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Ars Est Celare Artem

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Japanese Film Director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)

It was Horace in his “Ars Poetica” who wrote ars est celare artem, meaning that true art conceals the means by which it is achieved.

The film medium has an unusually rich variety of tools that can be used in movies, including zooms in and out, pans, wipes, tracking and dolly shots, tilts, and crane shots. And these do not include the complex technically-assisted tools such as are involved in computer generated imagery (CGI).

In Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock created a stunning visual effect by combining zooming out with tracking in. Some directors like Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, Jean-Luc Godard, and Andrey Tarkovsky have used the language of film in new and exciting ways.

Just as there are writers like Ernest Hemingway who employ a simple style. There are others, such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Georges Perec who used all the bells and whistles of literature to achieve their aims.

If there is an equivalent to the Hemingway style in film, I would have to say it is in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. In the dozen or so films I have seen, I remember only one camera movement, a slight pan in his Tokyo Story (1953), in which we follow an elderly couple as they walk alongside a wall at a seaside resort. With Ozu, there is, for the most part, only a succession of simple shots, most frequently at the level of a Japanese person seated on a tatami mat.

Intercut with these shots are others that are almost like stills. In the sound pictures, the music wells up, and the audience is meant to absorb what has just happened. This is referred to in Japanese as mono no aware. literally: the pathos of things. There is, for instance, this recurring shot in Floating Weeds (1959):

As one American writer put it in The Other Journal:

When I reflect on Japanese cinema, I find that one of the things that continually draws me back to it is a sort of gentle melancholy and pensive longing. Granted, this isn’t true of all Japanese films — I don’t know if you’d find it much in violent yakuza films or over-the-top kaiju films — but the ones that have stuck with me over the years are typified by this emotion and seem to contain it in large amounts.

There’s a Japanese phrase that sums up this feeling I’m describing: “mono no aware.” Roughly translated into English, it means “the sadness of things”. It’s not sadness in the sense of depression or angst, but rather, it refers to an awareness of the fragility of existence, of the transient and bittersweet nature of life, which, I’ve found, can make for incredibly beautiful and poignant cinema.

That feeling is present in all the Ozu films I have seen, which is why I regard him as one of the greatest of all film artists and perhaps the preeminent artist in the Japanese cinema.

Floating Weeds

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Rieko Yagumo and Yoshiko Tsubouchi in Story of Floating Weeds (1934)

Over the last two days, I have had the good fortune to see two great films by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, one the remake of the other. Although the technology to make sound films existed in Japan, Ozu deliberately made only silent films until 1936.

His A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) is about a traveling Kabuki player troupe that visits a small town. On a previous visit to that same town, the head of the troupe, played by Takashi Sakamoto, had an affair with a local woman who ran a small restaurant/bar and had a son by her. In the intervening years, he sent money for his education and begged the mother to say that he was the boy’s uncle instead of his “deceased” father.

Sakamoto loves spending time with his son, and that arouses the envy of Rieko Yagumo, his mistress on the road. She bribes her fellow actress Yoshiko Tsubouchi to seduce the boy, but they fall in love with each other. Furious, Sakamoto dissolves the acting troupe.

Like all of his films, A Story of Floating Weeds shows a group of people at odds with one another coming together in the end with an enhanced respect and gentleness.

It is no surprise that Ozu remade the film in 1959 as Floating Weeds. It is the same basic story, but with sound and color.

The Same Two Roles a Quarter Century Later

I actually prefer the original silent 1934 version. It was a better story and had better actors (even though the 1959 version had Machiko Kyo in the role of the mistress in the troupe). It was so good, in fact, that I plan to buy the recent Criterion release of both versions on DVD.

Yasujiro Ozu was one of the five or ten greatest film directors who ever lived. Over the years, I have seen over a dozen of his films, and there was not a clinker in the bunch. Even John Ford, Jean Renoir, and Carl Dreyer made some stinkers. But not Ozu. The world lost a magnificent artist when he died in Tokyo in 1963. I plan on discussing his film style in a later post this week.