Shima Iwashita as a Bride in Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
Last Tuesday will Turner Classic Movies’ (TCM) last installment of its Yasujiro Ozu film festival. During the month of May, I saw a total of thirteen films directed by Ozu, missing only four of those shown. And I will try to see the four I missed sometime in the next two weeks using TCM’s “Watch Now” feature, if they are still around. The four I missed were all shown in the middle of the night. I am, alas, too old now to lose too much of my beauty sleep.
It used to be that I would wake up at 3 am to watch Edgar G. Ulmer’s Babes in Bagdad or John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, but that was many years ago, when I was a fanatical adherent of the politique des auteurs. I will explain what that means in another post to be written soon.
The films I saw Tuesday were four in number:
Floating Weeds (1957), not to be confused with 1934’s silent A Story of Floating Weeds, of which it was a remake.
Late Autumn (1960).
An Autumn Afternoon (1962), which was the director’s last film.
Equinox Flower (1958).
As usual, I loved all four films, though I thought the earlier A Story of Floating Weeds, although a silent, was better than the 1957 Floating Weeds.
All the Ozu films I saw were released by Shochiku Studio. Ozu was nothing if not consistent in his loyalty to the studio.
As a special favor to my readers, I will refrain from future posts about Ozu for a period lasting up to a year. By then, my enthusiasm will be rekindled and I will enthuse about the Japanese director’s work yet again.
Argentinian Poet and Writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
I am certain that French literary scholars are raising their hackles because of my interpretation of the term explication de texte. The type of close reading that the term implies includes style and is rarely used with literature that is translated from another language.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote in Spanish, but I have been reading his work in English translation for over half a century. I thought it would be fun to take a paragraph from one of Borges’s stories and, by my own idea of a close reading, give you an idea why the Argentinian is one of my favorite writers.
The story I have chosen is “Three Versions of Judas” as printed in Andrew Kerrigan’s translation of the American edition of Ficciones. Here is the story’s opening paragraph:
In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulchre; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Dem hemlige Fraharen appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version, called Der hemliche Heiland, executed in 1912 by Emil Schering.)
Whew! The following notes rely heavily on Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes’s A Dictionary of Borges [ADOB] (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1990) and my searches on the Internet.
Basilides: “An early Gnostic from Alexandria who integrated Pythagorean and Cabbalistic traditions with the Christian faith.” ADOB
Nils Runeberg: Fictional character.
conventicles: secret or unauthorized religious assemblies.
fiery sepulchre: Refers to the sixth circle of Dante’s Inferno, where heretics were punished by eternal flames.
heresiarchs: Borges loves this word and uses it frequently. It refers to the originators of heretical beliefs.
Satornibus:Could refer to Saturninus of Antioch, “who held that the angels, archangels, powers and dominations were created by the Supreme Unknown, the Father, but that the world and everything in it, including man, was created by seven of the lowest angels.” ADOB
Carpocrates: “A second-century Neoplatonist from Alexandria, the founder of a heretical sect which believed in the dualism of good and evil, denied the divinity of Christ and held that the soul is imprisoned in the body from which it strives to be free.” ADOB
Liber adversus omnes haereses: Translated as A Book Against All Heresies. As Nilos Runeberg is a fictional characters, all his works are nonexistent.
Syntagma: “The earliest collection of heretical doctrines by Justin Martyr. Another text of the same title, also directed against heresy, was written at the beginning of the third century by Hippolytus of Rome….” ADOB
Lund: Lund University in Sweden was founded in 1666.
Swedish and German titles: Runeberg was a fiction, as are his books. As is translator Emil Schering.
Note also the use of subjunctive verb forms: might have directed … would have destined him … might have augmented … might have been preserved … might have perished.
And I have barely begun analyzing this paragraph, which was designed to flummox lazy readers and excite explorers of strange literary byways like me.
Novelist Thomas Wolfe was right: You really can’t go home again. When I graduated from high school in Bedford, Ohio in 1962, most of my graduating class left Cleveland. It was at a time when the population of “The Mistake on the Lake” was plummeting. When I was in grade school, it was the seventh largest city in the United States. A scant few years later, factories and businesses were shutting down at a fearsome rate.
To make things worse, when I returned to Cleveland for a visit, I was promptly infantilized, even after I graduated from an Ivy League College and worked as a computer programmer at System Development Corporation in the late 1960s, I was always remembered as the snot-nosed kid. So be it.
Here is a nifty poem by Joyce Carol Oates on the subject, from a slightly different slant:
Hometown Waiting for You
All these decades we’ve been waiting here for you. Welcome! You do look lonely. No one knows you the way we know you. And you know us.
Did you actually (once) tell yourself—I am better than this? One day actually (once) tell yourself—I deserve better than this?
Fact is,you couldn’t escape us. And we have been waiting for you. Welcome home! Boasting how a scholarship bore you away like a chariot of the gods except where you are born, your soul remains.
We all die young here. Not one of us outlived young here. Check out obituaries in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal. Car crash, overdose. Gunshot, fire. Cancers of breast, ovaries, lung, colon. Heart attack, cirrhosis of liver. Assault, battery. Stroke! And— did I say over- dose? Car crash?
Filling up the cemeteries here. Plastic trash here. Unbiodegradable Styrofoam here. Three-quarters of your seventh- grade class now in urns, ash and what remains in red MAGA hats.
Those flashy cars you’d have given your soul to ride in, just once, now eyeless rusting hulks in tall grass. Those eyes you’d wished might crawl upon you like ants, in graveyards of broken glass.
Atwater Park where you’d wept in obscure shame and now whatever his name who’d trampled your heart, he’s ash.
Proud as hell of you though (we admit) never read a goddamn word you’ve written.
We never forgave you. We hate winners.
Still, it’s not too late. Did I say overdose? Why otherwise are you here?
Yesterday, while I was at the Northridge Greek Festival, I spent some time reading Buddhist Nun Pema Chödrön. She had some interesting things to say about those times when nothing seems to go right. The quote is from her book When Things Fall Apart:
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
You know what an earworm is: It’s a catchy piece of music that keeps running through your head and you cannot “unhear.” Although I have visited Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Northridge many times, I saw an image on the wall that I cannot unsee. At the far left of the photo above is an image of the crucifixion with several saints gathered around the foot of the cross. You can see a figure in green at the extreme lower right of the image. If the photo were not so dimly lit, it would show a grieving Ruth Buzzi. The bearded figure above her is a dead ringer for Kris Kristofferson.
As the church was built in the 1960s and the images on its walls were probably painted in Europe, I am sure that the resemblance is not intentional.
Martine and I attended the Greek Festival held at the church this weekend. We always spend about an hour in the church looking at the ornate artwork throughout the nave and iconostasis.
Who would have thought that I would find in L. Frank Baum’s The Emerald City of Oz the most perfect villain of the Donald Trump variety. In an earlier Oz book (Ozma of Oz), the Nome King and his minions had been defeated by Dorothy Gale and Billina who exploit the Nome peoples’ fear of eggs and steal his magic belt.
In The Emerald City of Oz, the Nome King is up to his old tricks: “Therefore the King stormed and raved all by himself, walking up and down in his jewel-studded cavern and getting angrier all the time. Then he remembered that it was no fun being angry unless he had some one to frighten and make miserable, and he rushed to his big gong and made it clatter as loud as he could.”
Further on:
This Nome King was named Roquat the Red, and no one loved him. He was a bad man and a powerful monarch, and he had resolved to destroy the Land of Oz and its magnificent Emerald City, to enslave Princess Ozma and little Dorothy and all the Oz people, and recover his Magic Belt. This same Belt had once enabled Roquat the Red to carry out many wicked plans; but that was before Ozma and her people marched to the underground cavern and captured it. The Nome King could not forgive Dorothy or Princess Ozma, and he had determined to be revenged upon them.
So he calls for his general and when he doesn’t get the answer he wants, he “throws him away.” This consists of the following: “Please take General Crinkle to the torture chamber. There you will kindly slice him into thin slices. Afterward you may feed him to the seven-headed dogs.”
As we know, this is Donald Trump’s favorite way of handling subordinates, such as Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, and John Bolton. The seven-headed dogs are well fed by the orange-haired Nome King of Mar-a-Lardo.
This morning at the L.A. Central Library, I was reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel of sexual obsession entitled The Bad Girl, published in 2006. In it, he discusses a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris years before the 2019 fire that destroyed the cathedral’s roof. This passage made me think that it is dangerous to talk about anything that is man-made as permanent—with the possible exception of the pyramids at Giza in Egypt. Even though the damage has been repaired for now, nothing (in Vargas Llosa’s words) really is guaranteed to “escape the ususry of time.”
I tried to distract her and took her to look at the cathedral, a sight that never failed to overwhelm me even after all the years I had been in Paris. And that night more than at other times. A faint light, with a slightly pink aura. bathed the stones of Notre Dame. The large mass seemed light because of the perfect symmetry of its parts, delicately balanced and sustained so that nothing was disordered or disarranged. History and the sifted light changed the façade with allusions and resonances, images and references. There were many tourists taking pictures. Was this same cathedral the setting for so many centuries of French history, the inspiration for the novel by Victor Hugo that excited me so when I read it as a boy, in Miraflores, in my Aunt Alberta’s house? It was the same one and a different one that had accrued more recent mythologies and events. Extraordinarily beautiful, it transmitted an impression of stability and permanence, of having escaped the usury of time.
Shin Sabure and Michiyo Kogura in Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
I had not done such a thing since my early film freak days. Then it was not unusual to sit through five John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, or Budd Boetticher films projected one after the other in a screening room. Yesterday I did the same sort of thing as I watched four Yasujiro Ozu postwar films from Shochiku Studio screened between 5 pm and 12:30 am by Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I could have made it five pictures, but I had to miss Tokyo Twilight (1957) because I was beginning to fade by the time that midnight rolled around.
The films I saw were:
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) about a small child lost in the ruins of a bombed-out Tokyo
A Hen in the Wind (1948) about a young wife sells her body to pay her son’s medical bills
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) about a middle-aged couple that begins to separate over various issues, but comes together again in the end
Early Spring (1956) about the travails of salary-men in Tokyo
All four films were brilliant, and all featured interpersonal problems which ended in some form of reconciliation. In the divided West, such reconciliation would be replaced by buying a gun, wearing camouflage clothing, and committing a hate crime. We seem to prefer the irreconcilable in our own entertainment.
I am enthralled by TCM’s Ozu festival. So far this month, I have seen nine Ozu films; and there are four more screening next Tuesday, plus two more that I missed but could see using TCM’s WATCH NOW feature.
Why do I love Ozu’s films so much? For one thing, they are jewel-like in their perfection—even the silent films Ozu made before 1937. Also, they make me feel good without being saccharine in any way: His films, psychologically, are true to life. (In two of the films, there are depressed little boys with a bed-wetting problem.) Finally, Ozu’s films have a Buddhist sense of Mono no aware, which can be translated as “the pathos of things” or “the bittersweet awareness of impermanence.”
Yes, his films are all bittersweet. But they all end in sweetness.
In July 1943, the Writers’ War Board asked New Yorker writer E. B. White to make a statement on the subject “The Meaning of Democracy.” Below is White’s statement:
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. [Italics mine]
In 2016 and 2024, I learned that, according to Mr. White’s statement, we are NOT living in a democracy. I say that because a certain individual was elected president twice by more than half the voters—voters who were not only wrong in electing him, but very probably wrong in their judgments on any subject you care to name.
I suppose I could be forgiving toward the voters who propelled Trump to the presidency, but I don’t feel like it. I have no intention of agreeing that water flows uphill, that the sun sets in the East, or that the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces can declare war at any time against anybody. In fact, I am feeling very non-committal about our country as it begins to celebrate its 250th anniversary as a former democracy.
An Influencer Couple Takes On Caye Caulker, Belize
Planning a vacation will never be the same again, now that influencers have weighed in. As usual, the results are both good and bad.
Recently, I have been researching vacations in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, and Caye Caulker, Belize. The good thing is that I have seen enough images of the two islands to feel confident that there are interesting sights to see, good places to eat, and decent accommodations. Now that everybody and his brother has a video camera and a drone and professional underwater equipment, there is no lack of images promoting a large variety of vacation destinations.
On the minus side, many of the producers of these videos insist on highlighting themselves, sometimes in every shot. My interest is in seeing what Isla Mujeres and Caye Caulker are like, not in the drinking habits of these influencers. Of course, now I know that an inordinate number of visitors to Isla Mujeres are serious alkies. There are times that, on seeing these videos, I wonder how the influencers are still on their feet and not face-planting in a puddle somewhere.
There is also a lot of mispronounced names of places and misinformation. It is obvious that most travel influencers don’t do their homework when visiting another country.
Another point is that some influencers have received free products and services to promote destinations, hotels, and restaurants. As such, one has to take their recommendations with a grain of salt. Of course, the viewer gets a chance to see the accommodations and the food and get some idea of what to expect.
The important thing is balance one influencer off against another and use one’s judgment to make good decisions. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?
Tarnmoor 
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