Deleuze on Ozu: the inventor of pure audiovisual images

Ozu: Inventor of Pure Audiovisual Video "Time-Video" p.20-27

Although Yasujiro Ozu was initially influenced by American directors, he constructed the first work showing a purely audiovisual situation in a Japanese context (however, he did not make a sound film until 1936). His European counterparts did not follow his example, but in their own way shared his path. Despite this, Yasujiro Ozu is still the inventor of visual symbols and auditory symbols . His works borrow the form of wandering (narrative poetry), such as train trips, taxis, outings by bus, biking or excursions, grandparents traveling between the provinces and Tokyo, mother and daughter's last vacation, old people going out... and the film's The object is the ordinary daily life of a Japanese family. There is less and less movement of the camera: moving shots are slow and low-angle "movement units", low-position cameras are mostly stationary, taking front or side angles, and fade-in shots are replaced by simple cuts. This return to the "original film" happens to be a very subtle modern style: the cut-and-cut approach that dominates modern cinema is the transition between images, or pure visual pause, that directly produces or eliminates all combined effects. The sound is also implicated, because editing—everything can be accomplished in a "one shot, one dialogue" approach borrowed from American cinema. But in this case, as in Lubitsch's work, the action-image always functions as a sign. And Yasujiro Ozu changed the meaning of this technique, and now refers specifically to the absence of the plot: the action-image disappears, replaced by a purely visual image of who the character is, and a purely auditory image of what the character says, an extremely ordinary dialogue composition The main content of the script. So the most important thing is to choose the actors based on their physical appearance and inner temperament and a casual dialogue that sounds like there is no clear theme.

Apparently, this statement takes a fancy to silent time from the very beginning and spreads it out as the story unfolds. True, as the story progresses, one might think that silent time is not only valuable in its own right, but also has a more important effect: shots or dialogue can be stretched over longer periods of silence and void. But in Yasujiro Ozu's works, there is no distinction between the extraordinary and the mediocre, there is no distinction between the boundary-situation and the ordinary-situation, they interact or penetrate each other. We can't understand Paul Schrader's opposition to the "everyday" and the "moment of truth" as two phases, and this "incongruity" brings disjointed or incomprehensible emotions to the mundane. Strictly speaking, this distinction seems more suitable for neorealism. In Yasujiro Ozu's works, everything is ordinary and ordinary, even death and dead people are just objects of natural forgetting. Those famous scenes of sudden weeping ( In "The Taste of Saury" , parents cry quietly after their daughter's wedding 1:52:00; In "Late Spring" , the daughter looks at her sleeping father with a wry smile, and then tears well up in her eyes 1:28 :00; "Autumn in the Xiaobayakawa Family" 1:37:00, the daughter said some mean things to her deceased father, and then burst into tears). It does not express a sudden strong period that is opposed to the weak and slow period of daily life, and there is no reason to create some kind of suppressed emotion as a "key action".

The philosopher Leibniz (who knew many Chinese philosophers) pointed out that the world is made up of series that are organized and assembled in an orderly manner according to ordinary laws. It's just that these series and sequences are presented only in small parts and in a state of disorder and confusion, so that we believe in ruptures, dissonances, and dissonances as we believe in anomalies. Maurice LeBlanc has written a beautiful graphic novel that expresses a kind of Zen wisdom: the protagonist Balthazar, a "philosophical teacher of everyday life," teaches that there is nothing transcendent or miraculous in life, that the most peculiar. Adventures can be explained, everything comes from the ordinary. It should be said, however, that because series relationships are inherently fragile, they are often disrupted and disorganized. Ordinary comes from its sequence, appearing in the scope of another ordinary sequence, and they present a strong state, a special point or a complex point, than the former. Man places this chaos in the regularity of the series, the normal continuity of the universe. There is a time to be born, a time to die, a time to be a mother, and a time to be a daughter. But man scrambled them, making these timings chaotic and conflicting. This is Yasujiro Ozu's thought: life is simple, but people keep "turbulent water" and complicate it (such as the three partners in "Autumn Harmony" ). If Yasujiro Ozu's work after the war did not show the kind of decline that was predicted, it was because the postwar situation just confirmed his point, but updated, strengthened and transcended the theme of the two generations of antagonists: the American The ordinary collides with the ordinary in Japan. The collision of these two kinds of daily life is directly reflected in the color. Red Coca-Cola or yellow plastic suddenly burst into the elegant and pure color series of Japanese life. As in "The Taste of Tea and Rice"One of the characters said: If everything is turned upside down, rice wine, sanxian, geisha hairpieces suddenly fill the daily life of Americans... For this, we think that it is not natural to appear at some key point as Schrader thinks. moment, or in the apparent rupture of the common man. The natural charm of the snow-covered peaks shows only one problem: everything is mundane and regular, everything is everyday! Nature only seeks to reconnect what has broken with human beings and recreate what human has broken. Therefore, when a character suddenly gets rid of family conflicts or ends the wake and goes to stare at the snow-capped mountains, he is actually trying to reconstruct the order of the disturbed series at home, but it must be based on the eternal and regular nature as the criterion, like an equation It is possible to unravel for us the reasons for the apparent rupture, which Leibniz described as "coming and going, ups and downs".

Daily life can only bear the fragile perception-action association, and replace the action image with pure audiovisual images, such as visual symbols and auditory symbols. In Yasujiro Ozu's works, there is no cosmic natural line connecting the critical moment and the dead and the living like Mizoguchi's works, nor does the inspiration of Kurosawa Akira's works that contain profound problems - space or merging space. Yasujiro Ozu's space is either disjointed or nihilistic (in this respect, Yasujiro Ozu can be called the initiator), sublimated into an arbitrary spatial state. Fake shots of gaze, direction, and even the location of objects are frequent and systematic. The motion of a camera can provide an example of disjointness. In Mai Qiu , the heroine walks forward on tiptoe, wanting to surprise someone in the restaurant; the camera moves back to take the hero's mid shot; then, the camera advances in an aisle, but this aisle is not The aisle of the restaurant, but the aisle of the hostess's house, she has returned home. As for the empty mirror spaces without characters and movements, they are all interior scenes, ethereal exterior scenes or natural scenery without a host. These spaces in Yasujiro Ozu's work have an autonomy that they do not directly possess, and even in Neorealist works they have only a relative (as opposed to narrative) or synthetic (once the action disappears) face value. They realize absoluteness, such as pure contemplation, to achieve the state of unity of body and mind, unity of reality and reality, unity of subject and object, unity of matter and self. They fit in part what Schrader calls "stasis." Noel Buch's "Pillow-Shot", Ritchie's "Still Life". The question is to find out whether there is no longer any difference in this category.

It is true that there are many similarities, identical functions and imperceptible transitions between an empty mirror space or scene and a still life in its purest sense, but they are not the same thing, and a still life cannot be equated with a scene. The value of an empty mirror space lies in the lack of possible content, while still life is defined by the presence and composition of objects, which themselves contain or become the carrier of their own content, such as "Late Spring" 1:28:40 near the end, the vase's long shoot. Such objects don't have to be hidden in empty mirrors, but allow characters to live and speak in a certain hazy state, such as that vase and fruit still life in "Daughter of Tokyo" or "What Did the Lady Forget?" The still life of the fruit and golf course in . As in Cézanne's work, characterless and punctate scenes differ from the principle of creation of filled still lifes. Sometimes it is also difficult for people to recognize when their functions overlap or when there is a subtle transition. For example, at the beginning of Yasujiro Ozu's "Floating Grass," the idea of ​​a bottle and a lighthouse is amazing. This difference is the difference between emptiness and fullness, and it plays a vastly different role in Chinese and Japanese thinking, two manifestations of contemplation. If mirror spaces, interior or exterior, can construct purely visual (and auditory) situations, then still lifes are their opposites, their counterparts.

The vase in "Late Spring" separates the girl's wry smile and tears. Destiny, change, process are represented here. But the form of what is changed has not changed, it has not moved, and this is time. Personal time is "the pure state time of a moment," the immediate time-image that gives unchanging form to what is changed, and in that unchanging form produces change. Night turns into day or day turns into night, like a still life with bright and dim light ( "The Wife of That Night" , "Whim" ). A still life is time, because everything that changes resides in time, but time itself does not change, and it may only change in another time, an infinite time. The difference between a film image and a photograph is most pronounced when they form the most direct contrast. Yasujiro Ozu's still lifes have this kind of duration and, strictly speaking, represent what remains after a series of changing states. A bicycle can also have time duration, and it expresses the invariable form of things in motion, as long as it is immobile, stationary, and leaning against a wall ( "Floating Grass" ). Bicycles, vases, still lifes are pure and immediate images of time. Every image is time, time in this or that condition of what time changes. Time, that is, full, is full of immutable forms of change. Time is "the most accurate visual storage of events". Antonioni has described time as "the horizon of events," but supports the word's dual meaning to Westerners: man's everyday vision and the unattainable, ever-expanding vision of the universe. This is the difference between European-style humanism and American-style sci-fi in Western cinema. He thinks the Japanese are different, they have no interest in science fiction. What connects the universe with the everyday, the continuation and the change, is the same vision, the same time, like the unchanging form of the changing things. Thus, Schrader argues that nature or stagnation can be defined as a form that connects the everyday with the "unified, eternal thing". A priori is not involved here. In mundane everyday life, action-images and even motion-images give way to purely audiovisual situations, but they discover a new relationship, they are no longer perceptual-action, they incorporate unconstrained meaning into time and in the direct relationship of thinking. This is a very unique extension of visual symbols: making time and thought feel, making them tangible.

Yasujiro Ozu's vase