Diary: Jean McGarry, Reflections on Equipoise, Ozu/Calder

Still from Tokyo Story (1953)

Must art in some way stir emotion? What are these feelings, and where do they reside?

After Aristotle attributed to tragedy the psychic disturbances of fear and pity, William Wordsworth proclaimed emotion as the source or prime mover of poetry. Writing was poetry, a work of art composed in words, only if the artist was overwhelmed by a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” and then waited long enough to retrieve it coolly: “emotion recollected in tranquility” became—and still is—a kind of recipe for the making of artistic substance. Immanuel Kant had something harder and dryer in mind for his definition: art must be created in a spirit of “purposiveness without purpose.” That paradoxical nugget has also lingered. The notion that art could only be for art’s sake, a mandate for artistic freedom from morality, politics, faith, or any other constraint, has been its modern extension. Does art following such dicta include emotion?

These thoughts arose as I reflected on the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. His subjects are painful: callous treatment of old folks, sidelined widowers, empty marriages, ungrateful children, loss, death, loneliness. But even when the story is palpably sad, one sees the director inflecting his scenes, as a musical score is inflected, with emotive pressure and release. Does that pressure threaten to become a hindrance, whose urgency, rise and fall, must be seized and controlled, especially if it comes in the form of an “overflow”?  It led me to wonder just how Ozu is able to mine, in the slag of a melodrama, the gold of art.