Food, Weather, and Time: Yasujiro Ozu's Cinematic Life

Author: Liu Qing

There are many things in celebrity diaries that are witty. Hu Shi gambled every day and swore not to play cards, and as a result, he neglected his studies and was busy playing cards every day. The British anthropologist Malinowski was a deep reader of "pulp fiction", struggling every day between doing academic work and reading idle books. From 1933 to 1963, he wrote a diary of 30 years intermittently, most of the time a foodie wrote down "drinking black tea", "eating Russian snacks", "eating chicken hot pot", "eating pork tofu", "eating red bean rice", interspersed with "drinking", many times "drunk".

In Ozu's films, there are many foods and wines, such as "The Taste of Saury", which is directly named after food. The picture shows the stills.

In the story of marriage and funeral, eating and drinking bear the sorrow and joy of the people

Not surprisingly, Ozu's film also has a lot of food and alcohol. In his films, two films are directly named after food, namely "The Taste of Tea and Rice" and "The Taste of Saury", and the script he failed to complete is called "Radish Carrot".

In the daily stories of marriage and funeral, eating and drinking bear the sorrow and joy of the people. The end of "Late Spring" is sad, Kiko is married, her father sits in the empty home, cutting apples alone, and her lonely figure is frozen in what seems to be eternal dead silence. "The Taste of Tea Bubble Rice" is a humorous light comedy, phoenix male high climbing white rich beauty, the difference in background is too big for the small two mouths to go together, often angry, the male protagonist always works overtime very late to return home, sneakily eating leftover tea to make cold rice, which has become the most relaxed and happy moment in his life. The colors of "Autumn Day" are bright and intense, and the elderly elders discuss "eating carrots, tofu, and shiitake mushrooms...", and some people on the spot objected: "I also want to eat steak and pork chops." "There is no saury in "The Taste of Saury", this fish appears on the coast in the lonely season of early winter, and the season of eating saury inevitably has a sense of sadness of life withering, just like the old guys in the film discussing tonics in the liquor store. In Japan, which entered the consumer society after the war, the traditional extended family in "Mai Qiu" gradually disintegrated, and the intergenerational alienation and tearing penetrated into the details of food, clothing, and housing, the old father of "The Taste of Saury" Hirayama, who went to the izakaya for a drink every day, while his eldest son liked golf, and in the small family of his and his daughter-in-law's new group, the home-cooked food was hamburgers, omelettes and ham.

"The look of that cloud is really vivid and interesting."

In addition to food, the most written in Ozu's diary is the weather.

"Sleet, numazu inn, clam soup fresh."

"The snow is accumulating. Drink beer. ”

"It's going to rain. The cherry blossoms have not yet fully bloomed, and this spring we will not see the cherry blossoms in full bloom. ”

"It rained all night. The peony flowers are all withered. The orange stalk grows tall. ”

Donald Ritchie, a scholar dedicated to Japanese film studies, has concluded that the characters in Ozu's films are unusually concerned about the weather, and often in tense and delicate moments, they start talking about the weather. In "Tokyo Story", after the death of his mother, his father suddenly said in front of everyone: "Today will be very hot." In "Good Morning", a pair of young people with a two-way crush meet at the station and say without words:

"Good weather is hard to come by."

"The way the clouds look is really vivid and interesting."

Food constitutes a solid texture of perpetual everyday life, and the weather is the poetry of ordinary life that is still sideways after being filtered out dramatically. The characters can not be loud, and the rain and snow still have meaning. Ozu is wary of the "poetic" language of the weather in the film, restraining himself from alternating morning and dusk and the obscure images of wind and rain, leaving only day and sunny days. Japanese scholar Renaishi Shigehiko once concluded that although Ozu's film titles have a strong and straightforward sense of season, such as "Late Spring", "Mai Qiu", and "Autumn Harmony", the traces of the seasons are blurred in his films, and his pictures are always bright and clean.

Akira Kurosawa's films have rain, And Inoguchi's films are foggy, Ozu's films seem to stop on endless and boundless days of daylight. In his successful and popular films, "sunny" is the rhetoric he coined. This rhetoric, such as his preference for Bach's music, creates a beauty of rigorous rhythm and structure. And "wind and rain" is his real feeling of restraint, his last black-and-white film "Tokyo Twilight" has a rare twilight and fine snow, and the color version of "Floating Grass" has a torrential rain, these two Ozu films that are considered "unsuccessful" are just the occasional revelation of his true feelings after giving up emotional management.

"Although the taste is sufficient, but not familiar with the world"

"Mai Qiu" follows "Late Spring", which is the story of an older girl looking for a partner, Ozu said, he wants to express in a similar plot that "people are touched by different situations of nature and human affairs." After filming "Mai Qiu", he felt that "the results were not ideal". It wasn't until nine years later, when he made "Autumn Day And", he said: "This time it was made, but it was not thorough enough." ”

Perhaps Ozu did not expect that his most stubborn artistic concept was "thoroughly" realized in his diary: how time can leave its mark on a person's life.

In 1923, at the age of 20, Ozu became a photography assistant at the Shochiku Film Factory, and Masamune Tanaka wrote of "The Young Azu" in "Ozu Yasujiro's Journey": "The strong teenager wears clothes with serene and white patterns, and wears thick clogs on his feet, and appears in the film factory... Lightly carrying the heavy camera onto the shoulders of the sweat vest, he ran with agility. ”

The first entry in Ozu Yasujiro's Diary was on January 1, 1933, when he began to work as a director, expressing a strong desire to write poems and haiku in his diary, "The sun is warm and bright, and the fragrance of spring wild flowers is difficult to find." The light of spring is heavy, and the wheat seedlings are gradually exposed and verdant. There was open optimism in three words. By 1963, after the death of his dependent mother, Ozu, who lived alone, entered a life of dry wells, his diary was not written for "non-existent readers" or communicated with himself, and the fragments were just traces of the non-stop passage of time: "All day at home." "Sleep all day." "Nothing to do." "Send away quietly for a year."

Compared with Ozu in the silent film and sound film period, the style is very different, and the traces of this change coincide with the career interruption caused by the war. Audiences who enter Ozu's world from masterpieces such as "Late Spring" and "Tokyo Story" may be surprised to see "Floating Grass Story" in 1934. Ozu was 31 years old, looking through his diary that year, there was not much about the shooting of "Floating Grass Story", and he finished writing the script at the end of July, surveying the scene in early August, and when filming began in early October, he wanted to finish filming as soon as possible and move to Kamakura. On November 17, the film finished its last shot, and five days later it was edited and released. During the short shooting cycle, one of the most interesting records was that "dreaming of drinking tea with Tanaka Akasa is a polite dream." In "Floating Grass Story", Ozu photographed the chaos of the jianghu drama class and the sadness and joy of the wandering artists, and in his early 30s, he has a sober and warm understanding of art and the "floating waves" of artists, and he uses wanton and unrestrained images to shoot an artistic life full of accidents and loss of control - the external world and fate are uncontrollable, but he neither complains nor fears.

Three years later, the war ended Yasujiro Ozu's career as a director. He enlisted in the army, and on the battlefield he saw the world after the collapse of reason and order. After returning to the Shochiku Film Factory after several ups and downs and a period of living abroad, post-war Japan was turned upside down, and he retreated from the "vast world of artists" to the "father and daughter" family. Ozu's story of marrying a daughter is irrelevant to realism, and he borrows the concept of "family" to create a small world of self-consistency between parents and children, which could have been closed and complete, but again and again forced by the pressure of ethical and social order, and faces disintegration because of the marriage of daughters.

In 1959, in order to fulfill the promise of his friends, Ozu remade "Floating Grass Story" into a color version of "Floating Grass", and he attached much more importance to the new version than the original version of "Unintentional Grass" 25 years ago, and for more than half a year this year, he talked about the preparation and shooting of "Floating Grass" in his diary. His heart was so concerned, but reality backfired, and most of the time he wrote in his diary that it was "very unsmooth." This is a bitter cognition, and in hindsight, the veteran director's mathematical audiovisual scheme and rhythm accumulated after "Late Spring" cannot reproduce the vivid and uncertain floating waves of his youth. Or, he is no longer able to calmly face the unpredictability and uncontrollability of fate.

By then the New Wave in Japan had begun, Ozu's student Masahira Imamura had defected from the school, and the younger generation of creators were radically searching for the fragmented truth of the world in new expressions. Ozu stubbornly defends the fragile "integrity" of the world before it is torn apart in the rhetoric of the film. In "The Taste of Saury", the daughter in full costume looks back, it is a splendid and sad goodbye, the father played by Kasa Chi-chi, after his daughter leaves, he is drunk alone in the tavern, the desolate old song is played in a loop, his time has passed, his world has turned over - he is Ozu's endorsement, this is Ozu's self-condition and self-mourning.

On New Year's Day 1955, Ozu wrote in his diary, "Mrs. Kawakita sent green fish roe, which means 'although the taste is sufficient, it is not familiar with the world.' He may not be ignorant of the world, but he just refuses. (Liu Qing)