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A potential disparity between man and nature underlies Ozu’s films. He suggests that the flow of man and nature may be separate rather than unified, which, within the context of his traditional structure, certainly does create a schizoid reaction. This disparity becomes obvious when Ozu juxtaposes similar codas after contrasting family scenes. A shot of a snow-capped mountain inserted after a discussion by several parents plainly suggests the unity to which they aspire, but the same shot inserted after a parent-child quarrel suggests that the traditional unity may have little meaning within the postwar family structure. The codas can be not only a positive statement on the unity of man and nature, but also a wry commentary on the lack of it.
Ozu’s use of character ambivalence and irony is similar to that of Czech director Milos Forman, and an interesting comparison can be drawn between their films. Both perfected a form of light comedy which contrasted documentary “realism” with flashes of human density. In their comedies, disparity is reflected by a tragicomic attitude toward character and a resultant irony. Their early films, given cultural differences, were remarkably similar, but Ozu’s later films moved gradually out of the light comedy category and acquired a weight as yet unknown to Forman’s work. This is because the later Ozu films employ transcendental style: by changing superficial “realism” to the rigid everyday and by changing mild disparity (character ambivalence, irony) into unexpected decisive action, Ozu transforms human density into spiritual density. Assuming that Forman and Ozu started from an analogous base in light comedy (Black Peter vis-à-vis I Was Born, But . . .), Ozu’s evolution may be hypothesized thus: the twin influences of the age of postwar Westernization heightened the innate conflict between Zen culture and modernization in Ozu and forced him little by little to intensify his already schizoid style so that the differences could no longer be resolved but had to be transcended. The compassion of Ozu’s later films is so overburdening and disparate that rapprochement cannot be achieved by laughter as in light comedy, but only by a deep spiritual awareness. (Milos Forman is still a young director, of course, although the surrealistic conclusion of Firemen’s Ball suggests that his career will take a different course.)
The disparity in Ozu’s films is primarily internal: man cannot find nature within himself. The disparity in Bresson’s films is primarily external: man cannot live harmoniously with his hostile environment. In Ozu, there are no futile protests against the frailty of the body and the hostility of the environment, as in Bresson. In Bresson, there is no resigned acceptance of environment, as in Ozu.
The decisive action in Ozu’s films is a communal event between the members of a family or neighborhood. The decisive action in Bresson’s films is limited to a lonely figure pitted against a hostile environment. Bresson stands in the Judeo-Christian tradition of the single redeemer: Moses, Christ, the priests, saints, and mystics who each in his own life righted man with the world. Ozu does not structure his films around a specific Christ or a specific Calvary. In Ozu’s films a number of characters can participate in the Transcendent through a number of decisive actions.
The differences between Ozu and Bresson are unified in stasis, the culmination of transcendental style. The Wholly Other, once perceived, cannot be limited by culture.
A tracking shot is a moral judgment, Jean-Luc Godard once remarked, and so, for that matter, is any camera shot. Any possible shot—high angle, close-up, pan—conveys a certain attitude toward a character, a “screen” which simplifies and interprets the character. Camera angles and pictorial composition, like music, are extremely insidious screens; they can undermine a scene without the viewer’s being aware of it. A slow zoom-out or a vertical composition can substantially alter the meaning of the action within a scene.
In the everyday Bresson replaces the “screens” with a form. By drawing attention to itself, the everyday stylization annuls the viewer’s natural desire to participate vicariously in the action on screen. Everyday is not a case of making a viewer see life in a certain way, but rather preventing him from seeing it as he is accustomed to. The viewer desires to be “distracted” (in Bresson’s terms), and will go to great lengths to find a screen which will allow him to interpret the action in a conventional manner. The viewer does not want to confront the Wholly Other or a form which expresses it.
how would this compare to say Brecht's concept of estrangement/alienation
When the same thing starts happening two or three times concurrently the viewer knows he is beyond simple day-to-day realism and into the peculiar realism of Robert Bresson. The doubling does not double the viewer’s knowledge or emotional reaction; it only doubles his perception of the event. Consequently, there is a schizoid reaction: one, there is the sense of meticulous detail which is a part of the everyday, and two, because the detail is doubled there is an emotional queasiness, a growing suspicion of the seemingly “realistic” rationale behind the everyday. If it is “realism,” why is the action doubled, and if it isn’t realism, why this obsession with details?
In each case Bresson’s protagonists respond to a special call which has no natural place in their environment. It is incredible that Joan the prisoner should act in such a manner before a panel of judges: nothing in the everyday has prepared the viewer for Joan’s spiritual, self-mortifying actions. Each protagonist struggles to free himself from his everyday environment, to find a proper metaphor for his passion. This struggle leads Michel to prison, Fontaine to freedom, and the priest and Joan to martyrdom.
The viewer finds himself in a dilemma: the environment suggests documentary realism, yet the central character suggests spiritual passion. This dilemma produces an emotional strain: the viewer wants to empathize with Joan (as he would for any innocent person in agony), yet the everyday structure warns him that his feelings will be of no avail. Bresson seems acutely aware of this: “It seems to me that the emotion here, in this trial (and in this film), should come not so much from the agony and death of Joan as from the strange air that we breathe while she talks of her Voices, or the crown of the angel, just as she would talk of one of us or this glass carafe.” This “strange air” is the product of disparity: spiritual density within a factual world creates a sense of emotional weight within an unfeeling environment. As before, disparity suggests the need, but not the place, for emotions.
The decisive action forces the viewer into the confrontation with the Wholly Other he would normally avoid. He is faced with an explicably spiritual act within a cold environment, an act which now requests his participation and approval. Irony can no longer postpone his decision. It is a “miracle” which must be accepted or rejected.
The decisive action has a unique effect on the viewer, which may be hypothesized thus: the viewer’s feelings have been consistently shunned throughout the film (everyday), yet he still has “strange” undefined feelings (disparity). The decisive action then demands an emotional commitment which the viewer gives instinctively, naturally (he wants to share Hirayama’s tears, Michel’s love). But having given that commitment, the viewer must now do one of two things: he can reject his feelings and refuse to take the film seriously, or he can accommodate his thinking to his feelings. If he chooses the latter, he will, having been given no emotional constructs by the director, have constructed his own “screen.” He creates a translucent, mental screen through which he can cope with both his feelings and the film. This screen may be very simple. In the case of Pickpocket it could be that people such as Michel and Jeanne have spirits which have deep spiritual connections, and they need no earthly rationale for their love. In Diary of a Country Priest it could be that there is such a thing as the Holy Agony, and the tormented priest was its victim. Bresson uses the viewer’s own natural defenses, his protective mechanism, to cause him, of his own free will, to come to the identical decision Bresson had predetermined for him.
The long forehead, the lean features, the closed lips, the blank stare, the frontal view, the flat light, the uncluttered background, the stationary camera, these identify Bresson’s protagonists as objects suitable for veneration. When Michel’s cold face stares into the camera in scene after scene in Pickpocket, Bresson is using his face—only one part of Bresson’s complex film-making—like a Byzantine face painted high on a temple wall. It can simultaneously evoke sense of distance (its imposing, hieratic quality) and a strange sensuousness (the hard-chiseled stern face amid a vast mosaic or environmental panorama). And when Bresson brings the rest of his film-making abilities to bear on that face, it takes its rightful place in the liturgy. Just before the priest collapses in fatigue on a barren hillock, almost enveloped by gray dusk and dark barren trees, there is a long shot in Bresson’s Country Priest which creates a composition familiar to Byzantine wall paintings, such as the Ascension mosaic at St. Sophia: an agonized, lonely, full figure set against an empty environment, his head hung to the left, wrapped in body-obscuring robes, about to succumb to the spiritual weight he must bear.
[...] Anne and Martin attempt to hide their love, romancing only on clandestine field trips. This conflict is reflected in the decor: the parsonage is claustrophobic and chiaroscuric; the fields are bucolic and well-lit. [...]