Contemplations
Find your Tofu
“I have always said that I only make tofu because I am a tofu maker. One person cannot make so many different kinds of films. It is possible to eat many different types from around the world at a restaurant in a Japanese department store, but as a result of this overly abundant selection, the quality and taste of the food suffer. Filmmaking is the same way. Even if my films appear to all be the same, I am always trying to express something new, and I have a new interest in each film. I am like a painter who keeps painting the same rose over and over again.” Yasujiro Ozu
“Collect constraints you enjoy,” Steph Ango advises in his ‘Style is consistent constraint’ post. Stick with them long enough, and your personal style becomes your identity.
Jonathan Rowson, a former British chess grandmaster, writes in The Moves That Matter that “the best kinds of freedom involve choosing your constraints wisely and claiming them as your own.” Chess rules might seem restrictive to a non-player, but they create the space to think creatively. Creative freedom comes from having constraints, not from their absence.
No director embraced self-limitation more deliberately than Yasujiro Ozu. He spent the last two decades of his career returning to the same subject, using similar scenes from earlier films in later ones and casting the same actors in similar roles.
Once Ozu found his cinematic tofu (the Japanese parent-child relationship), he kept mining it, presenting a changing Japan to an audience grappling with the erosion of tradition. He exclusively used the 50mm camera lens, which he kept stationary, allowing his actors to walk in and out of the frame. Ozu favoured a low-angle framing shot, which became known as the tatami shot because it was based on the perspective of a person seated on a traditional tatami mat. This meant that his camera was always about three feet above the ground.
Kaneto Shindō, a fellow Japanese director who worked with Ozu, recalled in a 1983 documentary about Ozu: “he didn’t use low-angle shots just for style. Ozu got to the heart of Japan. He really got to the heart of what ordinary people were like. To do that, he had to use Japanese-style rooms with shoji screens, futons and tatami mats, all straight lines and right angles. Low camera angles are best for filming a setting like that. Then he confined living beings within these rigid forms. I think he was trying to express his ideas through that. That’s why he never panned or moved the camera. No high-angle shots either. The camera angles with which he was most comfortable bound him within narrow limits.”
Consumptions
📺 (TV Show)
A Shop for Killers – Jian walks slowly out in a green tracksuit and red trousers. She stands for a moment. A weary Jian looks around, overwhelmed by death and carnage. And then she lets out an anguished scream, but with the relief that she’s still alive somehow. The confusion of all the things she had discovered since the death of her uncle, all the lies and misdirections that she was only just finding out.
This is one of the key moments in this Korean TV show. The story is about Jian, a 20-year-old college student, and her uncle, Jinman. A mysterious man who had been taking care of her for the past 10 years, ever since her parents were brutally murdered, would wind up dead suddenly. The verdict is death by suicide, but is this the case? As we discover with the progression of the show, Jinman was a former mercenary and accidental arms dealer for contract killers. All of this was unknown to Jian.
What Jinman would do, over the next 10 years, is use the phrase “Listen up, Jian” whenever he was about to give her a piece of survival advice, which would come in handy when his ex-employer and clients came looking for her. He used every opportunity to train her without her realising she was being trained. Jian is a proxy for the audience. We are both trying to find out the truth about Jinman.
There is a scene in episode 2 featuring Jinman and his 10-year-old niece at home in the dark, watching a National Geographic documentary about a lion surrounded by a pack of hyenas. Jinman says to her:
“We all die eventually. Death isn’t something scary. Do you see that lion? That lion will die soon. But take a look. The lion who’s facing death is quiet while they’re all loud. Why do you think that is? Only the weak bark. The strong don’t. You must be strong to make your opponent bark.”
There is also a scene from the past where Jinman tells a colleague, “I wanted to set things right, but I think I made another mistake.” A Shop for Killers is about the consequences of the choices Jinman made a decade earlier, choices that would cost his family everything. The show is only eight episodes long, but it packs a lot in. It is violent in the way good action K-drama thrillers are, but the plot is strange and funny enough to make the time investment well worth it.
