Here are some assignments that I had done at Temple University Japan Campus. To view the list of my blog posts in a magazine style, please visit my Scoop it! page. Please feel free to leave a comment.
The following article was written as an assignment for the Classical Japanese Cinema class.
Good Morning
Good Morning (Ohayo) is Ozu Yasujiro's second color film made in 1959 nearly at the end of his career. He is also credited as the scriptwriter in this film with Noda Kogo. In 1983, a critic/scholar of French literature Hasumi Shigehiko wrote a book about him and his films. Unlike the title Director Ozu Yasujiro which sounds like a biography of Ozu, what Hasumi actually did in the book was to trace the thematic elements in detail in all the Ozu films and find out the new characteristic of the films that had never been pointed out before. Unfortunately, although Hasumi occasionally refers to the film title, he does not write much about Good Morning in his book. In this paper, I would like to analyze the narrative structure of Good Morning more in detail using Hasumi's and Roland Barthes' theoretical terms of narratology, and illustrate the rich narratological structure of the film.
Director Ozu Yasujiro
Before exploring the film, I would like to briefly explain what Hasumi actually sees in Ozu's films and what kind of concepts he uses in his analysis. He avoids going into auteurism and analyzes the films based on his “film experience” in order to “touch cinema in its rawness.” More specifically, he says that it is to notice several elements that co-exist and become pluralized at the same time on a segment of the film, which thus form the rich significative field on the screen. According to him, the beauty of Ozu's films lie in these co-existence of multiple stories. To illustrate his point, Hasumi uses two terms: a narratological structure and a thematic system. The former is not “the stories that link the scenes in individual works,” but “the synthesizing force that fuses the oppositional and heterogeneous into a single unity without excluding anything.” The latter term is, on the other hand, defined as “the expressions in significant detail that transcend the successive chain of sequences and intersect with each other in the realm that is different from the chronological order.” These two terms are mainly applied to analyze Ozu's films in his book.
Roland Barthes
I would also like to define two more narratological terms that are to be used in my analysis since Hasumi's two terms mentioned above are not enough for a single film analysis. One of them is what Barthes calls “the mainspring of the narrative activity” or “logical time,” which “prevail [...]the apparent fracturing of units being still closely subordinated to the logic which binds together the nuclei of the sequence.” In a film, a story unfolds with the function of narrative. Suspense and mystery are the perfect examples of this. As we will see the examples later in the film, they are “a way of gambling with structure, with the ultimate goal being, as it were, to risk and to glorify the structure. Hasumi uses the term “narratological sustention, in the similar way. The other technical term I would like to use is ‘discourse' in the film. This simply means the topics the characters in the film talk about. At least these four terms need to be clarified before analyzing the film.
A scene from Good Morning
As Hasumi points out as the general characteristic of Ozu's films, Good Morning does not have dramatic elements in the story. Only daily lives of six lower middle-class families living in Kawasaki in the late 1950s are depicted in detail. Daily situations including going to school, sewing at home, and drinking at a bar are repeatedly depicted in the film. There are a few, small mysteries for the spectators that develop the story such as missing of a collected due among the wives. This mystery is, however, to be solved soon within ten minutes in the film. There are some other small mysteries for each character (e.g. Harada's wife does not know why Hayashi's children do not talk to her), but they are not shown as a mystery at all for the spectators since the reasons are shown earlier in the film. There is also a little adventure of a boy Zenichi who tries to escape from his room to the neighbor house to watch TV, but still it shortly ends. All the mysteries and adventure in the film do not have enough length and strength to draw the spectators' interest toward the resolution. Comparatively the most dramatic events in the film are the disappearance of two Hayashi's brothers Makoto and Isamu, and the day of a new TV set coming to their house that both occur at the end. These events are received as a surprise for the spectators simply because how the characters came to the consequence are not shown in the film at all. The questions of where to go by the two brothers and what to buy from a home-electronics salesperson next door by their parents are being suspended in the film for a while until the end. In this way, these seemingly small and less-dramatic events are shown with more surprise to the audience.
A scene from Good Morning
What is shown instead of mystery and adventure in the film is the conflicts and reconciliation among the members of six families living in a small neighborhood. Their interwoven relationships between each other are gradually introduced to the spectators with the topics they talk about. Taking a pumice stone and farting are the topics that are talked about among the children, Heiichiro (their English teacher), and Tomizawa's husband in the different place and time. A TV issue is discussed in more groups among the children and mothers at their houses, and the fathers at the bar. A retirement issue discussed in the bar is later raised again at Hayashis. All these discourses spreading among the characters rarely unfold the story, but show the relationships between them and set the characteristic of each character. This can be only done with the situation that the telephone was not available at home so that people had to convey their messages by word of mouth (In Japan, a telephone became available at home in the 1970s). Sometimes a topic is discussed so intensively that the characters are caught up by it. The discourse of unnecessary greetings made by adults, which Minoru brings up in criticizing the way adults greet each other, is a typical example of it. The discussion over the issue actually put Minoru and Isamu into the battle with their parents and Heiichiro to reveal his hidden intimate feeling for Setsuko to his sister.
A scene from Good Morning
The narratological structure that Hasumi sees in Ozu's films can be found in the conflict and reconciliation that the discourse creates among the characters. The spectators finally know the conflict that the brothers had with others has been dissolved by seeing them saying “Good morning” to their parents and neighbors. This “movement towards the unification of oppositions” is what Hasumi calls “the true narrative of Ozu.” These conflict and reconciliation process can also be seen among the other characters. For example, two different salesmen visit the families while the wives are at home. The hard-sell salesman visits each house first and does coercive sales to the wives. After a while, the other gentle-looking salesman comes to each door and tries to sell them an emergency bell that can scare the hard-sell salesmen away. The later scene at the bar shows that the two salesmen actually worked as a pair and the first one threatened the wives so that they are more likely to buy the emergency bell from the second salesman. The point is that both drink at the same small bar with the wives' husbands. In there, they are depicted as the workers who finish their work at the end of the day and are having a drink. Here the conflict between the wives and salesmen is canceled out and neutralized. The first characteristic of the salesmen are changed and the conflict no longer exists. Such “unifying movements through sites of co-existence, where affirmed together” is the Ozu's “narratological structure” that can be also found in Good Morning.
A scene from Good Morning
What Hasumi sees as another beautiful characteristic of Ozu's films, which he describes as “the thematic systems,” can be found in the juxtaposition of the characters in the film. According to him, something new starts when two intimate characters stand next to each other and look at the same object in the same direction in Ozu's films. At this moment, without seeing each other and saying anything, they show a sympathetic feeling shared between them. This is what he calls the “Ozu's lyricism” and it is sometimes enough to show it just to repeat the other's gesture. These scenes can be found at the end of Good Morning when Heiichiro and Setsuko are standing next to each other at a platform and looking at clouds in the sky. While waiting for a train, they both look at the clouds and talk to each other. What is actually done here is that Setsuko just repeats what Heiichiro says about the weather and the shapes of the clouds they are looking at. The spectators definitely see their intimate feelings toward each other and notice the beginning of their new relationship in the near future. This is a perfect example of juxtaposition that clearly characterizes Ozu's films.
Ozu Yasujiro
What Hasumi calls as “the excessive details” that inevitably draw the spectator's attention, however, can only be pointed out when they are compared with other Ozu's films and found the similarity between them. The element that the spectators surely notice in Good Morning is the “strange space” that emerges when the two characters face to each other without catching each other's eyes. Ignoring the principle of imaginary line is often referred to as one of Ozu's cinematic characteristics. Hasumi says that their gazes do not seem to meet but pass parallel to each other. He also points out that Ozu did not pay any attention to the principle and instead interprets it as a cinematic effect that the spectators may become uneasy when they see the character in the film looks like staring at them. According to him, that's when they have a sense of urgency that the film is no longer considered as a film. This moment of breaking ‘the forth wall' by the character's gaze often appears in Good Morning. If examined more in detail, however, most characters' gazes do not go straight to the spectators' eyes outside of the screen. In many cases, they look slightly up or down toward the camera. Sometimes they look straight to it, but it is obvious from the context that they are talking to the person in front of them in the film and is more natural for the spectators to regard the scene as so. Hasumi also points out that Japanese do not look into other's eyes as often and relentless as the characters do in Ozu's films, but at least most characters in Good Morning actually avert their gazes within a few seconds.
A scene from Good Morning
What may make the spectators more uneasy in the film instead is that the character does not say anything and just acts even though no one in the world of the film watches his act. The little brother Isamu is the one who does this incomprehensible action. In the middle of the film after Okubo's husband showed up at the entrance of Hayashi's house by mistake and left, the boy, who is going back to his room on the hall way, suddenly turns to the camera and pumps his fists into the air as if he had fought with the intruder and defended his family. He then walks a half way through, but again suddenly turns to the camera jumping and spreading his arms wide. He looks very cute and his inarticulate excitement is adequately expressed in this scene, but the question about whom he acted for may remain in the spectators' minds. Since his mother has already gone to the kitchen, there is no one to watch his acts in the hall way. The scene is hard for the spectators to interpret. They may laugh at the boy's cute action and may not think much about what his acts were for. This can be called as the moment when the film no longer presents the fictional world in a film and the character directly tries to interact with the spectators, which may expose the limit of a film to them as Hasumi suggests.
As discussed above, all the characters are intricately arranged in the film in order to show the relations to each other in detail through different kinds of discourses they share. Dramatic elements that drive the story to develop are rarely used here. Instead, the spectators may encounter the uneasy moment that may break the rules of cinema and force them to realize their own act of watching the film. With the help of Hasumi's postmodern cinema analysis, we can still take a various hermeneutic approaches to the film and find rich meanings in “the excessive details” of Ozu's films even in the present time after they were produced more than 50 years ago.
The following article was written as an assignment for the Theory and Practice of Media Culture class.
Inside The Camp
Since 2008, the French artist Jean Michel Bruyère and his group LFKs have held an installation-style theatre called Le Préau d'un Seul various times mainly in Europe. In 2012, they had their performance as a part of the program of a performing art festival in Tokyo. The idea of this performance originally came up with the fact that more than 37,000 illegal immigrants are interned in more than 300 internment camps all over Europe today. Since the Tokyo performance was cut off from its cultural and historical context of the original performance, it may have had a different meaning for the Japanese audience. In this paper, I would like to review their performance through my own theatrical experience and analyze what it meant to do the performance in today's Tokyo with the help of a French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard's theory.
Portrait of the artist
Jean Michel Bruyère is known as a mysterious modern artist. He is known also as a stage and movie director, photographer, and graphic artist. His face photo is not shown either on the festival nor his official websites. He has done various kinds of collective art projects with the group called LFKs which consists of professionals including poets, actors, composers, philosophers, ethnologists and doctors. He even puts a fake biography on his website claiming that he was a past figure in the early 20th century and underwent a sex change and became a woman named Jana Tésárová (Biography). These tricky ways of his authorial representation clearly show that he tries to keep the attention off himself and refuse any kinds of auteurism. What he tries to do here is to draw more attention to the subjects and topics that his artworks suggest, especially the contemporary social issues that are hardly seen but do exist in today's society. One of them is an internment camp issue in Europe today. In his short essay titled "A New Camp in the Coming Age," he claims that "a new type of camp should be created; one that retains basic human rights" ( my translation). The performance's title Le Préau d'un Seul (the Courtyard of One) symbolically suggests the internee's helpless situation in the cell at the camp. It clearly shows that depriving of one's human rights and freedom is his primary concern and the performance more or less reflected his political thought and stance.
Inside the Gym
Bruyère and his group had then turned the actual camp situation into a form of performing art. In the Tokyo performance, whole classrooms in an old school building and a playground were used as the exhibition site. There were at least eleven installations and performances being held at different rooms and areas. Each of them represented or abstracted the elements of the internees at the camp and the camp itself. Some of them were quite obvious in representation, but the others made the spectators think what they really meant. For example, in the installation room titled La Bascule (the scale), all the photos hung on the wall and the video shown at the corner of the room showed the actual scenes of repatriations that were held in France. Also a big, old canoe standing in the middle of the room, which was actually used for smuggling, was displayed as historical evidence of illegal immigrants. Only the light tone of a whistling tune (a French martial song) heard in the room made the materials look less tragic. On this phase, the objects were merely displayed as they were and the spectators only had to know the facts. There was little space for their imagination and free association to cut in and appreciate the pieces since the objects were too real and concrete.
Egging on Room
In the next phase, some parts of the internment camp motif became more abstract and were presented not as facts but as a modified art pieces and performances. At the same time, some historical materials were still used as a prop to make the exhibition look more realistic and focused. For example, in the room called Egging on Room, a few hundred eggs were regularly aligned in cabinets, while the text titled Instruction for Alienating Foreigners by Air under Irregular Circumstances, which was released by the Border Police of France, was read by the performer. In other small rooms called The Camp, miniatures of the internment camps, which were made with white plastics, were displayed in order while the speech by an American Black Panther Party activist was being played on the tape recorder. The former gave the spectators the impression that the room was full of repressive discourses of the law enforcers, whereas the latter made the room filled with anger against them as an effect. In both cases, there was a little space for the spectators to associate the objects freely with other related issues and topics that they knew. These performances and exhibitions were designed to function as the mental preparation for spectators to get more involved in the later performances.
Video shown in the Dark Room
In the next phase, the spectators were arranged to watch the highly abstracted performers as the others. In the room called Dance Floor, several monster-like performers, whose bodies were completely covered with white strips from the head to the toes, were just dancing to music without saying anything. The important point here is that they did not even threaten nor try to interact with the spectators. From the spectator's point of view, they looked totally strange since the spectator could no recognize their faces, genders, skin colors, and ages at all. As a result, they were seen as complete strangers to the spectators. It can be said that in France, the performers might have been seen as French majority's mental image of the foreign immigrants that were recognized as incomprehensible others for them, but the spectators in Tokyo could associate them freely with other issues they could imagine because of their unidentifiable appearance. The same thing can also be said to the exhibition shown in the next classroom called Dark Room. In there, a parody video was being played in front of the spectators. In the video, the monster-like performers acted as if they were the characters of an American TV soap opera The Young and the Restless. Their voices, situation, speeches and actions were same as the original drama. Only their appearances were different. This video strongly suggested that even though they speak and act like the Westerners, their appearances will never change and be recognized as ours from the Western point of view. In a sense, these two performances put the spectators in the position of a distant observer who differentiates oneself from the unidentifiable others.
White monster costume
Before going to the main theatrical experience inside the Tent, there was an installation arranged for the spectators to literally experience the others. The dark room called Fitting Room was located before the gym in which the Tent was installed. In this room, the spectators could wear the monster-like costume (a wig, a costume, and a pair of shoes that were all covered with white strips). Only three people could enter the room at the same time. In there, one could see oneself in the monster costume in the mirror. The floor carpet was made of cow's dried turd. This installation actually let the spectators put themselves in the others' position in the uncomfortable environment. At this point, they had experienced both our and others' points of view toward the internees in the camp.
Repatriating ceremony in the Tent
The most interesting performance at the site was being held in the Tent in the gym. Several performers, who were covered with white surgical costumes, put a thin, black male in a straitjacket, carried him over their shoulders to the outside, and tied him to the apparatus set in the middle of the courtyard. They had repeated this performance again and again for a whole day. The spectators also found the sign in English near the apparatus saying "Please do not feed the foreigner." This ritual performance by the LFK members apparently symbolized the repatriating process. Before entering the Tent, the spectators saw the big sign on it saying "Choose a camp." At this point, they had already experienced the camp situation as the insider and outsider. What was instructed next in the Tent is to be asked to participate in the repatriating act by witnessing the live performance from a close distance. The sign forced them to prepare for the actuality that inevitably involved them into the event even if they did not actively participate in it (they could not go to the next installation without walking by the performance). Being asked to take off one's shoes and be quiet in the Tent made them feel that they were actually in part of the ongoing ritual process. The spectators' theatrical experience at the entire site basically ended at the height of this repatriating performance.
Repatriation in the school yard
The purpose and meaning of the whole performance can be explored by referring to what Bruyère said in his interview. He said that the entire performance was designed to have the spectators to get involved in and think about the basic structure that cannot be seen in our daily lives. He also said that he set up the theatrical mode so that the spectators could not leave, avoid, or escape from it. As seen above, all the performances were designed not to show how the internment camps really are and address the issue, but to have the spectators experience the issue with minimum explanation. This artistic method shows how art is different from activism and demonstration. In his interview, Bruyère, who was once an activist himself, said that he and his team have never tried to represent the minority group in the society by playing their role in the fiction. Instead, they have tried to make an opportunity for the spectators, most of whom were in majority, to question the way the concept of ‘minority' is used and propagated. As seen above, his installation-style theater was the perfect example to extract the concept of the internment camp issue from the real situation and let the spectators experience it while remaining it in the abstract level and leaving a space for them to freely appreciate it.
Jean-François Lyotard
Bruyère's attempt to question the usage of `minority' concept also means to question the legitimation of majority and administration that categorizes the minority as so. This was also done in his performance by using the characteristics of science and technology. What was most characterized in the Tent is that all the performers (except the black male who played the internee) wore white surgical coats with white caps, masks and gloves. There were surgical beds and carts as well. Surgical appliances, bandages, and cotton were also there on the desk. X-ray photographs were shown on a PC monitor. All these mise-en-scène implied that the repatriating process proceeded by the performers were based on medical evidence and system which was scientifically seen as correct. These scientific features shown in the performance first seemed a bit odd since medical disguise seemed to be noting to do with the repatriation. It is usually handled by political administration, not by surgical operators. However, the spectators must have become aware that the legitimating power of medical characteristics was being used to justify their seemingly inhuman act. A French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard wrote about the legitimation of scientific discourse and how it was used by legislators. According to him, "The question of the legitimacy of science has been indissociably linked to that of the legitimation of the legislator since the time of Plato […] [T]here is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both stem from the same perspective, the same "choice" if you will – the choice called the Occident" (The Postmodern Condition). Though the performance was played without any words, it obviously used tons of medical connotations as a whole to enhance the legitimated atmosphere in the Tent.
"Choose a camp" sign on the Tent
The art pieces that the spectators would encounter right after they got out of the Tent were a huge robotic arm which was automatically drawing something on the white sheet on the floor with blood-like ink, and the hospital beds lined up in a row which also kept folding and unfolding by themselves. Beside them, there was a pile of TV monitors that only showed vague images. All these artworks suggested that machines could keep working by themselves without any human help. They might have further implied that technology can replace human jobs (actually, they showed nonsense and insanity of it by letting the machines doing meaningless acts). Regarding technology, Lyotard also pointed out that technology often works to strengthen the legislator's legitimation. He wrote, "By reinforcing technology, one "reinforces" reality, and one's chances of being just and right increase accordingly." Bruyère's attempt was, in a way, to question the legitimating power that is often disguised in scientific and technological discourses. What he did to the spectators, especially when he asked them to "Choose a camp" before entering into the Tent, was what Lyotard called "a language game" or "the game of inquiry" that "immediately positions the person who asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked about." In this sense, this installation-style theater was very strategic and can be also called very postmodern.
Concentration camp miniatures
Finally, what it meant for the performance to be held in Tokyo should be examined since the internment issue does not seem to exist in today's Japan. There is a similar social issue that the Japanese spectators might have associated with the term `internment camp': a daiyou kangoku (substitute prison) issue. It is a detention cell in a police station where prosecutors can request as long as 28 days' detention of the suspect without giving any permission to leave under the Code of Criminal Procedure. Since this long detention limits the suspect's basic human rights and often became the cause of false accusation, it has been criticized even by the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations (IRTF). However, this could have hardly been imagined by the performance since the detainee in the substitute prison can be any one of us and is not usually seen as an incomprehensible other like that in France. The internment camp issue does exist in Japan, though. Since Japan has strict immigration laws and rarely certifies the applicants as refugees, the policy actually has led many foreigners who are seeking asylum to be detained in Tokyo Immigration Detention Center for a long period (IRTF). Still the issue is so minor in Japan that most spectators may not have thought of it. It might have been different if there was some information about the internment issue in Japan as well at the site (or at least on the brochure). Due to the different internment camp situation in Japan, it can be said that most Japanese spectators may have not associated the issue with theirs.
Blackboard in the Political Bureau
The other point that may not have worked for the Japanese spectators to understand the performance is a translation issue. There was a room called Political Bureau at the site. There the performers typed out their thought mainly in French, and handwrote them on big banners. They were later posted up on the fence in the courtyard. The problem here is that the Japanese spectators could not understand what the messages said. There was a small space by the window on the third floor of the building where the Japanese translation of the messages could be read, but that did not help the spectators to feel the impact of the messages when they actually saw the banners in the courtyard (at least there should have been the translation under the banners). In the same way, the sign "Choose a camp" on the Tent may have also received as the message written by foreigners (not us). These language barriers definitely made the installations and performances look more exotic and may not have made the Japanese spectators evoke the similar real situation in their minds. Over all, for the Japanese spectators, the whole installations and performances may have been seen from the outsider's point of view and the performers in both the monstrous and surgical costumes may have been recognized as others for them probably because the performers were both dressed up in white costumes and hid their national and racial identities.
Even though there may have been a cultural gap, Bruyère's attempt to let the spectators experience the internment camp issue was definitely successful to a certain degree. Unlike other art exhibitions, his installation-style theater was designed like an amusement attraction (e.g. a haunted house) so that the visitors could get involved in the installations and performances with great interest. After going through all of them, the visitors may have finally recognized at the exit of the site that what the title of the exhibition, Le Préau d'un Seul (the Courtyard of One), suggested was the desperate feeling of an internee in a camp located somewhere in the world today who is a victim of legitimating power. Even though the cultural background was very different from that in France, the Japanese spectators must have recognized at least this point.
