Taste of Sleep?:
Kiarostami and Ozu

April 1, 2007

My taste for Ozu continues to mature as I watch him back to back with other directors. In this case I watched Ozu's Good Morning and immediately afterwards Taste of Cherry by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. On the Criterion video there was an interview with Kiarostami, and he had the following to say about his filmmaking style:

But in all [my films], I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don't like in the movies. I think a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of films I like.

I am not sure I have ever encountered a more stirring defense of films that put you to sleep.

So I have been thinking about this. Is boring or "sleep-inducing" an aesthetic value I am willing to endorse? Perhaps not as a positive program, but if filming something of life is the goal.. and not the creation of some Hollywood razzle-dazzle dramatic situation.. then boring may well be a necessary attribute. Life is boring.. in the sense that if you trained a camera on any real person living a real life, you would quickly grow bored.. and sleepy.

Both Ozu and Kiarostami are liable to the charge of being sleep-inducers, but it strikes me that they arrive at this trait from very different directions. Ozu appears to want to make documentaries of ordinary Japanese life that have just enough drama—or in the case of Good Morning, melodrama—to justify the film as a film. The title Good Morning (which sounds something like O-Hio) points to the Ozu's attention to the daily salutations behind which lurk our feelings and social organization. When two boys take a vow of silence until their family buys a television set, a whole stream of small consequences follow. The spoken tokens of politeness turn out to be the grease of social life.

In the case of Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry we are given a most unusual situation: a man who wants to kill himself and needs help with the burial afterwards. The situation results in a series of interviews with ordinary Iranians.. lending the film a sense of reality. We get to know a Kurdish military conscript and and Afghan seminary student. We could imagine these people on some television interview show titled People From Around the World That You Will Never Meet. The talking heads ratio is approximately the same as in Ozu, but you could not use these scenes to re-create home life in Iran. In fact the beautiful scene at the end of Taste of Cherry where we see through a window the main character moving about restlessly inside his house, preparing for his death, is one of the most beautiful scenes I have witnessed in quite a while. That interior, framed by white branches, remains a mystery.