Floating Weeds - 1959 - DVD

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Years ago Roger Ebert brought Floating Weeds (1959) to The Conference on World Affairs (CWA) in Boulder, Colorado, which is an annual meeting of minds and scholars in the sciences, arts, and beyond. There, Ebert famously hosts "Cinema Interruptus", a 5-day screening and shot-by-shot analysis of a film of his choosing. At the event in the University of Colorado's Macky Auditorium, the film is screened in its entirely the first day (Monday). Each subsequent day the "interruptus" begins; at any point in the film, including the opening credits, audience members yell "stop!" at which point they must either have a comment or question about something within that freezed frame. As you can imagine, it is a long process getting through a movie in total, and in fact, the year I saw Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) at CWA we hardly got past the credit sequence before our time was up for the day. Luckily, the conference keeps running until Friday, but rarely is the whole film seen in full after Monday's introductory screening.

I missed that 2003 "Interruptus," and have meant to see Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds ever since. I finally did, and I am a better critic for it. Now I am left longing to see the original version, The Story of Floating Weeds (1934). The word on the street is that the original is even better. In the meantime, I am mesmerized with the 1959 version, the poetic long-takes of Ozu's characters who move in-and-out of and throughout the frame naturalistically. At once the composition is both simple and complex; in one shot, for instance, Ozu frames two rooms that are separated by one wall: a dining area and a staircase. The shot is simple in terms of the camera movement, since the camera doesn't move; but the shot's complexity is illustrated though the choreography of the characters within the spaces in simultaneous time.

I'm a novice in the Ozu department, but once this John Ford movie marathon is over (does it have to be?) there might be an Ozu marathon in the works. Stay tuned...