The opening shot of
Ukikusa ['Floating Weeds'] (1959) rhymes a sake bottle with a lighthouse:
Sake,
or other, bottles pop up throughout the film; usually their contents
are being drunk. The gentle artifice of this first shot flirts with the
possibility of unifying a lighthouse and an empty bottle. Most of the
film's other shots seem indebted to and responsible for the composition of the objects,
clothes, rooms, buildings & activities unfolding within them (e.g.
).
The sake bottle of the opening probably ended up where it was after a
shore side drinking session of a sort that we see later on in the film.
Cash flow problems leave the actual drinking to the imagination:
The subsequnt run of shots steadily withdraws the tentative unity of the opening composition:
The
passage of time collapses the relationships at work in a single
instance of visual composition. Film is not photography; its dependence
on continual movement, even within the composed shot (as water flows or
shutters tremble, say), does not lend itself towards static visual
statement. Each change of each shot demands the engagement of their
viewer's memory. If this is taken seriously, any implicit fixity in each
shot would become complexly dependent on any number of possible links
and threads stretching throughout the film and beyond. The viewer's
memory is both the enabler and limit condition for such operations. It
can only function if the semblance of a potential stasis is
continuously, even promiscuously, maintained. This delicate balance is
the generative motor of
Ukigusa, offered
to the viewer to some degree in each of the film's shots.
More
playfully, there are two moments in the film where the audio shows up
the flirtation with stasis that floods each individual shot with
meaning-potential. First, the sustained sound of an aeroplane passing
through the sky eases the splicing of shots from the would-be beach
drinkers
to the next scene's establishing shot
to the interior of that house, where the action of the next scene unfolds.
The
men on the beach and the woman in the house all acknowledge the sound
of the aeroplane by looking for the plane itself. The camera never
follows suit, remaining fixed on the characters. The plane's presence is
woven into the world of the film without being directly witnessed.
Instead, its intrusion is viewed through its effects, which are in turn
taken as an opportunity to ease a change of scene. In silent film, any
necessary audio is encoded into a visual dimension. Here, audio and
visuals work together to occlude the sight of the plane itself while
offering the existence of the plane to the viewer.
The
counterpart to this interaction of audio and visual comes towards the
end of the film. A narrative involving two young lovers reaches an
emotional climax, at which point the scene, and the ambient noise of
cicadas, is suddenly interrupted by the sound of a passing train. As
soon as the train's sound invades the scene, the shot enforces privacy
by changing from a composition containing the two lovers in their hotel
room to the corridor outside that room:
The
shot returns to a closer look at the two lovers mid-embrace as soon as
the sound of the train begins to pass. As the train noise passes the
cicadas can be heard again. The remainder of the scene's audio maintains
a threshold level of cicadas and the wheels of the train as its visuals
move to their closing shot of two bottles and two bowls on a table:
The
audio intrusion of the train is a humorously elaborate proxy for the
lovers' intimacy. Its grand show of establishing their privacy only
draws attention to their embrace (which we still get to witness in any
case), while gesturing towards a broader public world of travel and
distance outside the lovers' bedroom. An earlier scene has already drawn
out the implications of this broader public world; the lovers sat by
the bay and discussed their future with a boat towering over them to
provide the scene's backdrop:
Just
like the plane passing overhead, the public world, whatever that might
be, lies beyond the view of the film. It comes to be known through the
strange pressure it exerts in brief and highly wrought intrusions. They
resolve in the film's final shot: a train leaving the shore side town at
night:
Inside
the train, the action is much the same as it has ever been. People sit
around dozing, while an actress serves sake to the man who was both the
leader of her acting troupe and, more complexly, her lover:
Through
the context established by the film's narrative, the scene acquires a
particularly controlled emotive function. The couple on the train arrive
there following a completed arc of ambition, desire, dreams, failure,
and resignation.
This tone finds a complex corollary in
the shift to the final shot. For all that life passes on as usual, it
is shows to be happening within a piece of machinery of a sort that had
previously only existed as a kind of latent unspeakable throughout the
film.
Ukikusa is a colour remake with sound of an earlier black-and-white silent film by Uzo,
Ukikusa Monotogari ['A Story of Floating Weeds'] (1934).
Ukikusa Monotgari begins with the acting troupe pouring into the small town from their train:
In
Ukikusa the
train itself does not appear until the very end of the film. Instead,
its existence is variously hinted at. There is a traumatic dimension to
the brief snatches of modern transportation's noise that enter into the
film through these hints. They unsettle the pastoral calm of the seaside
town, providing the vision of small-town life with an ironic air of
untruth. The film's blue skies and sunny days are another instance of
this uneasy calm, particularly once a stormy night demonstrates their
contingency in a scene where remains of the past come up as concerns in
the present thwarting dreams of the future:
The
film's setting continuously tends towards pastoral. It is a place known
in the past, a place that the acting troupe had visited before. What
happened there in the past seems to hold the key to a calm & secure
future, particularly a love affair conducted by the head of the troupe
that resulted in a son. That future is not made manifest in the film,
and the promises of its dream steadily dismantled as the film goes on,
in a manner not dissimilar to the opening shots of the film that, by
dragging the camera towards the location of the film's narrative matter,
collapse the harmony of the lighthouse&bottle. The poise of the
film rests in its means of balancing trauma and repose, focusing around
the latter to gesture at the former without direct statement.
A more recent film that works on a similarly doubled movement of revelation through concealment is Hayao Miyazaki's
Kaze Tichinu ['The Wind Rises'] (2013). Public Japanese traumas of the 20th century
continually invade the film's narrative, which remains relatively unperturbed,
drifting along through its own personal tragedy through the
protagonist's sustaining fantasies of aviation. Another time!
