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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Tokyo Story (1953)


 
"It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections"

Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) follows an aging couple, Tomi and Sukichi, on their journey from their rural village to visit their two married children in bustling, postwar Tokyo. Their reception is disappointing: too busy to entertain them, their children send them off to a health spa. 
After Tomi falls ill she and Sukichi return home, while the children, grief-stricken, hasten to be with her. From a simple tale unfolds one of the greatest of all Japanese films. Starring Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, the film reprises one of the director’s favorite themes—that of generational conflict—in a way that is quintessentially Japanese and yet so universal in its appeal that it continues to resonate as one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces.

Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story" tells a tale as simple and universal as life itself. It is about a few ordinary days in the lives of some ordinary people, and then about the unanticipated death of one of them. 



It is clear that "Tokyo Story" was one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of the early-1950s Japanese cinema, and that Ozu has more than a little in common with that other great director, Kenji Mizoguchi ("Ugetsu"). Both of them use their cameras as largely impassive, honest observers. Both seem reluctant to manipulate the real time in which their scenes are acted; Ozu uses very restrained editing, and Mizoguchi often shoots scenes in unbroken takes.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-tokyo-story-1953



    1. 8.2/10IMDb100%Rotten Tomatoes

    1. Release date: March 13, 1972 (USA)
      Director: Yasujirō Ozu
      Cinematography: Yûharu Atsuta
      Cast: Setsuko Hara, Chishū Ryū, Chieko Higashiyama, MORE
      Screenplay: Yasujirō Ozu, Kogo Noda





The Child's Eye View

Ozu famously placed his camera on a strictly low tripod, roughly two to three feet off the ground. This mimics the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat. It flattens the perspective, emphasizing the geometry of the room and treating every character—children and adults—with equal democratic weight.




YASUJIRŌ OZU - THE DEPTH OF SIMPLICITY | THE CINEMA CARTOGRAPHY



Kurosawa and Ozu: Two Faces of Japanese Cinema




The Poetics of
Everyday Life

"I just want to make a tray of good tofu. If people want something like curry or schnitzel, they should go to another restaurant."












The "Ozu Style"

Ozu’s direction is famous for its extreme minimalism and unique formal constraints:

  • Tatami-Shot (Low Angle): Ozu almost always placed his camera about two or three feet off the ground—the eye level of someone sitting on a traditional Japanese tatami mat. This creates a sense of intimacy and equal footing with the characters.

  • Static Camera: The camera almost never moves. There are no pans, tilts, or zooms. In Tokyo Story, the camera moves only once, emphasizing the stillness of the lives being depicted.

  • Breaking the 180-Degree Rule: In dialogue scenes, Ozu often has characters look directly into the lens, making the viewer feel like they are a participant in the conversation.

  • Pillow Shots: Between scenes, Ozu inserts "empty" shots of landscapes, laundry drying, or cityscapes. These provide a rhythmic pause (like a "pillow" in poetry) and emphasize the transience of time.







The Noriko Trilogy

Tokyo Story is the final entry in what is known as the Noriko Trilogy, where Setsuko Hara plays three different characters all named Noriko.

  1. Late Spring (1949): A daughter struggles with the pressure to marry and leave her widowed father.

  2. Early Summer (1951): An independent woman decides her own path in marriage, disrupting her family's expectations.

  3. Tokyo Story (1953): A widow remains loyal to her in-laws, proving that ties of the heart can be stronger than ties of blood.







  • Critical Standing: It is a rare film that holds a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2012, it displaced Citizen Kane as the #1 film in the Sight & Sound directors' poll.

  • A Modern Blueprint: The film's influence is seen in the "slow cinema" movement. Directors like Wim Wenders (who made the documentary Tokyo-Ga about Ozu) and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Still Walking) cite Ozu as the primary architect of the modern family drama










Shima Iwashita in An Autumn Afternoon (1962). 








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