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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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la traduction française...
Another scene of premonitionary space-anxiety
occurs when Ryu and Higashiyama find themselves unable
to stay with their children for a night- ‘homeless
at last’ he jokes. He is going to stay with
friends while she will go to the daughter in law’s
cramped flat. As they look down over the Tokyo landscape,
she comments anxiously on the size of the city and
the possibility that if they got lost, they might
never find each other again. But it is not Tokyo that
causes this fear- it is Tokyo as embodiment of space
and distance, of potential separation.
Higashiyama’s falling ill is elided, although
we are informed that the symptoms were initially dismissed
as travel sickness brought about by the train journey.
Metaphorically this diagnosis might contain some truth
: her journey invalidated the coordinates that had
previously defined her life and exposed her to space
and distance. When she falls into a coma, apart from
one discreet, initial profile medium close up, the
camera keeps its distance from her. In marked contrast
to the agonising physicality of Bergman and Pialat’s
depictions of the death process, for Ozu it almost
seems that the dying mother had left her body the
moment she fell sick. Her passing is conveyed through
a series of landscape shots that echo the opening
images but with the crucial difference that they are
now empty of figures and movement- the river without
a boat, the tracks without a train, the street without
children. It is as if space- represented by the image-system
of landscape shots- had completely erased and absorbed
her. Death is not a physical process ; it is absence,
sudden and mysterious. The wife is lost to
the husband, separated by an imponderable distance
that the imposing size of Tokyo’s urban sprawl
foreshadowed. At her funeral her youngest son flees
the temple, quietly distraught. He explains that the
chanting seemed to make his mother grow smaller and
smaller. This unusual image movingly highlights the
energy of the present over the inevitably fading memory
of the past but it does so in spatial terms. She is
apparently relinquishing the space she occupies in
the dominant image system of human interaction, growing
distant.
The morning after her death the family sits around
the body ; but their father pays his respects by gazing
at the sun rise, as if in the knowledge that his wife
was somewhere else, somewhere out in the immensity
of sky, water and land before him. The body- which
Ozu seems to be quite indifferent towards whether
dying or dead- is the false focus of attention for
the children with whom Ryu has lost emotional contact.
Ryu is observed staring at the dawn from a point of
view roughly equivalent to that of his daughter in
law who calls him in. He is framed, as I have said,
like part of the landscape. However, Ozu never grants
the viewer a look at what Ryu is beholding. He appears
on the threshold of some vast immensity or even eternity
itself. By refusing to cut to Ryu’s point of
view Ozu subtly spiritualises the scene. The view
that we share with the daughter in law of the father
communing with time reflects the view of the mother
and grandson that we shared with the father earlier
in the film : that of a character sympathetically
watching another character who has gone beyond the
system of images used to create the flow of everyday
life to the frontier of the image system that conveys
pure space and which comes to represent the mother
from her death onwards. Existentially, this is the
end of the film for Ryu’s character. He has
gone beyond the rhythms of human communication and
interaction to the threshold of the eternal, denoted
by landscape. But he is still unable to pass over,
to become one with it. He is in limbo.
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