Talking about a film with friends after going out to see something as a group is all about comparing small moments.

Anyone can point out the major things a character did, the funny things he or she said–you don’t even have to go see the movie for that: save your ten bucks, watch the trailer, and wait in the bar for everyone else to show up in two hours.   The conversation becomes interesting when someone points out a detail that registered but was easy to miss the first time around.

        In Wim Wender’s 1983 film, that moment for me is when Wenders is filming a group of young Japanese men and women in a park in Tokyo.  They are dancers, wheeling around like the pachinko balls from a previous scene, doing the twist, doing the swim.  They dance to American music from the 50s and 60s and beyond; the tinny sound of Bill Haley and the Comets, and then Blondie staggering out of the ghetto blasters that have been carefully sheltered under an igloo of red polka-dot umbrellas.  They wear bobby socks and saddle shoes, have leather jackets with “Tokyo Rockabilly Club – Duck Tail” silk-screened on the back, and the men inevitably look just a little bit like Elvis reincarnated.

        The “moment” I want to draw attention to is a medium close up from behind one of the dancers.  He’s maybe 17, wearing a leather jacket that says “Tokyo Street Heroes” on the back and then “Teddy” which may or may not be his name. He’s also wearing dark glasses pushed down on his nose so he’s looking over the rims.  He turns and casts his glance behind him while in his mind an idealized version of James Dean inhabits his body and does the glance for him so that he is at once cool and at the same time he is cooler than he could ever hope to be.

        Then he notices that the camera is behind him and it is filming.    He reacts by turning and at the same time stepping away, as though he had something to hide.

For me, much of what the film is about is displayed in that moment.

        The film is about image, “Just looking, not trying to prove anything” Wenders says in the voice over narration.  But his looking is not without judgement.  What he shows us is a cascade of imagery and through his pictures, he asks us to question with him just what it is that makes an image authentic.  As a film maker, nothing could be more important to Wenders.  Film has a great capacity to help people escape from their lives.  It also has the capacity to help us see ourselves more clearly, to encourage our understanding of the things we see, and therefore of ourselves.

Tokyo-Ga is, according to Wenders’, an homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.  He has expressed his admiration of the way that Ozu’s films “show the slow decline of the Japanese family and the collapse of national identity.  They don’t do it by pointing aghast at the new, American, occidental influences, but by lamenting the losses with a gentle melancholy as they occur.”  (Wenders, Logic 61).  He wonders whether the Tokyo he is going to will be anything like the Tokyo he has come to know thorough watching the films of Ozu.

        It is a feeling familiar to me, albeit with a twist.  When I first went to New York City, I wondered whether the New York I would find would be anything like the New York I knew from the films of Woody Allen, or whether it would be like the New York of Law and Order.  And also, I think, not unlike Wenders, what I found was something completely other–the wonder of an eight story zipper factory I saw from the cab window crossing the Williamsburg bridge, a half a dozen nine-ball tables surrounded by a small army of men in an open air park in the middle of the afternoon off the boardwalk behind the World Trade Centre towers.

Wenders shows us the wonders of Tokyo and he does it with a slowness that reinforces the quality of the things he chooses to display.  His camera spends long moments without cutting focussed on men in pachinko parlours making little silver balls bounce through a course of nails and into a winning hole or all the way down to the general collection slot.  If you win, more little silver balls come out of the machine and you can start all over again.

        As he shows us the pachinko parlours, Wenders voice describes how they work, what the pachinko balls can be exchanged for, and how the “Kogichi” resets the nails in each machine after hours so that the pachinko balls will bounce differently the next day.

        For me, what comes across in his choice of images and in his explanations as we see those pictures, is his almost childlike fascination in all things.  What is that?  How does it work?  Why?  Why?  Why?

His answer to the “why” of the pachinko machines is startling when it comes.  It was only after the second world war, he says, that the game became popular, “when there was a national trauma to forget” (Logic 62).  Suddenly, the image of those men losing themselves in the machines makes a different kind of sense.

He goes to a driving range – an astonishing structure four tiers high that reminds me of a North American football stadium – and films hundreds of people out “golfing.”  They hit bucket after endless bucket of golf balls into the centre of the complex and the balls just keep rolling down the automatic tee-up machines which they tap with their drivers.  Never having to bend down and press a tee into the earth, or to cover up a divot after a bad shot.  Golf has become, Wenders observes, all about pure form in Japan, since only the very elite members of society could afford to play on a golf course.  The game has been ingested by Japanese culture and has become a hybrid of businessman’s pastime and martial art.  It’s a sort of Tai Chi with a club.

          Then there are the rock-a-billy dancers.  He stumbles upon them quite significantly, after an aborted visit to the new Disney theme-park that is just outside Tokyo.  We see a small white car approaching the Disneyland gates in the pouring rain.  Despite the crowded spaces Wenders has been showing us, there is no one lined up to get into Disneyland, and the car (which purports to be Wenders’ car), has plenty of room to turn around.   He can’t stomach the idea of strolling through something that is an exact imitation of something that is false in the first place.

When he comes across the teenagers a little later in the day, he is confronted by imitation.  Here is a group of young Japanese people who are imitating their idea of American culture from the 50s and 60s.  There is only one place that idea could have come from – the movies and television.  They are playing out rolls from American Graffiti and Happy Days, rockin’ around the clock.  The beautiful moment comes when that guy sees that he is being filmed.  In the moment, we see something absolutely authentic.  For just a second, when we see his fear of being seen, we truly get a glimpse of him.  He is out there in the park being an image of an image, but Wenders manages, just for a split second, to cut through that and the young man lets us in.  Not for long; he practically flees from the camera, but it’s too late, we’ve had our glimpse.

There are so many other moments in the film that try to break through the imitation present on the surface of things.  It is everywhere, Wenders seems to be saying, and it is hard to escape.

        He calls this film an essay, rather than a documentary, and he may not want “to prove anything” but he certainly does want to investigate as thoroughly as possible, the idea of image and whether or not there can be any truth in an image.

Wenders himself is not immune from presenting imitations and I think he knows it.  There are many trains in Ozu’s films and Wenders finds his own fascination with the modern trains of Tokyo.  One of the first train images he provides is a shot of the arrival of a bullet train at a station.  In every way, this shot is an imitation of one of the most famous shots in film studies history: the Lumiere Brother’s “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.”  The Lumiere film lasts forty-nine seconds, and so does Wenders shot.

As he travels to Tokyo, he finds himself unable to tear his eyes from the cinema screen on the plane.  We can see that they happened to be showing On Golden Pond that day and though he admits that he is watching reluctantly and without sound, he sees the images of the film flickering on the screen as “vapid.  A hollow form, a deception, a forgery of emotion” (Logic 61).  What he wants for himself as a film maker is what he sees out the window – to show people things as they are “the way you sometimes open your eyes.”  The “sometimes” is rather telling.  It is Wenders attention to things, that childlike fascination I was talking about that comes through in his work, that so many of us lose.  As children, we are wide-eyed, but as adults we so rarely get a chance to see anymore, so quickly dismissing what deserves our attention and giving our attention to things that don’t deserve it.

        Wenders laments the role of television in the dissemination of false imagery.  He shows us the TV screen in his hotel room upon which an advertisement displays a series of female bums in underwear while a horrible jingle – “who wears short shorts, we wear short shorts” – comes out of the tinny speaker.  “I am at the centre of the world” Wenders realizes.  Here he is in a hotel room with his TV in the country that builds most of the TVs for the world.  Those TVs of course, spread out across the globe, carrying with them not home grown images of Tokyo, or of Paris, or Toronto, or Duncan, or where ever they end up, but images produced by the American television industry, the main aim of which is to sell us things, or at best to entertain us for a while, but rarely to help us think, rarely to make us feel.  He knows that “every fucking telly is the centre of the world” and that the “centre has become a pathetic notion.” (Logic 62).

For an audience that is relatively new to film, the long interviews with the actor Chishu Ryu and the cameraman Yuuhara Atsuta are difficult but their context is simple in a way.  Wenders loves Ozu’s films and he loves them because he feels that they are authentic – something true comes from them and that is what he wants to investigate.  How are the films made?  What makes them seem so true?  Talking to an actor and the cameraman help him make sense of the problem even if they don’t provide him with answers.  Ryu almost always played characters that were older than he was, and acting is inherently an art of imitation.  And yet, the real value of an actor is to present their character as real.  One of the only ways to do that is to tap into something inside.  So there is always the question of just how false anything an actor shows us is.

        And the cameraman.  Well, for one thing, there is his clear and real reverence for Ozu that we see as he breaks down thinking about him.  And then there is his description of the way that Ozu always chose the 50 mm lens because he wanted his films to be as constant and “true” as they could be.  And yet, in insisting on that lens, he was still making a choice.  He was still representing things.

        For me, a final sequence that both simply astonishes me and seems to draw all of the thoughts together, is Wenders excursion to the wax sushi factory.  This is a place where displays of food are made so that they can sit out in a window for a long time and not rot.  Wenders shows us the process in painstaking detail and I am fascinated from beginning to end.  I almost gasped when a sous chef prepared a wax tempura shrimp by poking it quickly into a “blanket” of warm brown wax.  The great irony is that Wenders was not allowed to film the employees of the factory eating their lunch.  That real moment will be forever lost while the images of the production of false things lives on.  But then again, what is false about what those people do? working all day with hot wax to make sculptural bowls of noodles and nori rolls.  Is there something false about them?  Isn’t it in it’s own way very beautiful?

Wenders, Wim. “Tokyo-Ga,”  The Logic of Images.  Trans. Michael Hoffman.  Boston: Faber, 1991.  60-65.