Tokyo Story, in contrast to the other films presented to us so far this semester, examines modernity through the thematic focus of the family. Compared with Walter Ruttman's Berlin, in which the forces of modernity are highlighted and championed, or Eames' Toccata for Toy Trains, in which industrialised forces of modernity, at least in toy form, have entered the home, Tokyo Story as a film resists this. There is a quiet, underlying sadness permeating the film, embodied in the figures of the Shukichi and Tomi. One of the final dialogues of the film is between Kyoko and Noriko, where Kyoko states "Isn't life disappointing?" to which Noriko replies "It is." It's this sort of quiet despair that seems to be the dominant mood of the film. It is after all made in the aftermath of World War 2. You can't help but feel the Hirayama's sense of loss as their children, drawn closer and closer to modern life and the ceaseless pace of work and industrialisation, gradually drift further and further away.
Throughout Ozu's film, the symbol of the house is a near-permanent fixture within every shot. One of the earliest scenes is a long shot of Kyoko, walking to work and framed on either side by domestic houses. Apart from a few selected scenes, for example when the Shukichi and Tomi are at the hot-baths, or when they are travelling through Tokyo by tourist bus, the family home is present in every single scene. The dominant shot is the low-angled mid shot framed by wooden panels. There are other symbols repeatedly thrown in besides the house, such as smoke-stacks, powerlines and that other familiar trope of modernity the train, but these serve more as background or as distractions from the main preoccupation of the Tokyo Story: the family unit.
Throughout Tokyo Story, the characters are framed by doors and hallways, the bulk of their time is spent sitting down in the company of their family whilst the camera positions us almost as a silent member of the Hirayama family.
The prolific use of low shots whilst the Hirayama family are sitting places us directly at their table. Furthermore the shot-reverse shots employed position the film’s characters directly in the centre of the screen, and by extension directly in our field of vision, just as if we were seeing things from Noriko's or Shukichi's or Tomi's view. Something else Ozu employs is the reversal of camera angles, often we will be viewing characters from one side of a room throughout their conversations, only for their to be a 180 degree flip to the other side, signalling the end of the scene.
I suppose how I viewed it was not that Ozu was evangelically preaching that the forces of modernity would lead to the collapse of the family (a shift in how we conceptualise the family has arguably arisen however) but that with any great technological progression there accompanies with it a lamentation for what has been lost during as a result of it. Sentimentality in other words. But also something else. One of the moust touching scenes in the film occurs roughly half an hour in: the grandmother, having taking her brattish grandson out to play in a field whilst trains and powerlines exist blurrily in the background, muses over what she thinks his occupation will be when he grows up. She asks if he will be a doctor when he grows up and then, quite poignantly foreshadowing her own death, muses “By the time you become a doctor, I wonder if I'll still be here”. There's a certain duality within the film I think between the industrialised exterior spaces of Tokyo and Osaka and the seemingly pre-industrial familial interior spaces.
Something I think prevalent in Tokyo Story is this idea of families as a burden. Both Shukichi and Tomi, whilst wanting to spend time with their children, are wary of being a burden upon them. In contrast with the feelings of Koichi, Shige and Kaizo however, there feelings arise out of guilt. There is also a sense that Koichi and Shige regard their parents as burdensome, particularly Shige, who suggests that her and Koichi pay to send them to the hot springs. As well as this, it is Shige who calls up Noriko asking her to take Shukichi and Tomi sight-seeing and who demands of Kyoko Tomi’s finest clothes after her death. It's not this sense of families as a burden is neccessarily bad, I think it's quite a common experience. I know I've definitely felt so at times. In some sense it is depressing though, and I am constantly reminded of a Patrick White quote from The Tree of Man. The daughter of the novel's protagonist, having received a visit from him and seeing him home, "puts him on the train and resumes her life", or something along those lines.
Overall though Tokyo Story is an extremely tender film. Despite being seemingly gloomy, and the selfishness of the children being almost grating, Noriko does exist as a figure of balance. But the film does end with a sense of isolation. The final scenes are Noriko alone on a train back to Tokyo, whilst Kyoko stares solemnly through her classroom window as it passes and Shukichi kneels alone in his house, tears welling in his eyes, followed by a long shot, which interestingly is one of the few high-angled shots employed in the film, of the Hirayama home in Onomichi, a steamboat passing by.
Fountainhead Fail (In Several Quotes)
Instead of posting a rage-coloured polemic against Rand and her bullshit philosophy I thought I'd focus instead on her stylistics. That might seem fruitless as The Fountainhead is pretty much an essay masquerading as a novel, but being framed as a novel as it is then it demands close reading as any other novel. So here's a list of quotes which, for one reason or anoyher, are (hopefully) self-evidently bad. As in school-kid bad. Anyway, what I've done is compiled a list of quotes that I found particularly grating on first reading. Of course, this is not an exclusive list and I was tempted to just copy and paste the entire novel, but that would be lazy. If there's anything about Rand I noticed whilst reading The Fountainhead, it's that she absolutely cannot write sex scenes. Or dialogue, which in the novel is almost always stilted and unrealistic. It's also fairly cliched, even for a novel 50 years old or whatever. But maybe people actually spoke like that i the 40s or 50s. Rand's writing is also extremely repetitive. I also imagine that any Feminist critique applied to The Fountainhead would absolutely tear it to shreds, but as schools of thought go Feminist Theory is one of my weaker points. Also, there's a definite ginger-discrimination thread running through the novel, Roark being of orange-hair and all.
Speculation end, quotes now:
1.)"All right Peter. I think I know. You don't have to meet him if you don't want to. Just tell me when you want it. You can use me, if you have to. It won't change anything.
When he raised his head, she was laughing softly.
"You've worked too hard, Peter. You're a little unstrung. Suppose I make you some tea?"
"Oh, I'd forgotten all about it, but I've had no dinner today. Had no time."
"Well of all things! Well, how perfectly disgusting! Come on to the kitchen, this minute, I'll see what I can fix up for you!"
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2.)When they lay in bed together it was-as it had to be, as hte nature of the act demanded-an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the greatest things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance...it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much...It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion- the word born to mean suffering- it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain- the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy.
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3.)"However, that's how it's done. You see, reasons require scales to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is what the human spirit is made of-you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel. You could tell them why they should hire you so much better than I could. But they won't listen to you and they'll listen to me. Because I'm the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line-it's a middleman....Such is the psychology of a pretzel."
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4.)She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no consciousness to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her.
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5.)Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue...
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This quote, however, is probably the worst passage in the novel for sheer absurdist stupidity:
"I have hurt you today. I'll do it again. I'll come to you whenever I have beaten you - whenever I know that I have hurt you - and I'll let you own me. I want to be owned, not by a lover, but an adversary who will destroy my victory over him, not with honorable blows, but with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of you, Roark. That is what I am. You wanted to hear it all. You've heard it. What do you wish to say now?"
"Take your clothes off."
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A better title for the book would've been "Objectivism for Dummies". Something all the quotes I've listed have in common is an absolute refusal to leave anything ambiguous, which gets clunky at times; it feels as if Rand is treating you the reader with open disdain. I can see why twelve publishers rejected it in the first place, and the life of the novel bears a lot of similarities to the fictitious The Gallant Gallstone, the slowburner inserted and scythed down somewhere in the middle of Rand's novel.
Feel free to contribute other awful quotes, a top-list of bad Randian prose is probably something the world needs. Also, this is something I found humorous.
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/a-list-of-things-worse-than-a-threesome-involving-ayn-rand-43181.html
I'll spoil it all and tell you in advance that the only thing on the list is a two-some with Ayn Rand.
Speculation end, quotes now:
1.)"All right Peter. I think I know. You don't have to meet him if you don't want to. Just tell me when you want it. You can use me, if you have to. It won't change anything.
When he raised his head, she was laughing softly.
"You've worked too hard, Peter. You're a little unstrung. Suppose I make you some tea?"
"Oh, I'd forgotten all about it, but I've had no dinner today. Had no time."
"Well of all things! Well, how perfectly disgusting! Come on to the kitchen, this minute, I'll see what I can fix up for you!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------
2.)When they lay in bed together it was-as it had to be, as hte nature of the act demanded-an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the greatest things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance...it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much...It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion- the word born to mean suffering- it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain- the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
3.)"However, that's how it's done. You see, reasons require scales to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is what the human spirit is made of-you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel. You could tell them why they should hire you so much better than I could. But they won't listen to you and they'll listen to me. Because I'm the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line-it's a middleman....Such is the psychology of a pretzel."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
4.)She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no consciousness to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
5.)Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue...
-----------------------------------------------------------------
This quote, however, is probably the worst passage in the novel for sheer absurdist stupidity:
"I have hurt you today. I'll do it again. I'll come to you whenever I have beaten you - whenever I know that I have hurt you - and I'll let you own me. I want to be owned, not by a lover, but an adversary who will destroy my victory over him, not with honorable blows, but with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of you, Roark. That is what I am. You wanted to hear it all. You've heard it. What do you wish to say now?"
"Take your clothes off."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A better title for the book would've been "Objectivism for Dummies". Something all the quotes I've listed have in common is an absolute refusal to leave anything ambiguous, which gets clunky at times; it feels as if Rand is treating you the reader with open disdain. I can see why twelve publishers rejected it in the first place, and the life of the novel bears a lot of similarities to the fictitious The Gallant Gallstone, the slowburner inserted and scythed down somewhere in the middle of Rand's novel.
Feel free to contribute other awful quotes, a top-list of bad Randian prose is probably something the world needs. Also, this is something I found humorous.
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/a-list-of-things-worse-than-a-threesome-involving-ayn-rand-43181.html
I'll spoil it all and tell you in advance that the only thing on the list is a two-some with Ayn Rand.
On Eames
During the discussion on the Eames' films in class this idea of the doll's eye view came up. Which I thought was kind of cool, and today whilst I was randomly YouTubbing I found this video, which reminded me of that concept. There's a whole subgenre of YouTube Lego videos out there apparently, some good and others bad.
Which leads me to what I want to write about with the Eames films we looked at. The common thematic thread I felt within in them was a playfulness with perspective. Not so much in terms of cinematography, although that certainly happens, but on a broader scale. There's a certain visual and conceptual re-imagining of perspectives at work in Eames. Powers of Ten is a good example.
What I liked about the Eames' films, is this loose sense of magnitude that you get from them. Powers of Ten is pretty much an examination of spatial relations in one (or maybe two) camera movements. The way it's filmed is with one long continuous zoom-out, which is then reversed. That there is an odometer framing what we see is telling. By having the distance in metres either side of the image, we gain some abstract (as we don't actually count metres in our everyday experience) sense of spatial awareness.
What I also thought was interesting was the usage of the blue frame within the film, signifying a change in the factor of ten. Which I think gives the film a kind of telescopic aesthetic; you have frames within frames firstly moving away from you, then rapidly your perspectives flies through these frames and into the microscopic details of atomic and subatomic particles that make up the universe.
One of the most powerful images of Powers of Ten happens after about two minutes: the Earth taking up a dominant position at the foreground of the screen then slowly moving away until we can't see it anymore.
Which leads me to what I want to write about with the Eames films we looked at. The common thematic thread I felt within in them was a playfulness with perspective. Not so much in terms of cinematography, although that certainly happens, but on a broader scale. There's a certain visual and conceptual re-imagining of perspectives at work in Eames. Powers of Ten is a good example.
What I liked about the Eames' films, is this loose sense of magnitude that you get from them. Powers of Ten is pretty much an examination of spatial relations in one (or maybe two) camera movements. The way it's filmed is with one long continuous zoom-out, which is then reversed. That there is an odometer framing what we see is telling. By having the distance in metres either side of the image, we gain some abstract (as we don't actually count metres in our everyday experience) sense of spatial awareness.
What I also thought was interesting was the usage of the blue frame within the film, signifying a change in the factor of ten. Which I think gives the film a kind of telescopic aesthetic; you have frames within frames firstly moving away from you, then rapidly your perspectives flies through these frames and into the microscopic details of atomic and subatomic particles that make up the universe.
One of the most powerful images of Powers of Ten happens after about two minutes: the Earth taking up a dominant position at the foreground of the screen then slowly moving away until we can't see it anymore.
I think having the entire planet, there as the focal point of the screen, framed by a blue square and measurements in relation to where we began, highlights the aesthetics of perspective which are at the heart of Powers of Ten.
In complete contrast is House, which is more like a collection of photographs sliced together. Unlike the smooth movement of Toccata for Toy Trains or Powers of Ten, House seems a bit more stilted. The effect of this is to highlight more forcefully the differences in perspective, but I think, aesthetically at least, the House is perhaps less interesting than Powers of Ten or Toccata. You do have a wider variety of shot angles in House though, again, reinforcing this idea of perspective, and linking back to the doll's eye view idea. In House it's more of a flower's eye view, with slight but semi-jarring changes in pace.
Anyway, in conclusion, here is a Simpsons parody video I found.
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