#ozutober

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.