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.

The signature quality that comes to mind is the films’ exquisite balance or equipoise. Equipoise seems a guiding principle in the films’ very sequences, their odd camera angles, scenes shot from the floor, Ozu’s curatorial eye on every element in the frame: not just the kotatsu table, stage center, with its tea or sake cups, but also the window beyond, the items hanging on the walls, the placement of a flowering plant, an ancestral shrine, the arrangement of actors and their dress (kimono, or suit and skirt)—all of this deliberate figuration contributes to an equipoise of the whole.   

In Tokyo Story, Ozu’s masterpiece (named best film of all time by Sight & Sound), there is a prominent utensil that looks like a laboratory tool, or a mobile. The film’s beloved, pudgy wife, mother, and grandmother lies dying on her futon, surrounded by grieving family. Propped behind her head is a device (metal upright and crossbeam) holding in suspension a silvery pouch of crushed ice, there to cool Okasan’s fevered brow, weightless on her forehead. It’s a very crude kind of mobile, likely an accidental placement, or, perhaps, a deliberate and witty homage.

The tool brought to my mind, of course, the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Their dates are close—Ozu, 1903–1963; Calder, 1898–1976. So different in medium, subject matter, and use (or avoidance) of narrative—both made work that was cerebral, disciplined, elegant, mysterious, perfect, self-contained, vital, and highly concentrated. Both bodies of work exhibit a need to control every element, including the very air. For me what was less obvious, but unmistakable, was how Ozu and Calder’s art evokes strong, if sometimes elusive, feeling. Ozu-world is a precision machine, a mock-heroic tearjerker. The caring and self-sacrificing grandmother enjoys a last visit with her selfish children and bratty grandchildren, who farm her and her husband out to a hot springs resort, where the old lady suffers the first blow of her final illness. In a fairy-tale stroke, it’s only the couple's daughter-in-law, Noriko, a poor war widow, who cares anything about the elders. At the film’s end, it’s Noriko who lingers with the old man, when his own children flee as soon as they can, shortly after their mother is interred in a Buddhist send-off, where a monotonous chant and hollow drumbeat drive home the collapse of this old man’s world.

There’s a lot of psychic disturbance for the viewer—heartless children, endearing parents, a war tragedy, poverty, death, and loss—but the “overflow” in sadness is regulated, dispensed in calibrated doses, and lavished in odd places, like the rickety stand that takes the weight off the ice pack, or in silent scans of landscape, sometimes bleak and industrial, a skein of electrical wires and smokestacks obstructing the sky.

It is easy enough to feel the pathos in scenes of a defeated and bombed-out country (recently occupied), rushing to replace its traditional and stately ways (stone lanterns, kimono, paper walls, ancient crafts, punctilious courtesy) with alarm clocks, office hours, and charmless hydroelectric stations, just as a family contends with the loss of its beating heart. Calder’s mobiles for their part may seem to exist outside of time, yet they seem to impose on the viewer two speeds or tempos; there's a whip-quick effect like a joke, followed by sensations so complicated, and even conflicted, that sorting them out is like unraveling a dream. The sculptures, moving or still, seem to confront the eye in a split second, but then, and only then—while the viewer stands and gazes—do they begin to do their work. 

One composite of sheet metal, rod, wire, and paint is called Thirty-Two Discs. Calder titled his works only after completing them, and this name seems a partial inventory: the group of discs is comprised of sixteen big and sixteen small ones, attached in pairs at either end of a slim metal bar, looking a bit like an unevenly weighted barbell. A slender black pole, supported on a double-bent portion of itself, is surmounted by four sets of balances, the last of which ends in loops that hold the barbells. The sculpture stands almost eight feet tall.

Thirty-Two Discs is an unsettlingly disproportionate thing in which the supporting pole, taller than a pro basketball player, stands up straight and proud, while the discs (in their shimmering white) are small and smaller. The disproportion has a sweet kind of pathos: too thin, too tall, and somehow oblivious to its anomalies, the sculpture resembles a beanpole with little earrings, hung on a slant, left to right. Thirty-Two Discs demands of its viewer a reckoning of its parts that delays or even suppresses an impulse of empathy toward it. This is not a living thing, after all, asking for help or mercy. It has no feeling for itself. But the artist seems to have had a feeling for it. It’s a sturdy construction, built to last, but it nonetheless conjures a sadness, partly because the pole is so long and the discs so small, and far away. I’m here, look at me. Nothing wrong with my parts. The mobile stands on its own foot, and its little coins are free to rustle in the wind. Does it look like a tree? No. It projects pride in its sturdiness and self-possession, as many of Calder’s works do, perfectly balanced objects, or composite objects of base metal and angelic freedom.

One word that might describe both Thirty-Two Discs and Tokyo Story is “private,” in the sense of private life and the privacy of a work of art once it’s separated from its creator and stands, or spins, on its own.

Watching Tokyo Story again recently, I found it even more painful than I had remembered, with its tender theme music for the old man and his wife, hobbling into their last days as a couple, their rounded backs in matching kimonos as they gaze over the sea in Atami, and the selfless devotion of the daughter-in-law, who lives in an old factory building in a single room hardly bigger than a metal box. When the old folks come back too early from their cheap hot springs spa (noisy and raucous as a frat house on Friday night), they are homeless, as their grown children had counted on their staying away as long as possible. Otosan spends the night drinking with his wartime buddies, ending up slumped in one of his daughters’ beauty parlor chairs, while Okasan sleeps on the floor in Noriko’s cell block, mats lined up side by side, heads close, as they console each other.

How does a story that so exploits easy sentiment hit so hard? There are many techniques in play. One of these is tempo; scenes unfold very slowly. Each action—if action is the right word—lasts long, even longer than needed or expected, ending often in a shot of a single figure left behind or eluding company to gaze at a bustling river or at the sky broken by a string of clothes hanging at the horizon. Movie time is closer to clock time, not just marking the family’s comings and goings, the meals, the conversations, but also expanding, allowing the experience to diffuse until all of its force is spent. The tempo titrates the film’s emotional impact, allowing the viewer room for thought and suggesting that the events’ unseen aftereffects might play out for a very long time, maybe forever.

Another technique is a version of the Alienation Effect, the name Bertolt Brecht gave to devices that distance the audience from emotional involvement, signaling the artificiality of the medium. This effect is visible in Ozu’s habit of oddly timed cuts, and symbolic landscapes layered with real-life power cables and fuming smokestacks. Also, the persistence of floor-level perspective, aiming at bare feet padding along a matted floor, or the folded-up backs of people bent over a low table, rather than heads and faces. Emotion is also dampened by confined spaces, limiting any outflow: the Japanese house, with its thin walls, low ceilings, and paper portals, confines the characters, forcing them to modulate—if not suppress—their rage, spite, resentment, fear, sadness, and joy.

Ozu is known by his critics for his disdain for “films with a predetermined meaning” that viewers “are manipulated into embracing.”  Calder’s sculptures too resist settling into one thing.

Calder’s Sword Plant is composed of two swords appearing, to my eye, as new moons, black, and punctured with a few holes, and two plants, or a single plant split into two red wedges, each braced on wide-spread stems. Two short red wires tie each of the moons to its red wedge. Everything that isn’t sharp and pointy is gently curved. The thin red wires seem to be the only thing holding back the plant(s) and moons from vaulting straight up into the air. Three tapering red tips are the only thing keeping this powerful vegetable—in all its exuberance, its aspirations—anchored to the ground. The title hints at a scene of willful striving. Of course, there is such a thing as aggressive vegetation. The giant pitcher plant (Nepenthes rajah) possesses jaws mighty enough to chew up a rat and looms as tall as Sword Plant. Or Sword Plant’s vital forces—its bold thrusts and counterthrusts—can seem to embody the music of optimism. It’s also a mathematical expression, angles and planes bound by dynamic force. It’s stable, yes, but it means to fly.

Plant life cast in bolted metal with sharp angles is, in itself, a kind of joke, and yet Calder seems not to have wanted his sculptures to be assigned to what Carl Linneaus, the Dutch arbiter of names, labeled lifelessmineral.  His mobiles aspire to life, perhaps he deemed them a new form of life, rotating on their own power, taking different shapes, and projecting their pencil, fan, and foliate shadows, even speaking their own private clicking and clinking language. Or perhaps the artist wanted the viewer to forget plants and swords and try to grasp instead a new world. Calder’s works never seem to stand in for something else. They’re constructed, like a house or a bridge, with know-how, and they assert their own right to occupy space. (Alas, they don’t grow and breathe, but neither do they die!) The viewer comes into Calder’s world, or rather into the world of his creations, the work of his hands, yes, but free, finally, from his will, free to flex, fold, float, and circulate, or to stand stock still. This is an art that surely answers to the Kantian purposiveness without purpose. Living their own lives, his pieces exude something we can feel and share with them: something comic, sad, detached, peaceful, cool, puzzling.

Ozu’s work has that same detached self-containment, in spite of the fact that the story, scenes, and characters impress upon the heart, and invite responsive movement. How can that be—detached and affecting? One thinks of the lyrical and dreamy (non-referential) titles: Early Spring, Late Summer, An Autumn Afternoon, Equinox Flower, End of Summer, Green Tea Over Rice. These are warmer in tone than Calder’s Thirty-Two Discs, but both artists aim to prick the heart, obliquely—there if you stay with the work, and wait. 

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Jean McGarry’s most recent book is, Blue Boy, a novel. She has written for Book Post on Natalia Ginzburg, Samuel Johnson, Henry James, eating in James Joyce, and spaces of literary seclusion.

This post is adapted from an essay for a Pace Gallery catalogue accompanying the exhibition co-presented with Azabudai Hills Gallery, Alexander Calder: en effet du japonais, in Toyko.  

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