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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        Space or, rather, distance constantly hangs over the mundane rhythms of family life so lovingly captured in Ozu’s characteristic flow of tatami level interior shots. There are several premonitionary scenes that prefigure the mother’s passing. The first, near the beginning of the film, on the day following the parents’ arrival in Tokyo to visit their long grown-up children, places her in the landscape outside her son’s home with her little grandson. Her husband watches her as a figure in the distance through a window of the house. Already this scene functions in a similar way to the discovery of Ryu after her death, gazing at the sunrise : she has become a part of the still apparently subsidiary system of landscape images. The way the scene is shot and cut suggests that the distance between them is more than simply physical.

        Ryu is shot from profile on a set that has nothing to suggest the presence of a window. He suddenly looks up and comments that he can see his wife and grandson. Ozu cuts to an exquisitely framed extreme long shot of the old lady and the infant on top of a grassy hill. In this image there is no sign of a window either, or of anything else that might link it to the previous shot of Ryu. It could almost be a mental image- not necessarily an imaginary event, but one projected from everyday perception to a privileged moment of temporal awareness. The wife has been taken from the husband’s living world and inserted into a time image that, while visible to Ryu, seems to exist in a dimension physically removed from the space he occupies, in the parallel image system of landscape. This is precisely how Ryu is perceived by his daughter while watching the sunrise the morning after the death- she approaches him and brings him back into the house, but once he has been seen as part of the landscape by another character he can no longer exist under the jurisdiction of the spatio-dynamics of human interaction. He has been claimed by time.

        When Ozu cuts in closer to Higashiyama and the little boy on top of the hill, he preserves the sense of a moment of contemplative temporal awareness. As the child plays in the grass, his grandmother muses : ‘What will you be when you grow up ? A doctor like your father ? By the time you’re a doctor I wonder where I’ll be ?’ The wording of this rhetorical question (assuming the subtitles are doing the Japanese dialogue justice) is very important : ‘where will I be ?’ Death imagined in terms of spatial displacement. Ozu moves between medium close ups of the boy and the old lady. The shot of the former is horizontally divided in the background by a railway bridge signifying latent distance. Trains and boats are recurring symbolic motifs in the landscape image system, both representing the passage of time and departure. The juxtaposition of the boy playing, ignoring his grandmother, and the threat of departure embodied by the empty bridge perfectly encapsulates the dual themes of generational non-communication and imminent death in one eloquent composition.

        The slightly disorientating cut between Ryu and the long shot of this scene, haunted first by the distance between him and Higashiyama and then by the implication of imminent distance signified by the bridge, are characteristic of the threat of death as disorientation and distance that permeates the film. It could be argued that by making the long journey to Tokyo (by train) in the first place, the elderly couple is inviting disorientation and death by opening their lives to distance. Their geographical disorientation in the big city reflects their troubling reassessments of their children and their relationship with them. It also engenders an often-expressed anxiety about losing each other in the metropolis. When they first go sightseeing in the inner-city with their kind, loyal daughter in law (the wife of their dead son, killed in the war) they pause on an open-air staircase in a large building and ask her to point out where their children’s houses are in relation to the building. Ozu shoots the scene in two shots from low angles that outline the actors against the blank sky. They appear to be looking into a void. Only after they ask the direction of the daughter in law’s flat does Ozu give us a view of a section of the city, signifying that it remains the only house in Tokyo where they are genuinely welcome. Yet he does not cut back to them. Instead he cuts to a closer shot of her apartment building and then to its interior for the beginning of the next scene. The actors’ bodies remain unsettlingly untied to the urban landscape, visually confronting a blank space. Substituting the Tokyo cityscape for an empty sky could be legible as subtle proof of Ozu’s intention that the city should function as merely a conceit to allow for an obliteration of familiar spatial orientation, to set them adrift in what must appear to them as an abstract space.

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