Ozu - The Present Continuous

- image from Sanma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon) - the last movie of Ozu -

Diverse forms of Oriental art emphasize the focus on the present moment. Think at the ritual of tea preparation, think at yoga. While we live in time, in history, focused on the past and the future, the traditional cultures seem to be rather unhistorical. I'm clearly exaggerating, however I need to do this to come closer to the cultural space of the East: Cosmos does not know History, there is no such thing as temporal dimension for the Universe; no past, no future, only a present moment repeating itself endlessly.

I think the Apu Trilogy of Satyajit Ray is mainly about the conflict between Cosmos and History, between Eternity and Time. I hope I will find once the energy to put here my thoughts about Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar: these movies are very difficult to find, there are DVD copies of them that cost very much; but if you find them, they are worth the price, even if their technical condition is poor - these three movies are like giants, like the gods carved by Unkei!

Well, the movies of Ozu, despite the mundane contemporaneity they are depicting, belong to this cultural space of the Orient, where time has no importance, events, as tragic as they can be, are viewed in their relativity, and there is a feeling that life goes on no matter what.

Ozu's movies express so strongly this feeling of life goes on because they follow the stages of Zen enlightenment:

1. when I started to study Zen, the mountain looked like a mountain
2. when I started to understand Zen, the mountain was not looking like a mountain any more
3. as I was coming closer to enlightenment, the mountain started to look again like a mountain (however carrying in its image the awareness of the moment of disruption)
   

Each of his movies starts by depicting a seemingly normal situation of everyday life. As the story goes on, more and more things contradict the normality, the situation becomes more and more conflictual, more and more intolerable, up to the point of explosion. In the end, conflicts remain unresolved, but something suggests that such conflicts, as intolerable as we perceive them, are not that important and life will go on. People die, babies get born, old fellows remain alone, youngsters will become one day old and and will remain alone. The conflicts in the movies of Ozu remain unresolved, but they are transcended.

Actually the movies of Ozu explore the rapport between immanent and transcendent. No wonder, as they are so strictly Japanese. Only this way Ozu follows in his movies a structure that transcends the barriers between civilizations. This rapport between immanent and transcendent structures also movies created in civilizational spaces that are very different from the Japanese: Paul Schrader compares the movies of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer; and here come to mind also some movies of such different filmmakers as Pasolini, Brakhage, Kiarostami, Ray (and the list is actually much longer: think at Away from Her of Sarah Polley, or at Blind Light of Pola Rapaport).



(Yasujiro Ozu and Setsuko Hara)