sketches

With power over space, time, and the seasons—a power that rests on the creation of an all-consuming artificial winter—we are almost as gods. As the new Arctic we have built for our food plays its part in melting the old Arctic faster than anyone could have imagined, we had better muster the collective wisdom and action to avoid their fate.

Ozu-san was committed to anti-cinema; he was a person who denied all the prestige and attractions of motion pictures as a new medium. He worried that framing out and visualizing the actual conditions of the world with cameras would confuse the order of the world. He would never accept the motion pictures’ dominance, its power to restrict its viewers from useless and gratuitous gazes. Moreover, Ozu-san sensed that the movement of time was unrecognizable. For him, if the whole life of a person or a trip to the edge of outer space is told in nothing more than a two-hour screening time, it is merely a counterfeit that deceives our eyes. Ozu-san opposed the conventional ways of cinematic expression, but he simultaneously and endlessly loved cinema. He brilliantly lived with this contradiction.

By way of contrast, when we look at the actual conditions of this world through the camera’s lens, we must deny the random movements of the human eye and restrain the eye’s constant movements in order to focus on one point. An image in motion pictures chooses one particular object from the unlimited space of the world, frames it, and excludes and ignores all other things as if they did not exist. The image seems to prohibit the unconscious rhythm and useless activities of human eyes. Moreover, motion pictures even interfere with and control our time when we watch them. In this sense, motion pictures seem to pronounce a death sentence to the act of looking.

Being in a negative moment with another person can be destabilizing, hurtful, and stressful, especially if a person’s self-concept requires them to think of themselves as perfect. But it is not, by definition, Abuse. It could be Abuse, if one has power over another, but if not, it’s a Conflict. And being in Conflict is a position that is filled with responsibility and opportunity.

It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.

Wherever there exists honest resistance against powers that make life difficult or impossible for people, something of God’s justice is at hand. It doesn’t need a Christian bumper-sticker on it to make it such.