Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

22 March 2004

Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story

Yasujiro Ozu's movies are made of the stuff of life, soft, subtle, and profound.

Note: This article was written as a very brief introduction to the great Yasujiro Ozu for a music magazine.

For a long time, Yasujiro Ozu's movies were thought to be too Japanese to appeal to American moviegoers. At least that's what some movie distributors thought, and as a result, although he made some 50 movies between 1927 and 1962, they've rarely been seen in this country. Finally, that's beginning to change. Ozu's movies about everyday middle class life have begun to trickle into your local video store. Ironically, despite the wisdom of past film distributors, it's hard to think of a movie more relevant to contemporary American family life than Ozu's wonderful Tokyo Story, recently released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.

Made in 1953, Tokyo Story is about an elderly man and woman who take a trip from their small town in the country to the big city of Tokyo to visit their grown children. Their kids welcome them, take them site-seeing, shuttle them from one family to another, and, to keep from getting too far behind with their own lives, send them on a weekend getaway to a nearby spa. While no one really says much about it, the distance between the parents and their busy children grows painfully more obvious as the days pass. The sight of the old couple sitting on a sea wall, frail and alone, staring at the horizon, is so real that it's heartbreaking. Those are your parents sitting there, and mine.

Anyone who ever moved away from home, played tour guide for visiting in-laws, or made a trip to see their children will recognize the interactions in Tokyo Story immediately. Jonathan Franzen's recent novel The Corrections is about a similar situation — a mother wants her grown kids who live in New York to come back to the Midwest for one more Christmas together. That a movie made in Japan in 1953 can touch some of the same nerves as a hip, modern American novel shows just how common these themes are: they span media, languages, cultures, continents, and decades.

By the time he made Tokyo Story, Ozu was well established as a master filmmaker. He had sharpened and reduced his style to a small set of crisp, deceptively simple elements. His camera rarely moves. It sits three feet off the ground, at eye-level if you're seated on the floor, as his characters often are. He begins each scene with a brief montage of beautifully composed shots that prepare us for what's next — the drying laundry of domestic life, the smokestacks of city and commerce, the trains of transition — a kind of grammar built out of simple clauses, "pillow shots," they're called now, little cushions between interactions. He famously omits events that other filmmakers would highlight — a wedding, say — far more interested in the conversations before and after the event than the spectacle itself.

His later movies have similar titles, like Late Spring or Late Autumn or Early Summer. The plots often revolve around the marriage of a daughter and the meaning that the act has to her and her family. Ozu even built up a company of actors that he reused time and again, often in similar roles. Japanese audiences watched the great Chishu Ryu, who plays the elderly patriarch in Tokyo Story, grow from a college kid into a distinguished gentleman by watching 35 years of Ozu's movies.

And yet while these movies look similar, they are made of the stuff of life — marriage, war, children, separation, loneliness, joy, sacrifice — and Ozu demonstrated that with enough care and precision, these elements are reconfigurable into an infinite number of delicate truths. He specialized in the little things, the smiles on people's faces when they're in pain, or the politeness of disappointed parents. But he wasn't afraid of the big issues, either. He dealt with the growth of wartime prostitution in 1947's A Hen In the Wind, and abortion in 1957's Tokyo Twilight. (Yes, 1957.) His early silent masterpiece I Was Born, But... is ostensibly a charming comedy about the two new kids in town trying to make friends in the neighborhood, but an hour into the movie it turns on a dime, making a devastating comment on class inequities, something the adults know all about but the kids are just discovering. In the movies that Ozu made after World War II, the remnants of the war lurk around the edges, never forgotten, echoing in the lives of people who lost family members or struggled to make ends meet. Ozu is so often thought to be gentle and mannered that people sometimes forget he could be equally honest about the ugliness of life.

Although the moviegoing public may not know Ozu, many of them have unwittingly felt the impact that his movies have had on filmmakers around the world. In the bonus material on the Tokyo Story DVD, Aki Kaursimäki, the fine filmmmaker who made last year's The Man Without A Past, says that he's made a dozen "lousy" movies and he's going to make more, if only to prove once and for all that he's not as good as Ozu. Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Ghost Dog) likes to focus on the spaces between the actions, something he picked up from Ozu. Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) has said that, for him, Ozu's work is the closest thing the cinema has to a sacred treasure.

Calling Ozu a "Japanese master" makes him sound daunting, but his movies are actually quite accessible. He does expect patience, however. His movies are calm and quiet, and he plunks you down in the middle of things without explaining who everyone is right away. But he's not trying to be difficult, and he's not playing a game. He's evoking the feeling you'd have if you walked into another family's gathering, and if you pay attention long enough, you'll figure out who is married to whom, whose kid is whose, and what historical events are still important, because your family probably isn't all that different.

In Ozu's last movie, An Autumn Afternoon, a widowed father played once again by Chishu Ryu sits alone in a bar after his daughter's wedding. In the right light, the barmaid reminds him of his late wife, when she was young. She pours him a drink, and someone plays a war march on the juke box. We know from earlier in the movie that this man was a ship captain in the war. As he sips his drink and says not a word, we begin to understand from the look on his face that this moment must be a reminder of all of the losses of his life. While the tails of his tux drape over the back of his stool, he drinks whisky poured by a familiar looking barmaid and listens to the sounds of the war in which he fought for the losing side. "Funeral?" the barmaid asks when she sees his formal clothing. "More or less," he replies.

For more information on Ozu and his work, see ozuyasujiro.com and Strictly Film School, two excellent resources.

This is the sort of subtle climax that Ozu builds to. There are no villains in his movies, but sometimes there are heroes. Sometimes the characters are foolish, or prideful, or naive, or disrespectful, but Ozu doesn't beat them down. He helps us understand them. Sometimes they grow. Sometimes they decide to change. And if I identify with them, if I am the ungrateful child of Tokyo Story, then I can change, too.

Seldom does a movie reach so deep and so far with a voice so still. Seldom does a movie make me want to be a better son.

This article also appears in print in Paste Magazine #9, April/May 2004.

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