Tokyo Chorus

"A" Curry

1. I love the phantom image beneath the opening titles. It's as though the film knew that one day it would exist only in a severely damaged state, so it sent a postcard to the future. As the pristine negative to its current condition, so then too Tôkyô no chorus to Le Chorus de Tokio. ("Le" presumably — the barest smidge of an "E" protrudes into frame-left.)

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



2. A temporal leap from schooldays to the time when the workforce beckons for protagonist Shinji Okajima (Tokihiko Okada) gets conveyed by a cut from a shot of trees swaying in the wind behind a climbing post (used for the academy's phys-ed classes) to a table in the family home: books, a child's doll, a small clock. At once a practical lesson in cinema, and a reminder that one should not attempt to imitate Yasujirô Ozu.

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:




3. Another postcard: "Ozu-sensei — your films with their pillow-shots, they'll be watched forever." Fernando Pessoa as Ricardo Reis wrote five years before Ozu's film (English translation by Richard Zenith) — "Fruits are given by trees that live, / Not by the wishful mind, which adorns / Itself with ashen flowers / From the abyss within."

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:






4. Every smile by the actor Tokihiko Okada is the suppression of a sneer. Three years later he died of tuberculosis. In 1933 he fathered Mariko Okada. Ozu would cast her in two of his ultimate masterpieces: Akibiyori [Clear Autumn Days, aka Late Autumn, 1960], and his final film Sanma no aji [The Taste of Mackerel Pike / The Flavor of the Autumn Knife Fish, aka An Autumn Afternoon, 1962].

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



4. Hideo Sugawara is the son. From this period out Ozu will inflect the many moves of the Brat. (He no longer requires kidnapping.)

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



5. The daughter, Miyoko, is played by child-actress Hideko Takamine who turned 86 in March. Her mature roles include characters in such Mikio Naruse masterworks as Ukigumo [Floating Clouds, 1955], Nagareru [Flowing, 1956], and Onna ga kaidan (w)o agaru toki [When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, 1960].

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



6. The wife Sugako is Emiko Yaguma, the destructive thespian in Ozu's great Ukigusa monogatari [A Tale of Floating Weeds, 1934]. When her husband prepares her for the small size of the bonus he expects to bring home later in the day, she cheerfully and charitably responds: "Even a month's pay would be 120 yen."

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



7. "Is it a good bonus this year?" "Hoover's policies haven't helped us yet."

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



8. Other directors make whole films about material that Ozu relegates to a single infinitely rich shot.

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



9. A gag about fans being as at-the-ready as six-shooters in westerns. Dramatic direct confrontations abound in early Ozu.

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:





10. The era when Drosophila always entered shots. Ozu uses an instance of a fly pestering the boss's assistant while he tries to reattach a damaged shoe-heel as an opportunity for (a) documentary (b) comedy, before (c) resolving the element, or trope, artistically when the son brushes the same kind of bug off his baby sibling's leg in the hospital room of Miyoko. (Also see: the child-gets-sick plot-mechanism of the 19th and 20th centuries. But note: it's the rare film that can vouch for the cause of the child's illness as "spoiled arrowroot cake.")

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:






11. The children demand things; the parents eventually cave and buy them — at a price. What in Ozu is ever solely comedic material? dramatic material? Criterion released this film as part of an Eclipse box set of silent Ozus subtitled "Three Family Comedies", but Ozu offers countless invitations to laugh which a viewer will not accept.

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:





12. Ozu is a genius of what Nabokov referred to as the specific detail — for example, a street waif in Dickens who tosses a coin into the air then catches it "overhand". Shinji spanks his son's backside viciously — while pausing twice to wipe from his face the sweat of the exertion. To paraphrase VN: With Ozu we expand.

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:






13. And the characters know precisely whose movie they're in. "A bear getting out isn't going to change our lives."

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



14. That is: they're in a Comedy by Ozu. Young Miyoko is possibly fever-dying, and the baby-sibling splashes her sickbed with piss.

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



15. At the end, this affecting portrait of family and extended-family comes full-circle, and concludes on a choral note of reaffirmation of the bond that exists between humans with a history. Why then does lasting happiness feel anything but certain for the Okajimas at "The End"?

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



— If you're interested in seeing this Silent Film, I'd recommend investigating the Criterion/Eclipse set. I'd also suggest watching it either silent, or perhaps accompanied by Alice Coltrane's Huntington Ashram Monastery. Pass on the optional piano score.

"A mágoa que me convida / A amar todo o indefinido...
—Fernando Pessoa, "Um piano na minha rua...", 1917.

Tôkyô no chorus [Tokyo Chorus] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1931:



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Ignat Vishnevetsky's "Letter to Abel Ferrara on His 59th Birthday" here.




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Friends Fighting Japanese-Style

Really, It's a Couple Seconds of Slapping

Perhaps even more Dalí-esque, cracked-egg and all, than A Straightforward Brat [Tokkan kozô, Yasujirô Ozu, 1929], Ozu's similarly truncated 1929 work Friends Fighting Japanese-Style [Wasei kenka tomodachi] is no more 'realist' than the dream of a mudfish when it finds the time and the haven for sleep. Two day-laborers split a cigarette; a jalopy careens; a lady gets smashed by the vessel and nursed back to health like the storied fox by callow offenders who sleep cushioned encircled, domestically craven, within a tire-rubber like an inner-tube or something that prefigures the geometries of The Whole Town's Talking [John Ford, 1935]. The vehicle-grease transfers totally upon the victim girl's face, she's like the Al Jolson of Yokosuka more or less, — you know the movie-routine of breakfast-making and a shine-up, where next thing she's a sterling beauty and now the roommates are all WHAT.

Wasei kenka tomodachi [Friends Fighting Japanese-Style] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1929:









There's an incredible shot where a chicken gets dragged toward-out-of-frame via the string tied round its upper-quarters, so as to create foreground motion in the tableau.

Wasei kenka tomodachi [Friends Fighting Japanese-Style] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1929:



In Friends Fighting Japanese-Style we witness one of the first compositions of the sort that will exemplify the Ozu "pillow-shot" (yet the girl and her lover precedent a human intercession), followed by a shot that precursors Tôkyô monogatari [A Tale of Tokyo, Yasujirô Ozu, 1953] at last succeeded by the roommates holding hands in echo of the domestic conspirators from A Straightforward Brat. As such, if Lou Christie and The Tammys had produced one last semi-hit for soundtrack, it might have been titled "The Ambivalence Chakra".

Wasei kenka tomodachi [Friends Fighting Japanese-Style] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1929:







If you're able to get a hold of this Silent Film, you should watch it silent with volume off or accompanied by the end-credits cue from Tanner '88 on loop.

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A Straightforward Brat

A Jigsaw Flatplan

Ozu's earliest surviving work — or one of them — fragmentarily extant from 1929 — is a great surrealist work in its concatenation of scenes. The boy (Tomio Aoki, dead in 2004 but whom we can watch in other films by Ozu and by Kon Ichikawa, along with two films by the greatest living Japanese director — Seijun Suzuki's extraordinary Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast, 1963] and kantoku's 2001 masterpiece Pistol Opera) gets kidnapped by the John Carradine of Ozu's silent cinema, Tatsuo Saitô. The miscreant's false moustache finds an echo in the bald patches (malnutrition? scalp disease? they regardless rhyme with Aoki's kimono's pattern) of the alopeciac co-conspirator, played by Takeshi Sakamoto. Not-Mabuses, the unashamed pair share residence in a domestic-hovelship of crime, Sakamoto especially making a perfect target or twelve for the suction-cup projectiles launched from Aoki's pistol-toy. Clever gag in the oft-typically-lame Japanese Slapcorn Idiom, which Ozu will nonetheless hew and refine five years on for Aoki's turn in A Tale of Floating Weeds [Ukigusa monogatari, 1934].

Tokkan kozô [A Straightforward Brat] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1929:






Both the first act and the last act (separated across fourteen minutes) represent a forgotten realm, a 'nook' of city, mini-labyrinth probably not much more than five-hundred feet square, a kind of Fontaínhas for the 'passing-by.' It brings to mind reels by Essanay Studios or Max Sennett. The premise of the kidnapping is unknown, and that being such centers the premise back into the realm of kid-age anxiety over kidnapping — 'they kidnap you because they want to kidnap you!' and not because, as one realizes upon growing older, that the shadow-they want you for sexual slavery. Ozu configures the chaste childhood bedtime-ceiling-stare version, — it's a comedy, after all. All the antics find Carradine/Saitô redeposit Aoki at home-base and, soon after, his band of friends chase the kidnapper back down for revenge-pelting. A fascinating, justified early work by the Master of the Seasons.

Tokkan kozô [A Straightforward Brat] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1929:





If you're able to get a hold of this Silent Film, you should watch it silent with volume off, or accompanied by "Audrey's Dance" by Angelo Badalamenti.

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