A Few Thoughts on Wim Wenders' Movie Tokyo-ga

A couple nights ago, I watched the Wim Wenders movie Tokyo-ga. The picture is about the Tokyo of 1984 (the time of filming) and the Tokyo of the late director, Yasujiro Ozu who died slightly more than twenty years earlier. 

Perhaps I should start this essay with a brief word about Ozu from an essay by the late Roger Ebert:

People ask me who my favorite directors are, and I mention Hitchcock, Scorsese, Fellini, Welles and Ozu. They nod, but there is a slight pause, and I know they are considering whether to ask me: "Ozu?"

Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is sometimes considered the most Japanese of all Japan's directors. So Japanese, in fact, that despite a Western boom in Japanese films starting with samurai dramas in the 1950s, his films were hardly seen outside Japan until after his death.

They quickly gained an audience. It is a paradox that what is most particular is sometimes most universal, so that by concentrating closely on the daily emotional details of Japanese middle-class family life, Ozu made films that have the power to move audiences everywhere. A year ago, for example, I showed his masterpiece "Tokyo Story" (1953) to my film class, and heard people crying in the darkness. No newer, more "modern" film, has had that effect in the class over the years.

I would suggest reading the entire essay.

OK. 

Back to Tokyo-ga.

I expected the movie to be a documentary about the life and work of Yasujiro Ozu; it is not. The last, say, third of the movie is an interview with Yujaru Atsuta. Atsuta worked for Ozu on all of his movies, first as a camera assistant and, later, his cinematographer.

Atsuta foes into considerable detail on the technical aspects of filming for Ozu. We learn about how Ozu, for most of his career, filmed in static shots, did not move the camera, and almost never had the camera pan. 

It is impossible to overstate how unusual this method of filming is in twentieth century film-making.

We see a demonstration of the tripod that Atsuta and Ozu frequently used that was close to the ground and designed to allow the camera to focus on the actors' eyes when they were sitting. We learn that Ozu preferred to shoot in the studio and rarely shot on location. The exception to this desire to film in the studio were shots of trains and in trains. Atsuta convinced Ozu that trains had too many details to recreate on set. We also learn that Ozu used a 50 millimeter lens almost exclusively throughout his career. (A good essay on this lens can be found here.) Atsuta becomes quite emotional and says he did his best work with Ozu and found himself unable to work with other directors after Ozu's death. This section of the picture would probably be the section that most appeals to film buffs.

However, other than a fairly short interview with the actor Chisu Ryu, who acted in many of Ozu's pictures, most of the movie is not really about Ozu or his films. Instead, most of the picture focuses on answering the question: How has Tokyo and the people who live there changed since Ozu stopped making pictures there?

The director, Wim Wenders, takes what I would call a slow cinema approach to answering the question of what Tokyo has become. The contributors of Wikipedia define slow cinema as "a genre of film-making that emphasizes long takes, and is typically characterized by a style that is minimalist, observational, and with little or no narrative." Curiously, the article does not mention Wenders among the many examples of directors who have released slow cinema movies. For what it is worth, I would definitely consider Wenders' movies, especially Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, and Paris, Texas to be examples of slow cinema.

So, that is what slow cinema is, let us return to the content of the movie, Tokyo-ga.

Wenders films some scenes of Japanese television -- including in the taxi he rides from the airport to his hotel --, spends some time in a pachinko parlor, watches salarymen practice golf swings on the roofs of skyscrapers, sees children play a modified form of baseball in a cemetery, and spends quite a bit of time filming a group of craftsmen who make models of food that will be used as window displays in restaurants. In a bit of voice-over narration, Wenders notes, with some sadness, that he was unable to film was the craftsmen eating lunch.

If you are looking for an introduction to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, I would not start with Tokyo-ga. Instead, I would recommend picking pretty much any Ozu movie -- there are many available with a Criterion Channel subscription. If you have no idea where to start I would suggest Good Morning -- a picture about two young boys who go to extremes to convince their parents to buy a television.

At least in my opinion, Tokyo-ga will be an enjoyable movie if you are a person who thinks cinema can be an intellectual exercise. Not every movie needs to be a fast-paced story with plenty of action and/or dialogue. Not that there are not great movies that do those things. I believe that there is room in the universe of cinema for the occasional slow movie with sparse narration.

Somehow, after writing so much about this picture, I am reminded of a line from James Joyce's Ulysses that I first heard Ted Murphy quote in a sociology class at Houghton College back in the late 1980s:

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the the gods. (kindle location 8325).

As Ted said at the time, to an artist, that is a powerful statement.