Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988)

4 Structures, Strictures, and Stratagems I don't think the film has a grammar. I don’t think film has but one form. If a good film results, then that film has created its own grammar. Yasujiro Ozu! The materials upon which Ozu draws are further organized by particular constructive principles. No other cities or families in cinema are like his, and this uniqueness proceeds from a series of formal processes which will occupy me for the next three chapters. A poetics — derived from poiesis, or ‘active making’ — puts at the center of its concerns the problem of how art works are constructed to have certain effects and uses. The artist’s craft, including both abstract principles and particular practices, takes on major importance. In narrative cinema, this requires understanding how materials are deployed in structural patterns — progression, repetition, equivalence, and so forth — as well as how the spectator is prompted to dynamize those patterns in time through the process of what I call narration. If you notice that a film’s ending echoes its beginning, you have spotted a structural feature; if you go on to observe how the knowledge implicit in this ending modifies your impression of the beginning, you are tracing the process of narration. In this connection, let me roll out a few pieces of analytical machinery that will help the inquiry along. In the process of narration, various aspects of the film become cues for spectatorial activity. Of these cues, the most salient here are those proffered by the syuzhet, the substance and sequence of narrative events explicitly presented in the film. For example, Tokyo Story begins with the elderly father and mother packing to visit their children in the city; in the next scene, the couple arrive in their son’s Tokyo household. These scenes constitute distinct syuzhet components. The syuzhet prompts the spectator to build the fabula, or total system of story events, explicit as well as implicit. In the Tokyo Story example, the spectator must not only construct the narrative units of packing for the trip and arriving at the son’s home; the spectator must also infer the trip itself, which is not dramatized in the syuzhet. Later we learn that the old couple also stopped en route to Tokyo and visited another son. Overall, the action complex of leaving home/travel/visit to son/travel/arriving in Tokyo constitutes, in gross outline, the fabula. As the example suggests, the syuzhet invariably contains some gaps in presenting the fabula, and the choice and control of these gaps contribute mightily to the overall effect of the film.* (1 have borrowed the Russian Formalists’ terms for these processes because no English words unambiguously capture the distinctions that they make.) In accordance with contemporary usage, I shall also employ the term ‘diegesis’ to 51