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fact that what we see does not react. A reaction shot speeds up the assimilation of action, by telling us what we should be feeling – these shots slow the narrative down, with their mute appeals to the inanimate. The most famous shot of this sort, and one of the most famous moments in Late Spring, comes when the heroine Noriko seems finally to accept that she must leave her father. She lies awake in the room she is sharing with him in an inn in Kyoto. The camera gives us two shots of a vase, holding each shot for quite a few seconds. Paul Schrader, who started out as a critic before becoming a screenwriter (Taxi Driver) and director (Mishima), makes rather a meal of this shot. The vase is stasis, a form which can accept deep, contradictory emotion and transform it into an expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent. The decisive action – the miracle of the tears – has little meaning in itself but serves to prove the strength of the form. The transcendental style, like the vase, is a form which expresses something deeper than itself, the inner unity of all things. Because similar elements appear in Ozu’s films in different combinations, it can be tempting to treat him as sort of ikebana formalist – exploring the emotional pay-off that follows from the placement of a single chrysanthemum just so. Schrader takes this idea even further into abstraction, so that any emotional impact gets lost in the inner unity of all 10
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things, and Noriko’s miraculous tears (why miraculous?) lose all possible moisture content. Ozu has the reputation of having calculated his effects meticulously in advance, but the original script for Late Spring doesn’t actually feature the vase. So perhaps the release of Noriko’s feelings meant more to the director than it does to Schrader. Richie’s reading of the vase shot is remarkably similar to Schrader’s: The image of the vase in the darkened room to which Ozu returns at the end of Late Spring serves not only to bridge the transition between Setsuko Hara equitable and Setsuko Hara near tears, but also to contain and to an extent create our own emotions. Empathy is not the key here. To be sure we do imaginatively project our own consciousness onto another being, but this is perhaps a secondary effect. Primary to the experience is that in these scenes empty of all but mu, we suddenly apprehend what the film has been about, i.e. we suddenly apprehend life. This happens because such scenes occur when at least one important pattern in the picture has become clear. In Late Spring the daughter has seen what will happen to her: she will leave her father, she will marry. She comes to understand this precisely during the time that both we and she have been shown the vase. The vase itself means nothing, but its presence is also a space and into it pours our emotion. Mu is a Zen term meaning nothingness. It’s written on Ozu’s gravestone, and the ‘mu shot’ seems to be one of the approved terms for his trademark way of cutting to objects or pieces of decor. 11

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fact that what we see does not react. A reaction shot speeds up the assimilation of action, by telling us what we should be feeling – these shots slow the narrative down, with their mute appeals to the inanimate.

The most famous shot of this sort, and one of the most famous moments in Late Spring, comes when the heroine Noriko seems finally to accept that she must leave her father. She lies awake in the room she is sharing with him in an inn in Kyoto. The camera gives us two shots of a vase, holding each shot for quite a few seconds.

Paul Schrader, who started out as a critic before becoming a screenwriter (Taxi Driver) and director (Mishima), makes rather a meal of this shot.

The vase is stasis, a form which can accept deep, contradictory emotion and transform it into an expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent. The decisive action – the miracle of the tears – has little meaning in itself but serves to prove the strength of the form. The transcendental style, like the vase, is a form which expresses something deeper than itself, the inner unity of all things.

Because similar elements appear in Ozu’s films in different combinations, it can be tempting to treat him as sort of ikebana formalist – exploring the emotional pay-off that follows from the placement of a single chrysanthemum just so. Schrader takes this idea even further into abstraction, so that any emotional impact gets lost in the inner unity of all

10

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