.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Friday, 13 March 2009
Monday, 9 March 2009
Further to... Poetry: Poems by Czeslaw Milosz
.
Ars Poetica?
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though its an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.
What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?
It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.
There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.
And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
And Yet the Books
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Although he became an American citizen, he continued to write in Polish and these poems will be translations; unfortunately I haven't been able to find the name of the translator(s)
Ars Poetica?
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though its an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.
What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?
It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.
There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.
And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
And Yet the Books
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Although he became an American citizen, he continued to write in Polish and these poems will be translations; unfortunately I haven't been able to find the name of the translator(s)
Further Poems by Czeslaw Milosz
.
Song on the End of the World
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.
At a Certain Age
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: "That's me."
Dedication
You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.
Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
.
Song on the End of the World
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.
At a Certain Age
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: "That's me."
Dedication
You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.
Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
.
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Further to... Cats
.
Christopher Smart (1722-1771) worked first in London as a journalist and song-writer, using pseudonyms including Mrs Mary Midnight and Ebenezer Pentweazle, before turning to poetry. He became known for his reckless drinking and spending habits and was arrested for debt in 1747.
In the 1750s Smart developed a form of religious mania that compelled him to continuous prayer. Samuel Johnson remarked, "My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place." Eventually he was confined to a private madhouse in Bethnal Green. He seems to have been well treated there and lived in isolation apart from his cat. Eventually he was released, but the last years of his life were marred by poverty and he died in debtors' prison.
Smart is best known for A Song to David (1763), which praises the author of the Psalms as an archetype of the Divine poet. Although in its own time the poem was greeted largely with confusion, later poets such as Browning and Yeats would single out this poem for its affirmation of spirituality in an increasingly materialistic world. In this respect Smart has been considered as a forerunner to poets such as John Clare and William Blake. Smart is also known for his distinctive and often anthologized homage to his cat, Jeoffry. This poem comes from the surviving fragments of Jubilate Agno, which was also written during his confinement but not published in a definitive edition until 1954.
(notes from www.poemhunter.com)
For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry (excerpt, Jubilate Agno)
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
Christopher Smart (1722-1771) worked first in London as a journalist and song-writer, using pseudonyms including Mrs Mary Midnight and Ebenezer Pentweazle, before turning to poetry. He became known for his reckless drinking and spending habits and was arrested for debt in 1747.
In the 1750s Smart developed a form of religious mania that compelled him to continuous prayer. Samuel Johnson remarked, "My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place." Eventually he was confined to a private madhouse in Bethnal Green. He seems to have been well treated there and lived in isolation apart from his cat. Eventually he was released, but the last years of his life were marred by poverty and he died in debtors' prison.
Smart is best known for A Song to David (1763), which praises the author of the Psalms as an archetype of the Divine poet. Although in its own time the poem was greeted largely with confusion, later poets such as Browning and Yeats would single out this poem for its affirmation of spirituality in an increasingly materialistic world. In this respect Smart has been considered as a forerunner to poets such as John Clare and William Blake. Smart is also known for his distinctive and often anthologized homage to his cat, Jeoffry. This poem comes from the surviving fragments of Jubilate Agno, which was also written during his confinement but not published in a definitive edition until 1954.
(notes from www.poemhunter.com)
For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry (excerpt, Jubilate Agno)
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
Thursday, 5 February 2009
Classic Japanese Film -- by Beyond the Pale
.
CLASSIC JAPANESE FILM
_____________________________________
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was born in 1898 to relatively comfortable circumstances in a middle class district of Tokyo, but at age seven found himself caught up in the unfortunate consequences of the unwise business scheming of his overly ambitious father; the family was financially ruined, forced to move to a poorer district, and Mizoguchi's fourteen-year-old sister was put up for adoption and ultimately sold to a geisha house. Mizoguchi's adoration of his mother and sister was balanced by an intense hatred of his father, whose inability to support the family led to the boy -- by this time stricken with an arthritic condition which would become chronic -- being farmed out to relatives. It was only through the sacrifice of his sister that he was able to study art, become a painter, and eventually, in 1923, to begin directing films.
Events and characters from this troubled early life -- a sudden fall in class; the oppressive, self-deluded male authority figure; the selfless, self-sacrificing woman who's ultimately destroyed -- provided the basis of his greatest works: Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. In these films Mizoguchi brilliantly employs long takes, moving camera and shimmering tableaux to show the futility of the social and philosophical status quo, particularly as it related to women. His mature style is distinguished by a mise-en-scène of exquisite beauty patterned on traditional Japanese painting (whence his preference for high angle shots and sense of human figures lost in the landscape), yet made fluent and wholly cinematic by the elaborate flowing camera movement and choreography of actors on screen. His is a formal style -- in the 1930s a strongly formalist one, later in his postwar films more accommodating to an overarching humanism, but always marked by an unparalleled beauty of images that never deadens the power of his human drama or his sense of outrage against oppression. In his mature films, the thread of fate linking shot to shot, modulated by temporal glissandi that affect us like unexpected key changes in a musical piece, becomes so fine that a metaphysical purpose seems to emerge, the insistent presence of an unseen spiritual element rendering the difference between presence and absence almost indiscernible, even within a single shot.
"Mizoguchi, in line with the oriental approach to art, believed in a continuous unseen thread binding all living and dead things. The task of cinema would be not to represent this [thread] but to actualize its trajectories, to insufflate the fiber of this transcendental universe." -- Gilles Deleuze
It was in about 1936, Mizoguchi later said, that "I was able finally to show life as I see it; it was also from about that time that I developed a technique of shooting an entire sequence in a single cut, the camera always remaining at a certain distance from the action... In shooting in this manner I certainly did not want to inhibit (audience) identification. Rather, I tried to use it... at precisely the most intense psychological moments. During the course of filming a scene, if I feel that a kind of psychological sympathy has begun to develop, then I cannot without regret cut into this. Rather, I then try to intensify, to prolong the scene as long as possible... For a long time I found it difficult to avoid the style of the silent picture -- but at the same time I did want to avoid the close-up, that over-used if classical method of psychological description... Let us say that a man like myself is always tempted by the climate of beauty." The "climate of beauty" Mizoguchi distilled in his films is consistently imbued on the screen with the visual presence of women.
_________________________
Osaka Elegy (entire film is posted in successive clips)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l0kWPAPV28
__________________________
Geisha Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi) (entire film is posted in successive clips)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV97niIi-_8&feature=related
__________________________
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi) (entire film is posted in successive clips)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGKDJuekQ_4&feature=PlayList&p=2140E4B59C245C23&index=0&playnext=1
___________________________________
___________________________________
Yasujiro Ozu
The great contemporary of Kenji Mizoguchi, and in many ways his stylistic opposite, was Yasujiro Ozu (born 1903). Domestic tales drained of traditional dramatic highs and lows were Ozu's forte: whether poignant or gently comic, they focus tenderly on (often misunderstood) communication between ordinary people, dealing, for example, with a parent's concern that a daughter should marry, or a battle of wills between parents and faintly rebellious young children. Repeatedly returning to the same relatively minor domestic crises, Ozu fashioned an amazingly rich series of variations on a handful of themes, paring down his visual and narrative style, and steadily refining his delicately observed studies of emotional dilemmas to reflect a stoic but generous view of human nature and a resigned acceptance of life's vicissitudes. Among Ozu's key films are Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story, Early Spring, An Autumn Afternoon.
A signature feature in Ozu's work is his standard low-angle medium-distance shot, with the camera normally positioned three feet off the ground, and occasionally a foot and a half higher -- i.e. always well below eye level of a standing adult. This low angle is used in every shot. Visiting Ozu's home, American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch saw the camera tripod Ozu himself had designed. It had two positions which locked the camera into place at either one of those two low positions. "Ozu had no need for alternate possibilities," Jarmusch noted. "These limitations would instead define the core of his style." One visual result of the Ozu low-angle position is to keep all lines in the frame -- most often rectangular planes, defined by the low angle, as against the high-angle rhomboidal compositions of his contemporary Mizoguchi -- in generally the same pattern from shot to shot.
Distinct from Ozu's static-camera method is the "floating" approach enabled by the relentlessly mobile camera of Ozu's contemporary Mizoguchi. The result of Mizoguchi's method is a geometricization of space into shifting "zones" or "stations". Ozu's perfectly fixed stillness and Mizoguchi's more fluid, "spacy" stillness yield a slightly different "feel."
"His structure and arrangement are so precise," the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has said of Ozu. "He was able to create a special atmosphere to reflect his deep thinking about his time in Japan, a profound feeling. His expression was incisive and vivid. It is so precise, like an engineer. He had a profound understanding of the change in Japanese society. He processed the meaning and feeling of life: After World War Two, the defeat of Japan and the process of rebuilding of Japan, there were a lot of changes and industrialization, there was a lot of worry; he added this worry to his movies, his feeling of life, making it thicker. "
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)(excerpts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkYtOzz_Ct4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKLjKX75ja4&feature=related(Late Spring: The time-image:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz85Cepg34k&feature=related
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Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu) (closing scenes--two women)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEJ3M8D3NMs&feature=related
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Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu) (trailer & excerpts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPc793vD4YU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-R8o-GKjFY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9YbmF0rics&feature=related
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An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu)(closing scene)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVcY6Vffg8
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Mikio Naruse
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse)(excerpt))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOnj6y-ZAzc&feature=related
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A Hen in the Wind (Mikio Naruse) (excerpt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UCwPfgMBIk&feature=related
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Yearning (Mikio Naruse) (trailer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYs44cfI8Ks&feature=related
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CLASSIC JAPANESE FILM
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Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was born in 1898 to relatively comfortable circumstances in a middle class district of Tokyo, but at age seven found himself caught up in the unfortunate consequences of the unwise business scheming of his overly ambitious father; the family was financially ruined, forced to move to a poorer district, and Mizoguchi's fourteen-year-old sister was put up for adoption and ultimately sold to a geisha house. Mizoguchi's adoration of his mother and sister was balanced by an intense hatred of his father, whose inability to support the family led to the boy -- by this time stricken with an arthritic condition which would become chronic -- being farmed out to relatives. It was only through the sacrifice of his sister that he was able to study art, become a painter, and eventually, in 1923, to begin directing films.
Events and characters from this troubled early life -- a sudden fall in class; the oppressive, self-deluded male authority figure; the selfless, self-sacrificing woman who's ultimately destroyed -- provided the basis of his greatest works: Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. In these films Mizoguchi brilliantly employs long takes, moving camera and shimmering tableaux to show the futility of the social and philosophical status quo, particularly as it related to women. His mature style is distinguished by a mise-en-scène of exquisite beauty patterned on traditional Japanese painting (whence his preference for high angle shots and sense of human figures lost in the landscape), yet made fluent and wholly cinematic by the elaborate flowing camera movement and choreography of actors on screen. His is a formal style -- in the 1930s a strongly formalist one, later in his postwar films more accommodating to an overarching humanism, but always marked by an unparalleled beauty of images that never deadens the power of his human drama or his sense of outrage against oppression. In his mature films, the thread of fate linking shot to shot, modulated by temporal glissandi that affect us like unexpected key changes in a musical piece, becomes so fine that a metaphysical purpose seems to emerge, the insistent presence of an unseen spiritual element rendering the difference between presence and absence almost indiscernible, even within a single shot.
"Mizoguchi, in line with the oriental approach to art, believed in a continuous unseen thread binding all living and dead things. The task of cinema would be not to represent this [thread] but to actualize its trajectories, to insufflate the fiber of this transcendental universe." -- Gilles Deleuze
It was in about 1936, Mizoguchi later said, that "I was able finally to show life as I see it; it was also from about that time that I developed a technique of shooting an entire sequence in a single cut, the camera always remaining at a certain distance from the action... In shooting in this manner I certainly did not want to inhibit (audience) identification. Rather, I tried to use it... at precisely the most intense psychological moments. During the course of filming a scene, if I feel that a kind of psychological sympathy has begun to develop, then I cannot without regret cut into this. Rather, I then try to intensify, to prolong the scene as long as possible... For a long time I found it difficult to avoid the style of the silent picture -- but at the same time I did want to avoid the close-up, that over-used if classical method of psychological description... Let us say that a man like myself is always tempted by the climate of beauty." The "climate of beauty" Mizoguchi distilled in his films is consistently imbued on the screen with the visual presence of women.
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Osaka Elegy (entire film is posted in successive clips)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l0kWPAPV28
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Geisha Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi) (entire film is posted in successive clips)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV97niIi-_8&feature=related
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Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi) (entire film is posted in successive clips)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGKDJuekQ_4&feature=PlayList&p=2140E4B59C245C23&index=0&playnext=1
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Yasujiro Ozu
The great contemporary of Kenji Mizoguchi, and in many ways his stylistic opposite, was Yasujiro Ozu (born 1903). Domestic tales drained of traditional dramatic highs and lows were Ozu's forte: whether poignant or gently comic, they focus tenderly on (often misunderstood) communication between ordinary people, dealing, for example, with a parent's concern that a daughter should marry, or a battle of wills between parents and faintly rebellious young children. Repeatedly returning to the same relatively minor domestic crises, Ozu fashioned an amazingly rich series of variations on a handful of themes, paring down his visual and narrative style, and steadily refining his delicately observed studies of emotional dilemmas to reflect a stoic but generous view of human nature and a resigned acceptance of life's vicissitudes. Among Ozu's key films are Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story, Early Spring, An Autumn Afternoon.
A signature feature in Ozu's work is his standard low-angle medium-distance shot, with the camera normally positioned three feet off the ground, and occasionally a foot and a half higher -- i.e. always well below eye level of a standing adult. This low angle is used in every shot. Visiting Ozu's home, American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch saw the camera tripod Ozu himself had designed. It had two positions which locked the camera into place at either one of those two low positions. "Ozu had no need for alternate possibilities," Jarmusch noted. "These limitations would instead define the core of his style." One visual result of the Ozu low-angle position is to keep all lines in the frame -- most often rectangular planes, defined by the low angle, as against the high-angle rhomboidal compositions of his contemporary Mizoguchi -- in generally the same pattern from shot to shot.
Distinct from Ozu's static-camera method is the "floating" approach enabled by the relentlessly mobile camera of Ozu's contemporary Mizoguchi. The result of Mizoguchi's method is a geometricization of space into shifting "zones" or "stations". Ozu's perfectly fixed stillness and Mizoguchi's more fluid, "spacy" stillness yield a slightly different "feel."
"His structure and arrangement are so precise," the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has said of Ozu. "He was able to create a special atmosphere to reflect his deep thinking about his time in Japan, a profound feeling. His expression was incisive and vivid. It is so precise, like an engineer. He had a profound understanding of the change in Japanese society. He processed the meaning and feeling of life: After World War Two, the defeat of Japan and the process of rebuilding of Japan, there were a lot of changes and industrialization, there was a lot of worry; he added this worry to his movies, his feeling of life, making it thicker. "
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)(excerpts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkYtOzz_Ct4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKLjKX75ja4&feature=related(Late Spring: The time-image:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz85Cepg34k&feature=related
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Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu) (closing scenes--two women)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEJ3M8D3NMs&feature=related
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Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu) (trailer & excerpts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPc793vD4YU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-R8o-GKjFY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9YbmF0rics&feature=related
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An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu)(closing scene)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVcY6Vffg8
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Mikio Naruse
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse)(excerpt))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOnj6y-ZAzc&feature=related
______________________________
A Hen in the Wind (Mikio Naruse) (excerpt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UCwPfgMBIk&feature=related
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Yearning (Mikio Naruse) (trailer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYs44cfI8Ks&feature=related
.
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