Sunday, March 18, 2012

Human scale


TOKYO STORY (東京物語 ,Tokyo monogatari, 1953) by Yasujiro Ozu. It is unanimously considered one of the greatest films ever made. It deserves this appraisal even being a very simple story. Two parents and their sons. Two generations disjointed between tradition and modernization in Japan, a topic explored profusely by Ozu. What makes him, and the film, interesting for architecture was probably not intentional. It is Ozu’s characteristic camera shots that introduces the spectator inside the film so well what makes us “be” inside the scene and observe it as architects, as well as we observe everyday life. The camera barely moves; it is placed so we observe a scene but not in the old theatrical way. Life passes through the lens, being part of the plot or not, in the same way we observe life passing through in our routine. We are even introduced into a place where the act has not yet begun, the characters being still outside it, so we have time to become acquainted with the space. Ozu uses also a characteristic camera style, the “tatami-mat” shot, in which the camera height is placed low, about the eye level of Japanese people seated in their distinctive manner. This way, the spectator is placed at the same level as the characters, being part of the scene (we are seated as required by etiquette even though we may not know how) avoiding odd angles. And also, as Donald Richie explains", it eliminates depth and makes a two-dimensional space", a form of avoiding this odd angle our eyes have that shows the place we step into and which usually have no meaning in the development of things.


The movie was filmed in Tokyo, Onomichi (Hiroshima) and Atami (Shizuoka). Ozu tried to show the dichotomy tradition-modernity also with this sets. But although it is probably not a film I would select to illustrate some specific architecture, it is a master piece of the art, and as such, and for the specific camera work of Ozu, I believe it clearly demonstrates how film works with spaces. That is also the real test for architecture. Not as the object to be shown, but the object that allows things to happen.

Kyoko: -Isn't life disappointing?
Noriko: [smiles] -Yes, it is. 

The Criterion Collection © 2012


Further information:

The Criterion Collection trailer in Youtube

Roger Ebert full article on Tokyo Story

Nygren, Scott: Time Frames; Japanese cinema and the unfolding of history. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 2007.
 
Richie, Donald: A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2005 2nd ed.