On Pointing the Camera
"Before familiarity can turn into awareness, the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be, it will now be labeled as something unusual." - Bertolt Brecht
cross-posted to Chained to the Cinémathèque
Comments
"Ozu's method, like all poetic methods, is oblique. He does not confront emotion, he surprises it. Precisely, he restricts his vision in order to see more; he limits his world in order to transcend these limitations. His cinema is formal and the formality is that of poetry, the creation of an ordered context that destroys habit and familiarity, returning to each word, to each image, its original freshness and urgency. In all of this Ozu is close to the sumi-e ink drawing masters of Japan, to the masters of the haiku and the waka."
-From Donald Richie's "Ozu"
There goes that word poetic again.