Whatever it is I am saying, I always need a leaf or a flower, if not an entire field.
—Mary Oliver
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.
Above: Ivana Miloš, What Did the Lady... (2021), monotype collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm.
Caught up in our daily lives, we tend to forget about the existence of trees. Especially those growing close to us. I remember taking a large chestnut tree standing in front of my parents' apartment in a small city in Germany for granted. Sometimes I would marvel at the many blackbirds gathering in its crown but mostly I was just too busy with whatever was going on inside the flat or on my screens. Yet, on the day my mother passed away, I felt a peculiar urge to look at this strangely quiet tree and I remember the astonishment I felt when I realized that it didn’t care about my tears. The realization that it was simply living its own life has stayed with me. The only film director who has ever given me that same sensation is Yasujirō Ozu.
In his second sound feature, What Did the Lady Forget?, he cuts to the image of such a tree in front of the building in an affluent residential area where most of the film’s action takes place. Ozu shows us the tree in the same shot twice during the film. The first time we glance at the leafless and vase-shaped tree growing very close to the house for merely five seconds while we listen to the curious and comic Hawaiian soundtrack composed by Senji Itô. It’s followed by three interior shots of the family home of professor Komiya and his wife Tokiko.
We don’t discover the bourgeois tidiness we expected from this place after seeing the large windows and white facade from outside (the exteriors were shot in what is today Akasaka, Tokyo in February 1937, if we can trust Ozu’s diary entries). Instead, clothes are lying everywhere, a glistening purse speaks of an unfamiliar female presence in the house. When Tokiko enters the last of these shots and calls for her niece Setsuko, we know that the young woman is the reason for the chaos and the changes to come.
Later Ozu shows us the same shot of the tree a second time, lasting twelve seconds and accompanied by a more classical film score. Setsuko’s modern ways have already clashed with Tokiko’s conservative housewife attitudes and found sympathy in Komiya who regularly sneaks out of the house to visit a geisha house. It’s the old battle between tradition and modernity presented in a way that is “light, effortless, fresh, and truthful," as Nathaniel Dorsky (a great filmmaker of trees himself) put it. Of course, the tree couldn’t care less about this battle. In winter it is dormant anyway. I can only wonder whether the married couple, in the moments of crisis occurring throughout the film, will also look out of their window and discover the tree for the first time.
Considering the fact that Ozu’s father ran a fertilizer company, it’s strange that there are relatively few plants in his films. They are part of life, just like the sky, a bottle of sake or some forgotten newspapers blowing across the pavement. We do see plants, however, as Ozu always lets us see everything in a shot (he famously declined distorted lenses). There are, for example, some beautiful fruit trees in A Story of Floating Weeds, unforgettable red Joseph’s Coats in Floating Weeds and sand-covered patches of sea grass in Record of a Tenement Gentleman.
Many film scholars and critics have tried to describe those cutaway still-lifes or pillow shots, as Noël Burch labeled them: “People are perhaps known to be near, but for the moment they are not visible, and a rooftop, a street-light, laundry drying on a line, a lampshade or a tea-kettle is offered as centre of attention.“ To me, less than a transitional device or even a suspension of narration as some have said, these shots change my perspective on life. They remind me how small I am.
But what about the trees in yards? Do they really contain emotions as Donald Ritchie has observed in relation to Ozu’s focus on non-human elements?
Even if no one sees us, we green, we blossom, / we give our fruits into ungrateful hands, / we lay down leaves in circles round about us / when Autumn comes, and stay unnoticed through the Winter wrote Isobella Levatin and W. H. Auden in their poem about Trees in Courtyards. Ozu does notice, and he makes sure we don’t forget about this winter tree’s existence, but he is more interested in the tree being next to people than its being as such. Since the shot is framed in a way that lets us only see part of the tree (especially its seemingly upwards growing branches) it’s almost impossible to identify the tree. I contacted several experts and Tokyo residents with a screenshot showing the tree and the most convincing reply was from a Japanese tree photographer who conjectured that it could be a Japanese zelkova, adding to the aesthetic argument the fact that a lot of these trees were planted in Tokyo in the beginning of the last century. I wonder whether tree historians watch a lot of films?
Contemporary city planners worldwide know that we need trees in cities since, among other advantages, they improve air quality, absorb dust and cool down their surroundings. Politicians act accordingly, motivated by a desirable image (in Tokyo many trees have been planted since 2008 in order for the city to look better during the Olympic Games originally thought to be held in 2020). Recent developments in Western countries have also shown a strange return of the Catholic confession logic in relation to planting trees. Institutions organize the planting of trees in parks and thus expect the world to forget about all the trees that have been killed in order for the cities themselves to exist.
In Japan, many trees are excessively pruned under the pretense of preventing toppling during the typhoon season. Ozu cuts for another reason. He focuses on the space between the tree and the life of those inside the house. He doesn’t show this space, he makes it visible in a cut. What happens between a tree and people? What happens when we take the time to look at a tree? I’ve come to think it’s about a balance that brings together the deep time, so very palpable in the sleeping tree in What Did The Lady Forget?, and the fleetingness of human struggle. In some way, the spaces between trees and ourselves embody another battle between modernity and tradition. It isn’t about conflict but togetherness. In such a shot, the tree, just like Ozu's films, might remind us: yes, we do exist.