zero focus

During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the film director, Yasujiro Ozu, was sent to China to fight in the war. According to his diary, at the beginning of the war, he was making plans to make war films once he goes back to his homeland Japan. His diary was filled with ideas of scenes which depict the daily lives of the soldiers in a foreign country. But at some point during the war he stopped making such notes. As a soldier, he was the unit leader for a unit which spread chemical gas against the Chinese army. He saw and experienced the worst of the war. After Ozu came back to Japan, he never made a single war film nor a single scene involving war battles. All the scars of the war are erased, and repressed under the surface of beautiful daily lives of the people on screen. 

I am especially fascinated by the way he (Yasujiro Ozu) directed actors. Actually the characters in his films have some similarity to the subjects of (Bruce) Nauman’s videos, in the sense that depictions of the inner self are stripped down to set of gestures within a rigid framework. Ozu’s films are like puppet shows using bodies of real actors. He never believed in conventional filmic language; he wanted to create his own. And he achieved it, inventing this very strange filmic language that no one can copy. On the surface, everything looks so ordinary and undramatic, but once you become aware of the layer behind this surface, you realize how dark and pessimistic his visions were.

So along with this line of thought, the new Ozu drawings are made. And one more important thing is that In Ozu's film, the camera almost never moves. He always fixed the camera in one position, and tried to construct the perfect image by looking through the lens within the frame. So in his film, the space outside of the frame doesn't exist. Everything is played out within the fixed frames - just like there is nothing inside of the facial expression of the actors. Everything is on the surface and within the frames. Such is Ozu's film, and that's why with this drawing, the same 4:3 ratio image is repeated 16 times. They are like 16 frames of Ozu's film, and there's no face to read, but just discovered (or invented) landscape outside of the existing frame.