{"id":50,"date":"2016-05-24T17:56:08","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T17:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/?page_id=50"},"modified":"2017-03-18T08:03:36","modified_gmt":"2017-03-18T15:03:36","slug":"essay","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/essay\/","title":{"rendered":"Essay"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wax Tempura Shrimp<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Talking about a film with friends after going out to see something as a group is all about comparing small moments.<\/p>\n

Anyone can point out the major things a character did, the funny things he or she said\u2013you don\u2019t 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The conversation becomes interesting when someone points out a detail that registered but was easy to miss the first time around.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In Wim Wender\u2019s 1983 film, that moment for me is when Wenders is filming a group of young Japanese men and women in a park in Tokyo.\u00a0 They are dancers, wheeling around like the pachinko balls from a previous scene, doing the twist, doing the swim.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They wear bobby socks and saddle shoes, have leather jackets with \u201cTokyo Rockabilly Club \u2013 Duck Tail\u201d silk-screened on the back, and the men inevitably look just a little bit like Elvis reincarnated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201cmoment\u201d I want to draw attention to is a medium close up from behind one of the dancers.\u00a0 He\u2019s maybe 17, wearing a leather jacket that says \u201cTokyo Street Heroes\u201d on the back and then \u201cTeddy\u201d which may or may not be his name. He\u2019s also wearing dark glasses pushed down on his nose so he\u2019s looking over the rims.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then he notices that the camera is behind him and it is filming.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He reacts by turning and at the same time stepping away, as though he had something to hide.<\/p>\n

For me, much of what the film is about is displayed in that moment.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The film is about image, \u201cJust looking, not trying to prove anything\u201d Wenders says in the voice over narration.\u00a0 But his looking is not without judgement.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As a film maker, nothing could be more important to Wenders.\u00a0 Film has a great capacity to help people escape from their lives.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Tokyo-Ga is, according to Wenders\u2019, an homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.\u00a0 He has expressed his admiration of the way that Ozu\u2019s films \u201cshow the slow decline of the Japanese family and the collapse of national identity.\u00a0 They don\u2019t do it by pointing aghast at the new, American, occidental influences, but by lamenting the losses with a gentle melancholy as they occur.\u201d\u00a0 (Wenders, Logic 61).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is a feeling familiar to me, albeit with a twist.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And also, I think, not unlike Wenders, what I found was something completely other\u2013the 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If you win, more little silver balls come out of the machine and you can start all over again.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As he shows us the pachinko parlours, Wenders voice describes how they work, what the pachinko balls can be exchanged for, and how the \u201cKogichi\u201d resets the nails in each machine after hours so that the pachinko balls will bounce differently the next day.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What is that?\u00a0 How does it work?\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

His answer to the \u201cwhy\u201d of the pachinko machines is startling when it comes.\u00a0 It was only after the second world war, he says, that the game became popular, \u201cwhen there was a national trauma to forget\u201d (Logic 62).\u00a0 Suddenly, the image of those men losing themselves in the machines makes a different kind of sense.<\/p>\n

He goes to a driving range \u2013 an astonishing structure four tiers high that reminds me of a North American football stadium \u2013 and films hundreds of people out \u201cgolfing.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Never having to bend down and press a tee into the earth, or to cover up a divot after a bad shot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The game has been ingested by Japanese culture and has become a hybrid of businessman\u2019s pastime and martial art.\u00a0 It\u2019s a sort of Tai Chi with a club.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then there are the rock-a-billy dancers.\u00a0 He stumbles upon them quite significantly, after an aborted visit to the new Disney theme-park that is just outside Tokyo.\u00a0 We see a small white car approaching the Disneyland gates in the pouring rain.\u00a0 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\u2019 car), has plenty of room to turn around.\u00a0\u00a0 He can\u2019t stomach the idea of strolling through something that is an exact imitation of something that is false in the first place.<\/p>\n

When he comes across the teenagers a little later in the day, he is confronted by imitation.\u00a0 Here is a group of young Japanese people who are imitating their idea of American culture from the 50s and 60s.\u00a0 There is only one place that idea could have come from \u2013 the movies and television.\u00a0 They are playing out rolls from American Graffiti and Happy Days, rockin\u2019 around the clock.\u00a0 The beautiful moment comes when that guy sees that he is being filmed.\u00a0 In the moment, we see something absolutely authentic.\u00a0 For just a second, when we see his fear of being seen, we truly get a glimpse of him.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not for long; he practically flees from the camera, but it\u2019s too late, we\u2019ve had our glimpse.<\/p>\n

There are so many other moments in the film that try to break through the imitation present on the surface of things.\u00a0 It is everywhere, Wenders seems to be saying, and it is hard to escape.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He calls this film an essay, rather than a documentary, and he may not want \u201cto prove anything\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Wenders himself is not immune from presenting imitations and I think he knows it.\u00a0 There are many trains in Ozu\u2019s films and Wenders finds his own fascination with the modern trains of Tokyo.\u00a0 One of the first train images he provides is a shot of the arrival of a bullet train at a station.\u00a0 In every way, this shot is an imitation of one of the most famous shots in film studies history: the Lumiere Brother\u2019s \u201cArrival of a Train at La Ciotat.\u201d\u00a0 The Lumiere film lasts forty-nine seconds, and so does Wenders shot.<\/p>\n

As he travels to Tokyo, he finds himself unable to tear his eyes from the cinema screen on the plane.\u00a0 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 \u201cvapid.\u00a0 A hollow form, a deception, a forgery of emotion\u201d (Logic 61).\u00a0 What he wants for himself as a film maker is what he sees out the window \u2013 to show people things as they are \u201cthe way you sometimes open your eyes.\u201d\u00a0 The \u201csometimes\u201d is rather telling.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t deserve it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Wenders laments the role of television in the dissemination of false imagery.\u00a0 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 \u2013 \u201cwho wears short shorts, we wear short shorts\u201d \u2013 comes out of the tinny speaker.\u00a0 \u201cI am at the centre of the world\u201d Wenders realizes.\u00a0 Here he is in a hotel room with his TV in the country that builds most of the TVs for the world.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He knows that \u201cevery fucking telly is the centre of the world\u201d and that the \u201ccentre has become a pathetic notion.\u201d (Logic 62).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Wenders loves Ozu\u2019s films and he loves them because he feels that they are authentic \u2013 something true comes from them and that is what he wants to investigate.\u00a0 How are the films made?\u00a0 What makes them seem so true?\u00a0 Talking to an actor and the cameraman help him make sense of the problem even if they don\u2019t provide him with answers.\u00a0 Ryu almost always played characters that were older than he was, and acting is inherently an art of imitation.\u00a0 And yet, the real value of an actor is to present their character as real.\u00a0 One of the only ways to do that is to tap into something inside.\u00a0 So there is always the question of just how false anything an actor shows us is.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And the cameraman.\u00a0 Well, for one thing, there is his clear and real reverence for Ozu that we see as he breaks down thinking about him.\u00a0 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 \u201ctrue\u201d as they could be.\u00a0 And yet, in insisting on that lens, he was still making a choice.\u00a0 He was still representing things.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Wenders shows us the process in painstaking detail and I am fascinated from beginning to end.\u00a0 I almost gasped when a sous chef prepared a wax tempura shrimp by poking it quickly into a \u201cblanket\u201d of warm brown wax.\u00a0 The great irony is that Wenders was not allowed to film the employees of the factory eating their lunch.\u00a0 That real moment will be forever lost while the images of the production of false things lives on.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Is there something false about them?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it in it\u2019s own way very beautiful?<\/p>\n

Wenders, Wim. \u201cTokyo-Ga,\u201d\u00a0 The Logic of Images.\u00a0 Trans. Michael Hoffman.\u00a0 Boston: Faber, 1991.\u00a0 60-65.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Wax Tempura Shrimp 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-50","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/50\/revisions\/331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.viu.ca\/ruzeskyj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}