Cries, whispers, silence and space :
death and the family in films by Pialat, Bergman and Ozu par Maximilian Le Cain
La Gueule ouverte (1974)

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        This is most evident during the moments of Mélinand’s death, the most powerful scene of death in film history. Not necessarily the most powerful scene of a character dying, of the passage of a human being from this world or of the emotional consequences of this departure or of the disintegration of the human body, but the most powerful scene of death itself, of death at work. A darkened room, the breathing of the dying woman, a long, stiflingly long take. Silence creeps up around this breathing, tightens its hold, waiting. Pialat waits, we wait. When he finally cuts, it is only to the heavily shadowed figures of the father and son, waiting still. When will death arrive ? It is as if Pialat was trying to capture the Grim Reaper himself on film, to scrutinise the darkness for some sign of death at work like a silent, infinitely patient hunter awaiting his prey. Then the breathing finally stops and it is over. No other filmmaker has succeeded in showing the process of death as simultaneously so terrifyingly mysterious and so brutally matter-of-fact.

        The mother dies ; the children return to their lives ; the father remains, alone with his loss, suspended between life and death. In 1953 Yasujiro Ozu tackled this situation in Tokyo story as masterfully as Pialat would twenty years later. Ozu’s film, in which the actual deathwatch is only the final act, details the death of communication or of the death of the idea of communication, the testing of relationships taken for granted that are found to have imperceptibly dissolved- children no longer care for their parents or have no time for them, death steals up on one of the parents, the loyal daughter in law must be released from her adopted filial obligations. For Bergman, death brings the characters into themselves, an arena for spiritual self-confrontation ; for Pialat, death makes the sufferer marginal to an irreducible, ongoing drudgery of banal time ; for Ozu it results in and is part of the result of the dissolution of a system of ideas that have formed a structure of living but are found to have become virtual. After death in Bergman, peoples’ private hells survive ; in Pialat, death is a retreat from the solidly physical structures of life that persist. It is Ozu who takes us to the edge of the void. When the structures of life and human contact fall away, there is nothing left. Nothing except space or, more precisely, space-images suggestive of distance. As the family gathers around the mother’s body the morning after her death, someone notes the father’s absence. They find him standing on the edge of a patio staring into the sky. ‘It was beautiful sunrise’ he comments, Chisu Ryu’s delivery of the line banishing even the slightest hint of sentimentality or self-pity. No longer part of the group inside the house, Ozu films him in long shot in such a way that he becomes a part of the landscape, of one of the landscape shots that open and punctuate the film, slowly asserting themselves as the image of the eternal.

        When the film opens with a slow series of establishing shots typical of Ozu- boats and trains, children on their way to school- it might appear that these are simply to set the atmosphere, with little connection to the main body of the drama outside of creating space for audience reflection. Yet as the film progresses- and especially as it enters its final scenes- it becomes apparent that these landscape inserts are not only commenting upon the narrative but also serving to illustrate a parallel level of (non-) existence. The story of Tokyo story is not ultimately that of familial disintegration but rather of Ryu’s passage from one image system to another, from the world of the film’s main dramatic space- bustling family homes, dialogue rich character studies- to that of its seemingly subsidiary landscape studies, the latter steadily growing in power and meaning. The drama of family alienation allows him to divest himself of the ideas that have defined his life- that is, the revelation that his idea of a caring, well-to-do family is false- and the sudden death of his wife (Chieko Higashiyama) removes the comfort of human communication.

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