Week 11/2024

In Equinox Flower (1958) by Yasujiro Ozu, the composition of a familial home is turned upside down when a father decides to arrange his daughter’s marriage. In Ozu’s films, the Japanese home with its sliding doors becomes the narrative space that can be delicately stirred by opening a vantage point or turning the gaze away, for instance, to the window.

In Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the walls are solid and the windows show no sky. Jeanne Dielman fervently occupies herself with household chores, allowing no alteration of daily habits. Slowly, however, reality starts to resist: a shoe brush hits the floor. Ingrained gestures become corrupted. Chantal Akerman said in an interview: “Change is fear, change is opening the jail.”

In Stéphane Symons’s essay ‘Twee keer Ozu’ (‘Twice Ozu’), he quotes the Japanese culture critic Hasumi Shiguéhiko talking about “the threat of the destruction of the harmony of the whole” that is central to Ozu's cinema. This destabilization has everything to do with what Hasumi calls “meaningful details” that often “contradict the narrative structure”. Such details, gestures or events “pause the narrative flow” and constitute a “digression in the relationship with the intrigue”: they are “gaps.” In a new Dutch-language text on Sabzian, Dries Van Landuyt evokes how Jeanne Dielman has changed his way of looking at an ordinary plate in his hands: “Een krachtveld, een leegte die het bord samenhield, schemerde door de ogenschijnlijke massiviteit van het aardewerk heen. (A force field, a void that held the plate together, shimmered through the apparent solidity of the crockery.)”

The Moon and the Sledgehammer is a world apart from the interiors of the previous films. Philip Trevelyan made a cult documentary about a family that resisted modernity and remained in their forest south of London. Radically rejecting the prevailing curse of “push-button machinery” and the rigidity of the family home, they chose a shed in the ultimate messy constellation. 

Higanbana
Equinox Flower
Yasujirô Ozu, 1958, 114’

Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in Equinox Flower, his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned father and his newfangled daughter.

EN

“Equinox Flower is about a successful businessman and his attempts to cope with a daughter who defies an arranged marriage and runs off with a pianist. Ozu’s sympathy is never with one character over another; therefore ours cannot be either. Perhaps this is what makes his films, for all their designed tranquility, wrenching. Russell Merritt writes, ‘Ozu was one of the great precisionists and the exactness of Equinox Flower is apparent everywhere. [...] His fastidiousness is not just an assertion about the resources of the movies. It is also an idea about life.’ Nathaniel Dorsky notes, ‘Often the most intimate and poignant dialogue between two characters in an Ozu film is that between two women. In Equinox Flower, Ozu offers a progression of shots and cuts during a discussion between two women which dismantles time and space. There is no temporal reality; as a viewer you begin to float, you start to cry.’”

BAMPFA1

 

“Ozu’s first film made in color is both a delicate elegy and delectable comedy – the portrait of a domestic tyrant at odds with his liberated daughter, who shuns the idea of arranged marriage. A succession of quietly implosive epiphanies, Equinox Flower combines the director’s signature visual precision with color coding (with special use of Ozu’s favorite, red.) that underscores key elements of the environment. As the father is slowly won over, he sums up the director’s own sense of life’s capriciousness: ‘Everyone is inconsistent now and then, except God. Life is full of inconsistencies. The sum total of all the inconsistencies of life is life itself.’”

Harvard Film Archive2

 

“Social tensions also surface humorously in Equinox Flower when Mr. Hirayama takes one of his subordinates to the bar not realising it is his subordinate’s regular haunt, and when the Osaka mother demonstrates her scheming social aspirations for her daughter. The Osaka mother is endured by the Hirayama family, a point clearly made through the ‘toilet’ humour associated with the woman. This is not the only film in which Ozu uses bodily function humour. [...] Ultimately Ozu’s films are observational. The Osaka woman may be the most annoying and irritating individual in Equinox Flower, yet she is not judged by the film. Hirayama, in his stubbornness towards his daughter and in excusing himself to escape another conversation with the Osaka woman demonstrates his human fallibility. Ozu easily identifies his characters faults, but he readily understands and forgives their foibles. Along with Renoir, he is one of the great humanists of the cinema.”

Michael Koller3

 

“Ozu’s aim, of course, is to reveal character and not to pass judgement on it. In Equinox Flower, although the father is clearly wrong in opposing the marriage of his daughter, Ozu presents him very sympathetically. Ozu’s characters are always human, possessing all the human frailties.”

Marvin Zeman4

  • 1BAMPFA
  • 2Harvard Film Archive
  • 3Michael Koller, “Equinox Flower,” Senses of Cinema, 2018, nr. 86 (2018).
  • 4Marvin Zeman, “The Serene Poet of Japanese Cinema: The Zen Artistry of Yasujiro Ozu,” The Film Journal vol. 1, 1972, nr. 3-4 (1972).
screening
CINEMATEK, Brussels
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman, 1975, 201’

Jeanne Dielman, a lonely young widow, lives with her son Sylvain following an immutable order: while the boy is in school, she cares for their apartment, does chores, and receives clients in the afternoon. However, something happens that changes her safe routine.

 

Sam Adams: That’s very much the feeling of watching Jeanne Dielman, where the repetitive ritual of her daily chores forges a connection with the viewer that’s practically physical, to the extent that you feel a jolt when she drops the shoe that she’s shining, or lets the potatoes boil over. It’s an effect you can really only achieve with a film of that length.

Chantal Akerman: It is physical, but you know, when I started to shoot Jeanne Dielman, at the beginning, I was not aware of what was going to be the film. Everything was written in the script already, but still. After three or four days, when I saw the first dailies, I realized and I said, “My God, the film is going to be three hours and 20 or 40 minutes long, and it’s going to be developing little by little.” For example, when after she sleeps with the guy for the second time, and you feel something happens, even though the length of the shots is more or less the same as before, certainly there is an acceleration inside the viewer, just because, “Oh, she forgot to put the money there, and then suddenly she doesn’t know what to do.” It’s like the end of her life. She doesn’t leave any room for anxiety. It’s like the workaholic, they do the same. When they stop, they die, because then they have to face something inside of them that they don’t want to face. When she has that, that’s the anxiety. I think I am speaking about people. Jeanne Dielman is not special. I can do that with a man, going to work and doing the same thing and being happy because he has the key and he opens the door and then his papers are there and his secretary. Imagine, and then something has changed and he can’t stand it. Because change is dangerous. Change is fear, change is opening the jail. That’s why it is so difficult for yourself to change deeply.

Sam Adams in conversation with Chantal Akerman1

 

Pieter Van Bogaert: In Jeanne Dielman heb je dat plezier van het gebaar, maar ook die aantrekkingskracht die tegelijk een vorm van verzet is.

Chantal Akerman: En zeer geritualiseerd ook. Men voelt dat het gaat over iemand die zich heeft opgesloten in een soort gevangenis. Het is echt een naoorlogse film. Het is 1975, een moment waarop er veel sprake was van feminisme, maar het gaat ook over een vrouw die zich opsloot door de kampen. Ik heb een filmpje gemaakt waarin ik mijn moeder daarover laat vertellen. Ze vertelt hoe belangrijk het was dat de dingen elke dag hetzelfde waren in de kampen. Als men zich blesseerde of ziek werd, dan ging men naar de gaskamer. Voor mijn moeder moeten de dagen nu nog allemaal hetzelfde zijn. Zij heeft daar echt behoefte aan. Het is complex. Jeanne Dielman is een film na de Shoah. Ik wou dat de mensen fysiek de tijd voelden passeren. De meeste films worden gemaakt om de tijd te vergeten. Men zegt soms dat mijn films intellectueel zijn. Maar ze zijn veel meer fysiek dan intellectueel.

Pieter Van Bogaert in gesprek met Chantal Akerman2

 

“I don’t know if Jeanne Dielman’s kitchen feels real – for those who have known it, it is astoundingly recognizable. Perhaps it is possible to see Akerman’s films as a venture to portray certain objects correctly and totally. (Brecht: every good poem is also a document.)”

Daniël Robberechts3

 

“There is an air of study about this film. Not that it wants to be studied because it is so complex and intricate, no, the film welcomes intense reflective attention.”

Dirk Lauwaert4

screening
Cinema RITCS, Brussels
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
The Moon and the Sledgehammer
Philip Trevelyan, 1971, 65’

Mr. Page and his two sons and two daughters live a primitive life in the woods in southern England. They’re not hippies who’ve gone off grid, but the last members of an agricultural community driven to extinction by modern machines.

EN

“It’s a good job the moon’s well up there too, I’ve got room enough to swing a sledgehammer without hitting him.”

Mr. Page

 

“Although the film opens and closes with shots of cars wending their way down a suburban English street, the only vehicles glimpsed during the balance of Philip Trevelyan’s 1971 documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer are of a considerably less contemporary orientation. That’s because the film’s subjects, the Page family, lead an isolated, defiantly pre-modern (though not pre-industrial) life, subsisting without electricity or running water while confining themselves to their six acres of wooded property south of London. While the women occupy themselves with gardening and embroidery, the men take on intensive mechanical work, rehabilitating an old steam engine, building a boat from scratch, their labor a throwback to an outmoded artisanal tradition that, in concert with the men’s stated philosophies, stands as a corrective to the prevailing curse of ‘push-button machinery.’”

Andrew Schenker1

 

“Fantasies and philosophies unfolding in random upsurge.
The trees above them and the world beyond them.
Hermetically sealed within their pastoral echo chamber, yet universal themes ricochet amongst its arboreal clutter.
The detail is beguiling and their culture confusing.
There is no reality to their world, moreover it is a world of self-imposed narrative illusion. They live, as we still live, amongst the detritus of contingency, solidarity and irony. They live between what’s real and what’s fantasy. Their truths might even appear eccentric or quaint, but they are truths manifest as trace elements from the haptic events of their lives. Hands-on.”

Andrew Kötting2

screening
Cercle du Laveu, Liège
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
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