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 World Directors
and Their Films
Essays on African,
Asian, Latin American,
and Middle Eastern Cinema

Bert Cardullo

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2012

Book 1.indb i 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2012 by Bert Cardullo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cardullo, Bert.
World directors and their films : essays on African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle
Eastern cinema / Bert Cardullo.
p. cm.
Includes filmography.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8524-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8525-7 (ebook)
1. Motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1994.C3335 2012
791.4309—dc23
2012010245
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Book 1.indb ii 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Contents

Introduction: The Necessary Film, or Criticism Matters vii

Part I: Japanese Authors

1 A Passage to Tokyo: The Art of Yasujiro Ozu, Remembered 3

2 Given Circumstances: The East Asian Cinema of

Akira Kurosawa 15

3 Lost in Transition: Yoji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai 30

4 Without a Prayer: Vengeance Is Mine and the Cinema of

Shohei Imamura 35

5 Life and Nothing But: On Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi

and Nobody Knows 45

6 Reality Bites: Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani 61

Part II: Other Asian Auteurs

7 Ethics and Aesthetics, Eastern or Western: The Directing
Career of Satyajit Ray 69

8 Same Time, Different Children: Mrinal Sen’s The Case Is

Closed and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! 83

iii

Book 1.indb iii 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 iv Contents

9 Love without Pity, Passion with Pathos: Two Films by

Zhang Yimou 95

10 The Uses of History: On Chen Kaige’s Farewell,

My Concubine 111

11 South Korea and the Cinema: The Cases of Kim Ki-duk and
Hong Sang-soo 117

12 The Space of Time, the Sound of Silence: Tsai Ming-liang’s

What Time Is It There? 131

Part III: Iranian and Middle-Eastern Innovators

13 Blood and Cherries, Wind and Dust: Abbas Kiarostami and
the Cinema of Iran 143

14 Angels beyond America: Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven

and The Color of Paradise 163

15 Women and Children First: The Cinema of Jafar Panahi 176

16 An Afghan Is a Woman: Siddiq Barmak’s Osama and Other

Afghan-Iranian Films 193

17 Mirror Images, or Children of Crisis: Samira Makhmalbaf’s

The Apple and Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly 206

18 Of Human Bondage and Male Indulgence: Amos Gitai’s

Kadosh, Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut, and Savi Gabizon’s
Nina’s Tragedies 218

Part IV: African Art

19 Women and Fathers, or Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé and
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Abouna 235

20 Rite of Passage, Law of the Jungle: Idrissa Ouédraogo’s

Yaaba and Tilaï 244

Book 1.indb iv 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Contents v

21 Africa through European Eyes: Claire Denis’s Chocolat and

Frieder Schlaich’s Otomo 253

Part V: Latin American Art(ist)s

22 The Prison-House of Sexuality: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s
Strawberry and Chocolate, Hector Babenco’s Carandiru, and
Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven 263

23 All about My, Your, Their Mother: María Novaro’s Danzón

and Andrucha Waddington’s Me, You, Them in Light of the
Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar 281

24 Latino Art through European Eyes, or against the American

Evil Eye: Barbet Schroeder’s Our Lady of the Assassins and
Miguel Littin’s Alsino and the Condor 294
Filmographies 305
Bibliographies 317
Index 327
About the Author 341

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Book 1.indb vi 7/11/12 11:28 AM
 Introduction

The Necessary Film, or Criticism Matters

Film editing, or the instantaneous replacement of one moving visual field

with another, was once not part of our daily experience. So nothing in 400
million years of vertebrate evolution prepared us for the visual assault of
cinema. But amazingly enough, the process succeeded, and we became ac-
commodated to the idea of motion pictures. Even more, a mysterious extra
meaning was gained from the juxtaposition of two images that was not pres-
ent in either of the shots themselves. In short, we discovered that the human
mind was predisposed to cinematic grammar as if it were an entirely natural,
inborn language. Perhaps it is inborn, because we spend one-third of our lives
in the nightly world of dreams. There, images are fragmented, and different
realities collide abruptly with what seems to have great meaning. In this way
we can see film editing as, probably unwittingly, employing the power and
means of dream.
For many millions of years, then, human beings were apparently carrying
within them the ability to respond to film and unconsciously awaiting its ar-
rival to employ their dream faculty more fully. Some of us have long believed
that, through more recent centuries, theater artists and audiences themselves
had also been longing for the film to be invented even without a clue that there
could be such a medium. Many tricks of stagecraft in those centuries (par-
ticularly the nineteenth) were, without knowing it, attempting to be crosscuts
and superimpositions, or double exposures. Some dramatists even imagined
their work in forms and perspectives that anticipated the birth of the cinema
(most notably, and excitingly, Georg Büchner in Danton’s Death [1835]). In
his essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” Sergei Eisenstein shows
how the novel itself—specifically, the novels of Charles Dickens—provided
D. W. Griffith with a number of cinematic techniques, including equivalents

vii

Book 1.indb vii 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 viii Introduction

to fades, dissolves, the breakdown into shots, and the concept of parallel
editing. These novelistic and theatrical attempts at prognostication a few
centuries earlier are puny stuff, however, because for millions of years homo
sapiens had been subliminally prepared for the intricacies of film, and had
indeed been getting ready for them every night. Indeed, in a sense, the last
century, the mere centenary of film’s existence, was the emotional and psy-
chological goal of the ages—and continues to be into the twenty-first century.
When the first moving picture flashed onto a screen, the double life of all
human beings thus became intensified. That double life consists, on the one
hand, of actions, words, and surfaces, and, on the other, of secrets and self-
knowledges, or self-ignorances, self-ignorings. That double life has been part
of man’s existence ever since art and religion were invented to make sure
that he became aware of it. In the past 150 years or so, religion has receded
further and further as revealer of that double life, and art has taken over more
and more of the function; when film art came along, it made that revelation
of doubleness inescapable, in fact, more attractive. To wit: On the screen are
facts, which at the same time are symbols; for this reason, they invoke dou-
bleness at every moment, in every kind of picture. They stir up the conceal-
ments in our lives, both those concealments we like and those we don’t like;
they shake our histories, our hopes, and our heartbreaks into consciousness.
Not completely, by any means. (Who could stand it?) And not more grandly
or deeply than do the other arts, but more quickly and surely, because these
facts, these symbols, do their stirring and shaking with visuals, as well as with
motion, serially and cumulatively.
Think of this process as applying to every frame of film, and it is clear that
when we sit before a screen, we run risks unprecedented in human history. A
poem may or may not touch us; a play or novel may never get near us. But
movies are inescapable. (In the case of poor films, we often have the sensa-
tion of fighting our way out of them.) When two screen lovers kiss, in any
picture, that kiss has a minimum inescapability that is stronger than in other
arts—both as an action before us and a metaphor for the “kissingness” in our
own lives. Each of us is pinned privately to such a kiss in some degree of
pleasure or pain or enlightenment. In romances or tragedies, in period films
or modern dramas, in musical comedies or historical epics, in Westerns or
farces, our beings—kissing or otherwise—are in some measure summoned
up before us, in our own private visions. And I’d like to suggest that the fun-
damental way, conscious or not, in which we determine the quality of a film
is by the degree to which the reexperiencing of ourselves coincides with our
pride, our shames, our hopes, our honor.
Finally, it follows, distinctions among movies arise from the way they
please or displease us with ourselves: not whether they please or displease

Book 1.indb viii 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Introduction ix

but how. This is true, I believe, in every art today; it is not a cinema mo-
nopoly. But in the cinema it has become more true more swiftly and deci-
sively, because film has a much smaller heritage of received aesthetics to
reassess; because film is bound more closely to the future than other arts
seem to be (the reason is that, by its very episodic or “journeying” form,
film reflects for viewers the belief that the world is a place in which man
can leave the past behind and create his own future); and because film
confronts us so immediately, so seductively, and so shockingly (especially
on the larger-than-life screen) with at least some of the truth about what we
have been doing with ourselves. To the extent that film exposes the viewer
to this truth about himself, in his experience of the world or of fantasy, in
his options for action or for privacy, to the extent that he can thus accept
a film as worthy of himself or better than himself—to that extent a film
is necessary to him. And it is that necessity, I am arguing, that ultimately
sets its value.
Throughout history, two factors have formed people’s taste in any art, their
valuing of it, that is: knowledge of that art and knowledge of life. Obviously
this is still true, but the function of taste seems to be altering. As formalist
aesthetic canons have come to seem less and less tenable, standards in art
and life have become more and more congruent, and, as a result, the func-
tion of taste is increasingly the selection and appraisal of the works that are
most valuable—and most necessary—to the individual’s very existence. So
our means for evaluating films naturally become more and more involved
with our means for evaluating experience; aesthetic standards don’t become
identical with standards in life, but they are certainly related—and, one hopes,
somewhat braver.
Of course the whole process means that human beings feed on themselves,
on their own lives variously rearranged by art, as a source of values. But
despite other prevalent beliefs about the past connected with theology and
religion, we are coming to see that people have always been the source of
their own values. In the century in which this responsibility, this liberation,
became increasingly apparent—the twentieth—the intellect of man simulta-
neously provided a new art form, the film, to make the most of it.
That art form is obviously still with us, and now, in the twenty-first cen-
tury, more than ever, it seems. And its critics proliferate in number, in part
because of what I describe above: the “personal” element involved in the
watching of any movie, and the ease nowadays with which, through the Inter-
net, one can communicate that personal response to others. If, as Oscar Wilde
once said, “Criticism is the highest form of autobiography”—because only by
“intensifying his own personality” could the critic interpret the personality
and work of others—then film criticism must be an even higher form.

Book 1.indb ix 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 x Introduction

One purpose of World Directors and Their Films is to stake out territory
not just for film criticism, but for a certain type of film critic—one some-
where between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. At a time when
the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pic-
tures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific
discourse, the author offers close readings of major directing careers and
significant individual films that go beyond simple biographical capsules, plot
summaries, and vague impressions about acting (the province of the news-
paper review), on the one hand, yet that pull up short of oracular theoretical
pronouncements on the state of the art and its artists (the province of the
academic monograph), on the other. The essays contained in this book are
thus acts of interpretation—historical and theoretical, as well as critical—in
the humanistic senses of those words, not gaseous musings or pedantic tracts.
With elegance, clarity, and rigor, the author tries ever to demonstrate that the
cinema means as well as shows, and his ultimate aim is to explain how mov-
iemakers outside the United States use the resources of the medium to pursue
complex, significant human goals.
For this reason, World Directors and Their Films is aimed at the educated
or cultivated moviegoer, as well as college students and professors. In addi-
tion to the general or common reader, students and teachers of university-
level courses in film history, international cinema, movie criticism, and
independent film ought to find this book enlightening and helpful. It is not
intended for the reader who is looking for either a comprehensive history of
the cinema or a consumer guide to the movies, nor is it an erudite scholarly
tome targeted only at a limited audience of specialists. Instead, it offers a
refreshing, humanistic alternative to both the facile, stargazing monographs
that one can find in any chain bookstore and the arcane academic publications
that deal with phenomenology, historiography, the politics of gender, race,
and class, and the cognitive dissection of film style and technique.
World Directors and Their Films, then, offers readable analyses, in survey
form, of what the author considers to be some of the most important films—
and film artists—of our time. The book is arranged geographically into five
sections, supplemented by bibliographies, film credits, directors’ filmogra-
phies, and a thorough index. From a glance at the contents, if not at the title
itself, the reader will quickly discover not only that all the films treated are
Asian, African, Middle Eastern, or Latin America but also that all of them are
“art films.” Hence entertainment movies—particularly American entertain-
ment movies—are excluded, and this requires some comment.
By about 1920, long after American films had cornered the world market, a
rough, debatable, but persistent generalization had come into being: America
made entertainment movies, while Europe (and later the rest of the world)

Book 1.indb x 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Introduction xi

made art films. Even back then, some observers knew that there were great
exceptions on both sides of that generalization, particularly the second part.
(Every filmmaking country makes entertainment movies; they are the major
portion of every nation’s industry. But no country’s entertainment movies
have had the success of American pictures.) That generalization has become
increasingly suspect as it has become increasingly plain that good entertain-
ment films cannot be made by the ungifted; further, it is evident that some
directors of alpine talent have spent their whole careers making works of
entertainment.
Nonetheless, for compact purposes here, the terms entertainment and art
can serve to distinguish between those films, however well made and aes-
thetically rewarding, whose original purpose was to pass the time; and those
films, however poorly made and aesthetically pretentious, whose original
purpose was the illumination of experience and the extension of conscious-
ness. In this view, the generalization about American and European films has
some validity—less than was assumed for decades, still some validity. And
that validity has determined the makeup of the collection of pieces in World
Directors and Their Films, which is to say that I write here exclusively about
films made beyond American borders.
To be sure, I wish there were more American art films, but the nature of
movie production in the United States—which is almost totally commercial
and unsubsidized—prevents their creation. During the late 1960s and early
1970s, there was some hope that this situation would change due to the col-
lapse of the Hollywood studio system; the increase in foreign film importa-
tion (and therefore foreign influence); the soaring expense of moviemaking;
and the rise of the independent, “personal” film (to satisfy, as it were, the
increasing number of “personal” critics like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris,
and Dwight Macdonald). However, American filmmakers soon learned that
“independent” means independent only of the old assembly line. Indeed, in
some ways the new system is more harried, less self-confident, than the old
studio procedure, where picture people knew precisely what they were doing,
or thought they did, and for whom they were doing it.
Put another way, independent production now means that, for each proj-
ect, a producer not only needs to acquire a script and director and actors and
facilities and distribution, he also has to acquire an audience—possibly a dif-
ferent audience for each film he produces, or at least not a relatively depend-
able general, homogeneous audience, as in the past. No longer, then, is there
any resemblance in the movie industry to a keeper throwing fish to trained
seals. Making motion pictures is now much more like publishing books: Each
venture is a separate business enterprise, a separate risk and search. And the
moment “personal” films don’t make any money, they stop getting made in

Book 1.indb xi 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 xii Introduction

large numbers—as they have already done in comparison with the period of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, when we saw such personal (and in some
cases hugely moneymaking) pictures as Easy Rider, The Hired Hand, Five
Easy Pieces, Wanda, The Conversation, Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde, Alice’s
Restaurant, The Wild Bunch, The Rain People, The Graduate, Midnight Cow-
boy, and many more.
The operative term at the start of the previous sentence is money. The op-
erative term in World Directors and Their Films, by contrast, is art. I have
nothing against money (who really does?), but I like my art divorced from
it, or divorced from dependence on it, as much as possible. I hope the reader
will agree and read on with pleasure—as well as profit.

Book 1.indb xii 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 I
JAPANESE AUTHORS

Book 1.indb 1 7/11/12 11:28 AM

Book 1.indb 2 7/11/12 11:28 AM
 1
A Passage to Tokyo

The Art of Yasujiro Ozu, Remembered

The worldly life of Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963) was, like that of many another
artist, very worldly. This is especially true of film artists, for no one can live
in a movie environment as in a Buddhist monastery. And no film director is
likely to get the chance to achieve such “purity” as Ozu’s (more on this term
later) unless he can deal with the rather less pure circumstances that surround
the making of all films.
Ozu entered films as an assistant in 1923, when he was twenty years old,
assigned to a director of light comedy. He was born in Tokyo but moved
away with his mother while quite young. His father had remained in Tokyo to
manage the family business, so Ozu grew up virtually fatherless—an interest-
ing fact in light of the centrality of father figures in his later films. Sent to a
boarding school, he did badly and was expelled. When he was in a prefectural
(or public) middle school, he was dispatched to the city of Kobo to apply to a
good high school. Instead Ozu went to a movie. He soon saw other films, by
Thomas Ince and Rex Ingram, and later he said that, if he had not seen them,
he might never have chosen the film profession.
But he did choose it, and, with the help of a friend of his father’s, he got
his first job. Ozu remained an assistant for four years. He had chances to get
ahead, but subsequently confessed, “The real truth is that I didn’t want to. As
an assistant I could drink all I wanted and spend my time talking. Still, my
friends told me to go and try, and finally orders came through making me a
full director.”1 There is no evidence that Ozu gave up drinking and talking,
but there’s plenty of evidence that he soon got a reputation for hard work.
In 1927, he made his first film. He wrote the script with Kogo Noda, with
whom he also wrote the script of Tokyo Story in 1953, as well as many other
scripts. Most of Ozu’s early pictures were light comedies, like the first movie

Book 1.indb 3 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 4 Chapter 1

he worked on as an assistant. I have no intention, however, of sketching his

whole career for more than the obvious reasons: Some of the early films
have disappeared, and the remaining ones have not all been available in the
United States. In 1982, the Japan Society of New York showed the thirty-two
extant feature films (out of the fifty-four Ozu directed, thirty-four of which
were silents made before 1936), but few of them were subsequently released
to a wider public. Our Ozu, the Ozu we know well, is mostly the latter Ozu,
of such films, in addition to Tokyo Story, as An Autumn Afternoon (1962),
Floating Weeds (1959), and Late Spring (1949). This is not an unbearable
fate. Late Ozu would not exist without the experience that preceded it, it’s
true, but what we have is a treasury.
That treasury is one of at least two that Japanese cinema has bequeathed
to us, the other being from Akira Kurosawa. Even as, in his own nation,
Kurosawa is called the most Western of Japanese directors, Ozu is called the
most Japanese of filmmakers by his countrymen, and an American like me
can see at least a little bit of why this is so. But such a comment is a defining,
not a limiting one. (Who, after all, was more Swedish a filmmaker than Ing-
mar Bergman?) Kurosawa, a fine artist, is an immediately exciting director;
Ozu, a fine artist, is not. Kurosawa is essentially a dramatist, Ozu a lyric poet
whose lyrics swell quietly into the epic.
The films of Ozu’s last period, the ones I know, tend toward an adagio
tempo, and they are crystallized in loving but austere simplicity. His method
is one of nondrama, but not in any prosy, naturalistic, flattened sense. He
believes, along with many Japanese painters and draftsmen, that if you select
the right details—including words—and present them realistically, you have
created an abstraction that signifies a great deal more than detailed realism.
The drama, for Ozu, is in life itself, and his task is therefore not to contrive
but to reveal. Indeed, everything in an Ozu film derives from his utter sub-
scription to a view of life as infinitely sacred and of art as the most sacred
exercise in life—one whose purpose is not to account for or explain life’s
sacredness, but to document it. He serves, then, rather than making anything
serve him.
Around 1930, at about the time that Chishu Ryu emerged as a principal
actor for him, Ozu began to become the Ozu we now know, a serious direc-
tor chiefly interested in Japanese family life, in middle-class existence. I
underscore that the emergence of Ryu coincided with this artistic deepening
in Ozu; one may infer here that opportunity in this instance evoked ambition.
I also underscore that Ozu worked through most of his career with three close
colleagues: Ryu, the aforementioned Kogo Noda, and Yuharu Atsuta. Teams
of this kind have appeared from time to time in film history and have usually
produced superior results: Ozu’s “team” is no exception.

Book 1.indb 4 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Yasujiro Ozu 5

Ryu himself appeared in every one of Ozu’s fifty-four films, at first in

small parts and eventually in many leading roles, including the father in Tokyo
Story. From 1941 (after a stretch of military service) Ozu had Atsuta as his
camera self, or, as Atsuta put it in 1985, as the “caretaker of the camera”2; and
Atsuta served as Ozu’s cameraman on a dozen films. It was he who designed
the short tripod to make the camera usable at a height of three feet, a device
that facilitated the now familiar tatami shot—a hallmark of Ozu films—the
perspective, in medium to full range (rarely in close or from afar), of Japanese
seated on a household mat. From the beginning, Ozu also had Noda as a script
collaborator. In 1964, Ryu said of this writing collaboration that,

Mr. Ozu looked happiest when he was engaged in writing a scenario with Mr.
Kogo Noda. . . . By the time he had finished writing a script, he had already
made up every image in every shot. . . . The words were so polished that he
would never allow us a single mistake in the speaking of them.3

Other good directors often work otherwise. With Ozu, however, the result
is not mechanical execution of a blueprint, but the fulfillment of aesthetic
design.
In his own right, Ryu has an extraordinary place in Ozu’s oeuvre. He
became, one could say, the vicar on-screen for Ozu. According to some
critics, this is true in some of the earlier films in the strictly biographical
sense, and it continued, in the later films, in the psychological and spiritual
sense. Those who know all the available films have said that the so-called
Ozu feeling would have been impossible without the actor who played what
became known as the Ozu role. Ryu was, of course, aware of this. In 1958,
he said that, “Today I cannot think of my own identity without thinking of
him. I heard that Ozu once said, ‘Ryu is not a skillful actor—and that is why
I use him.’ And that is very true.”4 This also from Ryu—who was, in fact,
close in age to Ozu—in 1985: “Our relationship was always that of teacher
and student, father and son. . . . From the beginning to the end I was to learn
from him.”5
I don’t take either of Ryu’s two statements as an instance of modesty but of
affinity. Other directors have used personal vicars on the screen: for example,
the young François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud. Other directors, too, have
wanted actors who were not interested in virtuosity—Robert Bresson, for
prime example. But it is unique that a director should so long have used an
exceptionally talented (if “unskillful,” which I take to mean uncalculating or
unhistrionic) actor who was quite willing, with all the modesty possible, to
put that talent at the director’s disposal. The result is not subordination, but
self-expression—of Ozu’s self, as well as Ryu’s. And I know of no better
instance of this than Tokyo Story, which is the most successful of Ozu’s four

Book 1.indb 5 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 6 Chapter 1

late films to which I have referred (all of which have beauty). When it was
made, Ozu was fifty years old and Ryu forty-seven. Ozu, who never married,
had been exploring, continued artistically to explore, the experience of an
older husband and father, to feed into his films what he had observed and
imagined about such men, and Ryu, some twenty years younger than such a
character, was again the consummating yet humble vicar of the exploration.
For reasons I hope to make clear, I now synopsize Tokyo Story. This is
easy to do because, although it is a film of more than two hours, it doesn’t
have a complex narrative. Instead, the reader may find it hard to believe that
a wonderful work of art could be made from this story. A husband and wife in
their late sixties live in a small town called Onomichi on the southern coast of
Japan with their unmarried daughter, a schoolteacher. The couple decides to
visit their two married children and their children in Tokyo; during their visit,
they also intend to see their widowed daughter-in-law, whose husband was
killed in the war eight years before. En route, moreover, mother and father
stop off to see a younger son who lives in Osaka. The couple proceeds to visit
their children and daughter-in-law, a visit that is pleasant enough but, at least
with their own children, a bit uncomfortable—forced in feeling, if you will.
On the way home, the old woman falls sick and has to stop at her son’s home
in Osaka. When she and her husband at last get home, she sickens further.
The family is summoned. The old woman dies. After the funeral service, the
family leaves; the single daughter goes off to her school; and the old man is
left alone. Thus does Tokyo Story end.
To repeat, this apparently slender material makes a film of two hours
and sixteen minutes. It also makes a film that encompasses so much of the
viewer’s life that you are convinced you have been in the presence of some-
one who knew you very well. Students of mine were asked recently to write
papers on what they know about Charlie Chaplin. One of them began, “I
don’t know how much I know about Chaplin, but he certainly knows a lot
about me.” This seems to me one excellent definition of superior art, and it
also applies to Yasujiro Ozu. As for his Asian or Eastern remoteness, the
most obvious and fundamentally truest point about Ozu is that by being “most
Japanese” in his art, he was simultaneously being most universal.
That art begins with the script. Obviously, if an experienced direc-
tor and his equally experienced collaborator decide on the script I have
synopsized—a script with no vivid or sustained dramatic conflict, only a
series of incidents—they have something in mind other than conventional
drama. A lesser director would have thought, “Now that I have ‘located’
the components of my film and its movement—the trip to Tokyo—what
complications can I devise to keep things interesting?” Ozu, with Noda,
thinks only, “What are these lives like? Really like?” And by holding to

Book 1.indb 6 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Yasujiro Ozu 7

human truth, much more than to dramatic naturalism, he gives us a process

of mutual discovery, the characters’ and our own. This is an act of aesthetic
daring—to choose such a structure for a film—daring that comes not from
ego but, in a way, from the absence of ego, of authorial tampering, intru-
sion, or contrivance. The daring is to make what might be called an invis-
ible film, whose import, as with any other movie, is in what we see and hear
but is not immediately disclosed (or better, “dramatized”), in Tokyo Story,
by what we see and hear.
To achieve this, Ozu naturally had to have the understanding from the start
of Kogo Noda. He also had to have the camera of Yuharu Atsuta, whose pres-
ence is exactly what it ought to be: unnoticeable. We discern what happens;
we don’t float our way to it through gorgeous cinematography. And Ozu’s
three most important actors here seem to have blossomed out of the original
idea into full-blown, corporeal beings. Bent, faintly ludicrous, somewhat
egocentric, Chishu Ryu is nonetheless truly dignified by his character’s age,
and, by some magical act of imaginative transformation, he manages to act
with an old man’s bones. (His character, incidentally, has a partiality for
drink.) Chieko Higashiyama, his wife, has a plain, even homely, face that,
as we see more and more of her, becomes more and more beautiful; like El-
eanor Roosevelt’s face, that is, Higashiyama’s becomes facially beautiful as
her spirit becomes manifest. Tall, ungainly, and humane, Setsuko Hara, the
daughter-in-law, herself manages to give us tenderness without sugar, loneli-
ness without self-pity. These, then, are just some of the instrumentalities that
give this film its exquisite cinematic texture.
From the beginning, Ozu sets his tempo, which, again, is an adagio, and
which is dictated by his intent. Tokyo Story opens with three shots: a ship
passing, children passing on their way to school, and a train passing. The op-
erative image, of course, is “passing”—the idea of passage, in time as in life.
Then we see the old couple quietly packing their bags for the trip to Tokyo.
They are seated on the floor of their home, so within seconds or so of the
start, we get the film’s first tatami shot. Much of the subsequent film is seen
from this “national” viewpoint, when the characters are erect, as well as when
they are sitting: in such compositions as the stout old woman and her little
grandson standing silhouetted on a hilltop; the old couple seated on a curved
sea wall at a beach outside Tokyo, seen from behind, tiny but together against
the visibly immense, even illimitable sea, and knowing they will soon face
other, familial immensities; or the shot in which the camera moves slowly
past the side of a pavilion in a Tokyo park until, around the corner, we see,
again from behind, the old couple seated, alone on a ledge, eating their lunch.
These are all moments of deep and inexplicable poignancy, such simple and

Book 1.indb 7 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 8 Chapter 1

ordinary sights that, as Leo Tolstoy might have said, they cannot help but be
staggeringly important.
Because of these moments, because they are like stations on an archetypal
pilgrimage, I have often wondered about the tatami shot—about its double
meaning. For Japanese viewers, who were Ozu’s prime consideration, it
clearly has the embrace of the familiar; for them it is almost essential for
credibility, let us say. For foreign viewers like me, what has come in the West
to be known as the “Ozu shot” is an adventure, not into something wild and
strange, but into a different species of ordinariness. Through the power of
the film medium, this director forces us non-Japanese into the physicality of
Japanese life, into a view of existence that is part and parcel of decorum and
relationships: the eye level of a person seated on the floor. I’m not asserting
that sitting on a tatami mat explains Japanese civilization (although it is the
immobile position of watchful repose from which one sees the Noh drama;
from which one partakes of the tea ceremony; and in which the haiku master
sits in silence and only occasionally reaches essence, in his poetry, through
extreme simplification or distillation). I do maintain, however, that the tatami
shot has a subtly implosive effect on the Western mind, especially when we
remember that it has no such effect on the Japanese mind. That effect is at
once humbling and empowering. It’s as if Ozu were saying, “These are all
tiny atoms I am showing you, from your own ‘tiny’ position sitting on the
floor. Yet in any one of them, enlarged as they are on the screen, may be
found the entire universe.”
Let me move now to Ozu’s treatment of time, as opposed to his positioning
of the camera in space. One side of the old couple’s living room is a wide
window that opens onto the street. A neighbor passes during the brief opening
sequence, stops, chats through the window, and promises to look after their
house while they are away. Then cut to Tokyo. The cut is sharp, for, in the
1930s, Ozu gave up dissolves. He eventually declared that, “A dissolve is a
handy thing, but it’s not interesting. . . . Generally overlaps and fades aren’t
part of cinematic grammar—they are only attributes of the camera.”6 Tokyo
Story has no overlaps and almost no fades (there’s one on the old man at a
certain point, and, because of its rarity in Ozu’s oeuvre, the fade adds an ele-
giac texture to this character’s plight)—a seeming paradox in a film that has
as one of its themes the passage of time.
Ozu thus seems to be telling us what we should already know: that time
is a mortal invention. Mortality may mark the progress and end of existence,
but time, for its part, does not move: people do. At any given moment—an
idea that itself is a human invention—there are children and parents and
grandparents and dying people, as well as newborn ones. At any other given
moment, there is the same assortment, yet with the names changed. For time,

Book 1.indb 8 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Yasujiro Ozu 9

as Heraclitus told us, is a stream into which we cannot step twice. Unlike
humans, that is, time is constant, like the sea that Ozu’s old couple sits down
to observe. The movement of time is something that they (and we along with
them) invent as they watch the sea simply be, in all its permanency, even as
we invent such a movement as we watch the static long takes that comprise
much of this film.
In Tokyo, we are first at the home of the couple’s son, a physician, who has
two sons of his own from marriage. The old folks arrive and are greeted, and
the atmosphere is quickly established of people who are inseparably bound
to one another—but by bonds deeper than affection. In fact, little affection
is manifested. The same is true with their other daughter, a beautician, with
whose family they stay later. We see the pouting of the doctor’s older boy be-
cause he has to give up his room to his grandparents, and we see his younger
brother’s own reluctance to be near them; the old couple learns that their
doctor-son is not quite the success, nor quite the man, they had imagined, and
they also learn that their married daughter has been coarsened into a penny-
biting, suspicious shopkeeper who is stingy even with her parents’ dinner.
After these trivia have gone on for a while, and more like them, with the
old folks moving through such incidents like well-meaning disturbers of fam-
ily peace, a spine-chilling realization comes to us: Ozu is not going to drama-
tize anything in this film; what we see is what he means. What begins slowly
to distinguish Tokyo Story from domestic drama, then, is precisely that it is
not drama. It focuses on the beings of human beings, not on the artificialities
or arrangements of plot. Ozu believes that his characters’ wishes, responses,
concealments, frustrations, and foibles are themselves more gripping, more
unhistrionically engrossing, than anything that could be carpentered, if only
the artist who presents them is fundamentally free of judgment, reveres the
complications of existence, and interferes in the motions of the lives before
him (and us) only enough, and with enough skill, so as to make those motions
seem to flow unimpeded.
This is a tremendous idea, and it raises the subject of scale. For every-
thing in the film is calibrated with such refinement that feelings are always
restrained but never lost—so much so that when near the end, after his wife’s
death, the old man gives his widowed daughter-in-law the old woman’s
watch as a keepsake and the girl cries quietly, the effect is of a tremendous
emotional climax. As it turns out, the warmest of the young people whom
the old couple sees in Tokyo is just this woman: their dead son’s wife. (Their
own children ship them off to the nearby seaside resort of Atami for a few
days, ostensibly as a holiday but really just to get rid of them for a while.) His
parents themselves understand that he was a difficult person to live with and
not the most admirable of fellows; therefore, they urge the still-young widow
to remarry and not to follow the usual custom of remaining a widow.

Book 1.indb 9 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 10 Chapter 1

Many have noted the symmetries—formal, narrative, thematic—in Tokyo

Story, and some comment on them seems apt at this point. Such symmetries
are important to Ozu but never become tiresome. For example, two pairs of
sandals outside a hotel bedroom door, precisely placed, show that two people,
en route through their lives together, are spending this particular night behind
that door. On a larger scale, Ozu balances sequences. To wit, at the start, the
parents go up to Tokyo to visit their children; at the end, the children come
down to Onomichi to see their parents. The hometown neighbor who stops
at the window in the beginning to wish the old couple bon voyage passes the
same window at the close and consoles the bereaved old man.
Perhaps most important among these symmetries is the following: In To-
kyo, the old woman and the widowed daughter-in-law have a scene alone
together, a moving one in which the old woman gives the younger a gift and
spends the night in her small apartment (on her dead son’s marital bed, next
to his widow), while the old man is out drinking with some friends from the
past. At the conclusion of the film, it is then the old man who has the scene
alone with the daughter-in-law, in which he gives her the gift of his dead
wife’s watch and tells her that the old woman said her night in the little apart-
ment was her happiest time in Tokyo. The last shot of Tokyo Story, like the
first, is a passing ship.

Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953)

Book 1.indb 10 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Yasujiro Ozu 11

But such symmetries can hardly be taken as explanations in themselves, as

symbols of the film’s intent. Like the symmetries in the novels of Jane Austen
or Charles Dickens, they almost seem, partly on account of their very number,
to be the artists’ way of warning us against symmetries—of telling us that
experience abounds in symmetries, but they do not by any means therefore
illuminate the ambiguities and darkness that lie beneath them. Note, too,
the signs of Americanization in the film: the box of soap flakes (Rinso), the
baseball uniform hanging on a clothesline, the Stephen Foster tune to which
the schoolteacher-daughter’s class of children sings Japanese words. These
repeated motifs, like the aforementioned symmetries, themselves appear sec-
ondary: unavoidable, perhaps, but not as a result proof that Tokyo Story is a
lament about the postwar changes in Japanese culture under the pressure of
Allied occupation.
Much more pertinent are the visual images of passage to which I referred
earlier and which buttress the idea of life’s passing, with all the ache and
(if we admit it) the relief that this implies. Out of the loins of these two old
people whom we see sleeping peacefully side by side came the children who
are now turned away from them, and we know that it will happen to the
children themselves, with their children. The old couple knows it, too, yet,
without saying so, are content to have had what they have had and to have
been part of the whole familial process. Still, even in this instance, Ozu may
be saying no more than that wistfulness about passage—time’s passage, life’s
passing—is only a human construct, and for this reason only human vanity, to
which nature itself, in all its force and facticity, is oblivious.
This brings me to Ozu’s use of space, not in its own existence as a fact
and force of nature, but as a subjective experience. Space, for Ozu, is neither
decor nor setting: It is what his characters see and pass through, have passed
through, and will pass through. Many have noted, for example, that he often
begins a shot before the characters enter and holds it after they leave (in what
the French call temps mort, or “dead time”). But Ozu does this not so much
to suggest that the world, imperturbable, surrounds the perturbations of its
inhabitants, as nearly to prove that the place in question has been brought into
existence by the expectation and fact of people’s entry into or visit to it—just
as a composer’s rests or held chords seem to have been brought into being by
the expectation and fact of the musical notes that surround them.
Michelangelo Antonioni himself often, and beautifully, integrated environ-
ment with characterization to show his characters as in part the products or
result of their world. With Ozu, however, I think that something like the re-
verse is true: Everything we see is determined by an intense, personal reaction
to the idea of space. Rooms, for instance, seem just large enough in Tokyo
to accommodate the people and objects which they, the people, have brought

Book 1.indb 11 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 12 Chapter 1

there to fill the space further. It is thus that boundary, sheer rectilinear bound-
ary, reveals itself as the quintessential mode of Japanese structure: of rooms,
of doorways, of corridors, all of them placed there by human beings.
Further evidence of this is represented by the fact that Ozu sometimes even
gives us a shot of a room or hallway we recognize but that has nothing to do
with the preceding scene or the one to follow. Still, men and women created
that room or hallway, and they have passed through it, will pass through it.
Often in Tokyo Story we see such men and women from a distance, people
who have nothing to do with the events we are following—yet people who,
through their own very being on a street or in a corridor beyond, help to de-
fine or delimit space for the characters in the foreground, as well as for them-
selves, in the background. In this way, Ozu tells us that, around and among
his people, is the physical world as they, and others, have organized it. If in
the process order has been brought out of chaos in the environment, external
order as these Japanese conceive it, it is at least a palliative for the internal
disorder, or inner mystery, that they (and we) cannot master.
The film itself does not pretend to master that mystery, either. Indeed, as
in the case of the symmetries I have already cited, Ozu seems to be warning
us against understanding Tokyo Story too quickly. Take the scene near the
end in which the schoolteacher-daughter and the young widow say good-bye.
“Isn’t life disappointing, though?” the teacher says, and the other woman
agrees. But this exchange is much too easily ironic to be taken as the point
of the picture; it could not represent Ozu’s whole view. In this film, we see
parents disappointed in their children, it’s true, but we also see children disap-
pointed in each other and with themselves. Still, disappointment in life is no
truer than anything else in life, and for that which is other than life, human
or otherwise, we can say nothing. So the conclusion of “disappointment” is
simply too small for Tokyo Story.
Let me elaborate. No such handy consolation as disappointment will serve,
for life may be disappointing, but it is also joyous, bitter, exhilarating, dis-
gusting, unbearable, and inestimably precious, among other qualities, and it
is all these things for everyone in the course of existence. And at the moment
when one of these qualities is present, it is unshakably true—only to be sup-
planted because no one attribute of life is more unshakably true than another.
In other words, everything is true, just as no one thing is wholly or solely true.
It is this view of the equivalence of responses, the conviction that no response
is any more or less true than any other, the knowledge that sorrow is as unde-
pendable as ecstasy as a summary emotion, that Tokyo Story moves toward.
The true point of Tokyo Story, then, the only point large enough for it, is
that it has no point—no quotable motto or moral to tag it with. A fine artist
at the height of his powers has made a film that avoids such neat answers,

Book 1.indb 12 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 Yasujiro Ozu 13

but, like life, Ozu scatters deceptive answers along the way as he proceeds to
nonresolution. If I had to choose one word to describe his method, it would be
“purity.” Like the Carl Theodor Dreyer of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928),
like the Robert Bresson of Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Ozu gives us the
sense that questions of talent and ambition have been settled or set aside, that
he is now self-centered in what can only be called a selfless way. Presently,
in Tokyo Story, he is placing on the screen the very least that will fulfill the
truth of what he has seen, of what he knows, of life. There is no brave con-
sciousness of integrity in this; as I state toward the start of the chapter, Ozu
is simply consecrated to serving life, simply—and proudly.
All these matters are summed up in the film’s title, which may seem pedes-
trian but resonates powerfully. I want to emphasize that the title in English
is an exact translation from the Japanese (Tokyo Monogatari). And it seems
to me finally indicative that Ozu called the film Tokyo Story, since it is nei-
ther in any intrinsic sense about Tokyo nor in any formal sense a story. Two
people do go to a place called Tokyo, but it could have been any other place
where space is being defined by more people than this couple are used to
seeing together in one location. Moving through the space of this world, the
old man and old woman help to define it for themselves. But even the space
through which they move on the way to their final destination is defined and
redefined, by others, as well as by themselves. When they finally arrive in
Tokyo, these two are surprised that it is so near their home; when they are
about to leave, it seems so far. Put another way, Tokyo is nowhere, and it is
everywhere.
The story, insofar as there is one in this film, is in a sense only a series of
confirmations, or one big extended confirmation: that everyone is smaller or
different from what we thought or expected, including ourselves, but that,
nonetheless, it is for the most part a privilege to share in this realization, a
privilege to be one of the only group of sentient beings in the universe, be-
ings who can imagine time and space and self. Moreover, the story in Tokyo
Story is ultimately the same as all other stories because, ultimately, all things
in it have passed, and it ends, spatially speaking, as all stories must end: in
stillness.
As far as Tokyo Story’s reputation among all other “storied” films goes,
the British journal Sight and Sound periodically conducts an international
poll asking critics to list their ten favorite fiction features ever made, and on
my list—along with several others—there is always Tokyo Story. I saw it for
the first time in 1971 in a Japanese retrospective at New York’s Museum of
Modern Art. And only in 1972 did the film have its first theatrical release in
the United States. I saw it again at that time. I’ve screened it several more
times over the intervening years; I reviewed it twice recently on DVD; and

Book 1.indb 13 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 14 Chapter 1

I’m happy, in retrospect, that it was, and is, on my list. My list aside, I’m
happy that this film exists, and that I was on its list. Even as Ozu’s gravestone
(which I once visited in Tokyo) is inscribed with only the character mu, so
too does Tokyo Story finally seem to be inscribed with this one character. It
means, or is usually translated as, “nothingness,” but mu suggests the nothing
that, in Zen Buddhist philosophy, is everything, which is all—or null—that I
have to say about Yasujiro Ozu and his Tokyo story.

FILM CREDITS

Tokyo Story (1953)

DIRECTOR: Yasujiro Ozu
SCREENPLAY: Yasujiro Ozu, Kogo Noda
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Yuharu Atsuta
EDITOR: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
MUSIC: Kojun Saitô
PRODUCTION DESIGNERS: Tatsuo Hamada, Itsuo Takahashi
COSTUME DESIGNER: Taizo Saito
RUNNING TIME: 136 minutes
FORMAT: 35mm, in black and white
CAST: Chishu Ryu (Shukishi Hirayama), Chieko Higashiyama (Tomi Hi-
rayama), Setsuko Hara (Noriko Hirayama), Haruko Sugimura (Shige
Kaneko), Sô Yamamura (Koichi Hirayama), Kuniko Miyake (Fumiko
Hirayama), Kyôko Kagawa (Kyoko Hirayama), Eijirô Tôno (Sanpei
Numata), Nobuo Nakamura (Kurazo Kaneko), Shirô Osaka (Keiso Hi-
rayama), Hisao Toake (Osamu Hattori), Teruko Nagaoka (Yone Hattori)

NOTES

1. Yasujiro Ozu quoted in Richard Roud, Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: The

Major Filmmakers, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking, 1980), 743.
2. Yuharu Atsuta quoted in Stanley Kauffmann, Distinguishing Features: Film
Criticism and Comment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 183.
3. Chishu Ryu quoted in David Desser, ed., Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 152.
4. Chishu Ryu quoted in Donald Richie, Ozu (1974; Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1977), 147.
5. Chishu Ryu quoted in Kauffmann, Distinguishing Features, 183.
6. Yasujiro Ozu quoted in Roud, Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 744.

Book 1.indb 14 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 2
Given Circumstances

The East Asian Cinema of Akira Kurosawa

A MAN FOR ALL CINEMAS

The genius of Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) was manifold throughout his

long career. Prodigally, prodigiously, he moved with ease, mastery, and style
from the most mysteriously interior to the most spectacular. Ikiru (1952) is
about a dusty civil servant in postwar Japan doomed by cancer; The Seven
Samurai (1954)—one of the great art works of the twentieth century—is a
historical epic about honor as a predestined anachronism. Contrasts from
his filmography could be multiplied: Stray Dog (1949) is a crime-detection
story; Kurosawa’s version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (1951) is so
atypical in style that it’s hard to believe the film was made between Ikiru and
Rashomon (1950)—itself a Pirandellian study, with somber overtones, on the
relativity of truth or the impossibility of absolutes; and Record of a Living
Being (1955) is about an old Japanese man who wants to migrate with his
large family to Brazil to escape the next atomic war.
Indeed, Kurosawa could be called a man of all genres, all periods, and all
places, bridging in his work the traditional and the modern, the old and the
new, the cultures of the East and the West. His period dramas, for example,
each have a contemporary significance, and, like his modern films, they are
typified by a strong compassion for their characters, a deep but unsentimental,
almost brusque, humanism that mitigates the violence that surrounds them,
and an abiding concern for the ambiguities of human existence. Perhaps the
most startling of Kurosawa’s achievements in a Japanese context, however,
was his innate grasp of a storytelling technique that is not culture-bound, as
well as his flair for adapting Western classical literature to the screen. No
other Japanese director would have dared to set The Idiot, Maxim Gorky’s

15

Book 1.indb 15 7/11/12 11:28 AM

 16 Chapter 2

Lower Depths (1957), or William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Throne of Blood,

1957) and King Lear (Ran, 1985) in Japan. (The intercultural influence has
been reciprocated: Rashomon directly inspired the American remake entitled
The Outrage [1964]; The Seven Samurai was openly imitated in the Holly-
wood movie The Magnificent Seven [1960]; the Italian “spaghetti Western”
A Fistful of Dollars [1967] was pirated from Yojimbo [1961]; and Star Wars
[1977] was derived from The Hidden Fortress [1958].)
But Kurosawa also adapted works from the Japanese Kabuki theater (The
Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, 1945) and used Noh staging techniques,
as well as music, in both Throne of Blood and Kagemusha (1980). Indeed,
he succeeded in adapting musical instrumentation not only from Noh theater,
but also from Japanese popular songs, in addition to Western boleros and
Beethoven. (Kurosawa remarked in 1980, in a Film Comment interview, that
his generation and the ones to follow grew up on music that was more West-
ern in quality than Japanese, with the paradoxical result that their own native
music can sound artificially exotic to contemporary Japanese audiences.1)
Like his counterparts and most admired models, Jean Renoir, John Ford, and
Kenji Mizoguchi, Kurosawa thus took his filmic inspirations from the full
store of world cinema, literature, and music.

KUROSAWA AND THE WEST

As for the suggestion, as a result, that Kurosawa was too “Western” to be a

good Japanese director, he himself always insisted on his simultaneous Japa-
nese and internationalist outlook. As he also declared in the Film Comment
interview, “I am a man who likes Sotatsu, Gyokudo, and Tessai in the same
way as Van Gogh, Lautrec, and Rouault. I collect old Japanese lacquerware,
as well as antique French and Dutch glassware. In short, the Western and the
Japanese could actually be said to live side by side in my mind, without the
least sense of conflict.”2 To be sure, along with other Japanese directors and
with Satyajit Ray (whose Pather Panchali introduced Indian cinema to the
West in 1955), Kurosawa’s films share a liability to remoteness in Western
eyes—in his case, not in style or subject matter, but in the performative de-
tails of gesture and reaction. Yet, his work is less affected by cultural distance
than that of most Asian directors.
Hence it was not by accident that the first Japanese director to become
known in the West was Akira Kurosawa, when Rashomon won the top prize
at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, together with a Special Oscar as Best
Foreign-Language Picture the same year. Up until then, although the Japa-
nese film industry had been enormously active, with high annual production

Book 1.indb 16 7/11/12 11:28 AM

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER VII
STEAM JET CONVEYORS

A method of removing ashes from boiler furnaces which has been

developed extensively in America is essentially a pneumatic system,
although steam is the conveying medium instead of moving air.
Steam is used because the apparatus is always in use on boiler
plants, from which steam can be taken as conveying medium. No air
compressor or other special plant is required. On the other hand, the
simple use of a connection from the steam main is a matter of very
little importance, and no check is ever made as to the amount of
steam so used, hence 99 per cent. of the users consider that the
steam jet costs practically nothing for “power” compared with a
compressor which would have a certain sized motor connected, and
could not escape attention as an additional power consumer.
Steam Consumption. Investigation into the actual consumption of
steam jets would often give very startling results, especially after the
plant had been in operation for some time and the nozzles had
begun to cut and wear. As proof of the waste of steam possible in
such a plant, it is interesting to note that Mr. David Brownlie, in a
paper on Automatic Stokers,[1] gave results of actual tests made on
steam jets as used in certain classes of stokers in which steam jets
are allowed to blow down the hollow furnace bars. These tests
showed that, whereas the makers estimated the steam consumption
of the jets to be about 2 per cent. of the boiler output, the tests on 80
plants showed a consumption varying from 0·5 per cent. up to as
much as 21·4 per cent. of the total output of boiler.
As further evidence of the waste of steam that can occur due to
neglect of the cutting effect on the nozzles, one American firm has
designed an ingenious warning or “tell-tale.” A small hole is drilled
almost, but not quite, through the nozzle. While the nozzle retains its
initial shape and size the apparatus acts normally, but as soon as the
small amount of metal covering the end of the hole has worn away,
the hole is exposed, and a certain amount of steam passes through
it to a steam whistle which blows continuously until a new nozzle has
been inserted in place of the one which is now worn so much as to
make it uneconomical in steam consumption.
Provided that means are taken to prevent waste of steam due to
worn nozzles, the steam jet conveyor is very serviceable and, being
flexible and convenient, it is very useful for the purpose for which it
has been developed.
The following estimated steam consumptions are given for what
they are worth; they are of comparative value in relation with the
power consumption on the “suction” scheme: One firm claims, in an
actual proposal for a plant to be erected in this country, a
consumption of 30 lbs. of steam per min. to deal with 150 lbs. of
ashes per min., or 4 tons per hr. This is approximately equivalent to
72 electrical h.p. for dealing with 4 tons of ashes per hr. A second
firm states that a steam jet plant dealing with 12 tons per hr. will
require 3,466 lbs. of steam per hr. at 130 lbs. pressure: this, if
passed into a modern steam driven generator, would produce over
130 h.p. hours. These figures indicate how variable are the
estimates of power required. Note.—The “suction” schemes for
wheat actually work out at slightly more than 1 h.p. per ton per hr. in
single-nozzle plants, and 1½ h.p. per ton per hr. in twin nozzle
plants.
Lay-out of Plant. The plant is usually designed on the following
lines: Immediately under the ash hoppers are funnel-shaped tee-
pieces fitted to a cast iron pipe laid on the floor, or preferably in a
small trench just below the ground level. These funnel inlets are
usually covered with a cap when not in use, a tight joint being
established by the “suction” in the pipe line. When used on
Lancashire boilers having no ash basement the ashes are raked
from under the furnaces on to the floor, and swept into the inlets
mentioned (see Fig. 25). Large pieces of clinker are broken by hand
until they enter the intake pipe, when they are immediately conveyed
through the rest of the system.
 Fig. 25.—Brady Steam Jet Ash Conveyor.

In all large boiler houses with a proper ash basement it is usual to

have a travelling clinker breaker, motor driven, which can be moved
on light rails under each ash hopper and over each intake. The
breaker receives all the ashes when released by the hopper valve,
crushes them to a suitable size and discharges them by gravity over
the intake funnels, whence they are transported to the ash tank or
hopper.
The method of creating the moving air currents is by passing
steam through specially designed nozzles which are placed at the
extreme end of the intake pipe, and force the air out of the pipe, thus
inducing a stream of air to enter at the intake openings, and carry
forward the ashes which have been fed into the pipe with the air.
When the underground pipe has to rise vertically to cross roads, etc.,
or to reach an overhead tank, it is usually found necessary to insert
“booster” jets to impart additional velocity to the ashes, which are
naturally retarded seriously in changing their direction at the bend or
elbow. Should circumstances necessitate many bends being
employed in the pipe line the number of “booster” jets has to be
increased, and the total cost of steam for operation is increased
seriously.
The capacity of the conveyor depends upon the volume of air
passed through the pipe in a given time, and the ashes must not be
slacked before handling, but must be handled either straight from the
furnaces or allowed to cool and then conveyed to the ash hopper.
An 8 in. pipe is the largest used, and this will handle approximately
8 tons of ash per hour. Any increase over this size of pipe
necessitates a consumption of steam which makes the scheme
impracticable.
The conveyor pipe may be run at any angle, elevation or level, and
therefore is not handicapped by the rigid straight line, point-to-point,
requirements of bucket elevators, skips, etc.
The abrasive action of ashes is well known, and when they are
travelling at the high speed necessary with this form of conveyor
they cause considerable wear at the bends and elbows in the pipe
line. To overcome this a special mixture of iron has been obtained,
which is extremely hard and wear-resisting. Steel is quite unsuitable
and ordinary cast iron is too soft for these conditions.
Steam Jets. The James Brady Foundry Co. (Chicago, U.S.A.)
state, in their Bulletin on this subject, that the special steam jet
elbows are usually placed at the top and bottom of a vertical riser.
The jet of steam from the nozzle enters the elbow directly in front of,
and parallel to, the face of a special wearing liner. This prevents or
reduces the wear on the liners, as the jet protects the liners from the
pounding action of the ash. A renewable sectional liner is provided of
specially hard metal at all points in which the material makes actual
contact with the pipe or fittings. These liners are interchangeable in
all elbows, and each individual liner can be turned end for end when
affected by wear.
 In cases where the length of horizontal run exceeds 125 ft. it is
necessary to supplement the primary nozzles by “booster” steam jets
to maintain the velocity of the air current.
Buffer Boxes. At the discharge end of the pipe line it is necessary
to insert a baffle or buffer box to take the impact of the ashes, and
thus prevent wear on certain parts that are not designed to stand up
to the destructive effects of the impact. The function of the box is to
bring the ashes to rest, so that they may fall by gravity into the ash
tank or on to the storage pile. When delivering into a tank it is very
essential to install a buffer box, as otherwise the velocity with which
the ashes enter the tank will pack them so tightly that they will not
discharge automatically through the valve or gate. The location of
the ash hopper can be wherever most convenient for loading the
vans, railway trucks, or barges, etc., but preference should be given
to a site which makes possible a pipe run with a minimum number of
bends.
One American firm of engineers, the Vacuum Ash and Soot
Conveyor Co., New York, have done away with the numerous steam
jets and the blowing effect produced thereby, and rely entirely on
suction by using a sealed ash tank and exhausting the container and
pipe system by means of a single steam jet injector built into the roof
of the ash tank, and discharging its steam directly into the air.
By this means it is claimed that the following advantages are
obtained: (1) No sand-blast effect, such as is inevitable when
blowing at high velocity. (2) No steam enters the ash tank and
consequently there are no condensation troubles. (3) Much less dust
is blown into the atmosphere as the steam is never in contact with
the dust. (4) Conveyor pipes are cleaner since no steam enters
them, as in “blowing,” and there is therefore no condensation, caking
and corrosion.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Inst. Mechanical Engineers Journal, March, 1920, p. 291.
 CHAPTER VIII
MISCELLANEOUS APPLICATIONS OF PNEUMATIC

CONVEYING

Pneumatic Despatch Tubes. The ordinary pneumatic conveyor

picks up material at one point and unloads it at another and
continues this course consistently, whereas the “pneumatic despatch
tube” is a conveyor of small articles enclosed in a special cartridge
which is built to fit the tube and which travels to and fro as required,
carrying a variety of articles, or if necessary, the same articles,
backwards and forwards between the same two stations or a series
of fixed stations.
The despatch tube thus constitutes an effective “mechanical
messenger.” One or more tubes are run between the points to be
connected, with a despatch and receiving terminal at each end, or if
necessary, a single line to operate in both directions can be
designed. The tubes vary from 1½ ins. to 4 ins. diameter, and they
are also made of oval sections up to 4 ins. × 7 ins.; rectangular tubes
have been installed in special installations, chiefly in telephone
exchanges for convenience in dealing with certain cards there
employed.
Tubes. The tubes are of lead and are usually encased for
protection against mechanical damage, and the erection is carried
out with great care so as to preserve the smooth interior. Joints
occur at intervals of 28 ft. or less, and are “wiped” with an ordinary
plumber’s joint over an internal mandril which is heated previous to
insertion in the tube. Air-tight joints and smooth interiors are
absolutely essential to a successful installation.
Carriers. The carriers or cartridges in which the material to be
transmitted is placed are made of gutta-percha covered at the ends
with felt. One end of the container is closed and the other end is left
open, but a “skirt” of felt surrounds the open end, and, as this is the
“trailing” end and the air pressure is behind it, the air forces open the
“skirt,” making a tight fit and preventing leakage of air past the
carrier. The nose of the carrier is usually fitted with a felt “buffer”
which also assists in making an air-tight fit. A carrier for a 2½ in. tube
is 6¾ ins. long and weighs empty about 3 ozs. Fig. 26 shows a large
carrier.
Methods of Working. Pneumatic tubes are worked either by air
above atmospheric pressure or by reducing the pressure below
atmospheric. In the pressure system the usual pressure is about 10
lbs. per sq. in. above atmospheric pressure, whilst in the suction
system the vacuum employed is equivalent to about 6½ lbs. per sq.
in.

Fig. 26.—Typical Lamson Intercommunication Carrier.

Also, the method of working may be either “continuous” or

“intermittent”; in the first system the air, either above or below
atmospheric pressure, is circulating continuously and the cartridge or
carrier is inserted into a stream of air already in circulation, whilst in
the “intermittent” system the power, either pressure or suction, is
admitted to the conveyor tube only after the carrier has been
inserted, and it is again cut off when the carrier reaches the end of
its journey.
To a great extent the success of a pneumatic tube system is the
speed at which it can transmit the message sent by this means. In
the “continuous” system, working above atmospheric pressure, the
speed is not so great as in the “intermittent” scheme, because the
pressure in the tube is the same in front of and behind the carrier,
which has to displace the air in front of it. In the “intermittent” system
the pressure is turned on after the carrier is in place, and the
advancing carrier has only to move the air at atmospheric pressure.
On the other hand, if suction is employed, the “intermittent” system is
slower than the “continuous” system because the air has to be
exhausted to a certain point before the carrier begins to travel. It is
true that it will begin to move as soon as the difference in pressure
amounts to a few ounces, but there is a distinct “time lag” compared
with inserting the cartridge into a tube continuously exhausted when
it starts off at practically full pressure and speed immediately.
The difference in time is stated by Kemp to be 3 per cent. longer
with “continuous” pressure, compared with “intermittent” pressure at
6 lbs. per sq. in.; the difference increasing to 6 per cent. when the
pressure is raised to 14 lbs. per sq. in. The average working speed
of these tubes is from 25 to 30 miles per hour.
Power Required for Operation. It is difficult to determine the
actual amount of power necessary to carry a cartridge through a
tube. Kemp’s Engineer’s Year Book states that, working at the
standard pressure of 10 lbs. per sq. in., the power required is
theoretically 3·35 h.p. for a 2½ in. tube, 1 mile long, but actual
experience suggests that at least 50 per cent. should be added to
allow for losses from various causes, making the actual power, say,
5 h.p. per 2½ in. tube per mile.
Pressure receivers or tanks are inserted between the pump and
the travelling tube to compensate for the impulses due to the
irregularity of the pumps and also to act as reservoirs furnishing
additional power during periods of abnormal working.
 The vacuum system takes less power (for a definite time of
transmission) than is required by the pressure method of working,
but local conditions always influence results considerably, and it is
inadvisable to give any definite figure as to the power required,
without actual knowledge of the system and conditions involved.
The air compressors are usually driven electrically, but they can, of
course, be operated by any other prime mover such as oil, gas, or
steam engines. It is economical to combine the pressure and suction
systems by arranging the air compressor to draw air from the
vacuum receiver into the compressor cylinders whence it is returned
to the pressure line.
Automatic valves keep the pressures in the pressure and vacuum
sides of the system within pre-determined limits. “Make up” air is
admitted by the automatic opening of an atmospheric valve when the
pressure side of the system is low and the vacuum side high, so that
the pump is deprived of sufficient air to operate the system efficiently.
Should the conditions become reversed, that is, a low vacuum and a
high pressure, then the pump is working against a high back
pressure, and this is reduced by the opening of an atmospheric relief
valve which remains open until the vacuum is restored to normal
pressure. This system is preferable to and more economical than the
use of two separate pumping and exhausting machines.
Elaborate and valuable tables of horse-power required by
compressors and of “transit times” for distances up to 4,500 yds. with
1½ in., 2¼ in., and 3 in. tubes are given in Kemp’s Engineer’s Year
Book.
The Lamson Tube Co., Ltd., have brought what was originally
invented as a means of conveying persons to a practical business
accessory, capable of saving a great amount of time by despatching
sketches, papers, small articles, money, etc., here, there, and
everywhere at the rate of 30 miles an hour.
The utility of these plants has long been recognised by banking
establishments, the General Post Office, large stores, factories,
newspaper publishing offices, etc. (see Figs. 27 and 28).
 In addition to the conveyance of messages and papers, they are
frequently installed to convey money and bills from the numerous
departments of a large store to the cashiers, thus saving time and
effecting economy in labour and floor space. One cashier can attend
to from 10 to 15 stations, or in small establishments all the stations
can be centralized around the book-keeper.
The installation of a power-driven plant is not essential, providing
that the service required is not too great. A foot power pneumatic
service is available and it is in use in many business establishments.
In this system the methods of transportation are similar to those in a
power plant, but the tubes are brought to a special cabinet 15 ins.
square by 2 ft. 6 ins. high, in which is mounted a foot-operated pump
of patented design without bellows or cords. The pump is operated
as and when the service is required, and there is no loss of any
description when the apparatus is not in use.
Pneumatic Tubes for Heavy Articles. It is interesting to recall,
especially in view of the proposed use of pneumatically-propelled
parcel-conveying trains by the G.P.O. in London, the proposal made
by Mr. Medhurst, in 1810, when it was suggested that a carriage
somewhat similar to the modern railway carriage should be moved
through a tunnel by pneumatic means. So long ago as 1667, Denin
Papin read before the Royal Society a paper entitled “A Double
Pneumatic Pump,” and definite mention of despatch tubes was made
in this paper.
Fig. 27.—Tube Central in Wholesale Drug House,
Distributing Orders to all Departments.
Fig. 28.—Lamson Distributing Station in well-known
Publishing House.
 In 1840 a pneumatic railway was actually built and worked
between London and Croydon, and in view of its success was
followed by others between Dalkey and Kingstown and between
Exeter and Plymouth. From this it will be seen that transportation by
pneumatic means is not modern in its application, and was originally
intended for very large tubes and weights, but modern development
has been toward small tubes and light weights.
The Vacuum Cleaner. The pneumatic transporting of material in
the form of dust has been brought to a very high state of perfection
during recent years and an enormous number of plants is now in
use, ranging from the hand-propelled machine to very large
stationary equipments.
Certain hand-propelled machines have been constructed in such a
way that the fan is directly operated by gearing from the running
wheels, and after a few moments a very considerable speed is
attained and the suction of the fan is used for lifting the dust from the
surface over which the apparatus is travelling.
Numerous designs of more powerful machines actuated by hand
bellows have been placed on the market and these possess the
advantage that they are independent of the use of power; but it is not
altogether easy to operate a machine by one hand and to manipulate
the nozzle with the other.
Electrically driven machines of almost numberless designs are
available. These usually employ a high speed fan of the single-stage
type, but a piston pump is embodied in some designs.
In the removal of dust the same principle applies as in the
conveying of heavier materials, i.e. it is not so imperative to obtain a
high vacuum as it is to have a large volume of air moving at high
velocity, hence the multi-stage turbine machine has distinct
advantages as regards weight of material moved and economy of
power.
The multi-stage exhauster consists of turbine wheels mounted on
a single shaft, the air being drawn into the first wheel, from this to the
second wheel and so on right through the machine, each wheel
increasing the suction on the intake end according to the total
number of wheels or stages. This style of machine is procurable in
either the stationary or portable type, and in both it is made in
various sizes, the portable machines ranging from 1/12 h.p. up to ½
h.p. for domestic purposes, and from 1½ to 3 h.p. on trucks for
cleaning electrical machinery, railway carriages, etc. Figs. 29 and 30
illustrate typical stationary and portable plants respectively.

Fig. 29.—Stationary Turbo-Exhauster with Dust Separator.

 Fig. 30.—Portable Turbo-Exhauster Driven by 1½ h.p. d.c.
Motor.

It is not generally recognized what enormous amounts of dust and

dirt may be extracted by these machines. From one London hotel a
½ h.p. cleaner removed 166 lbs. of dust from the carpets of the
public rooms only. On a cleaning test in a first class dining car on
one of the English railways 25 lbs. of dust was removed from 38 sq.
yds. of carpet. A rug in front of a lift in a London stores yielded 91
lbs. 1 oz. of dirt to a small machine.
The stationary plants are usually installed in the basements of
large office buildings, theatres, hotels, clubs, etc., and the whole
building is piped suitably, wall plugs or connectors being fitted to
which the staff make connection by flexible hose as and when
required. The free end of the flexible hose is fitted with one or other
of a series of special nozzles, the latter being adapted to the varying
requirements of everything in the room from floor to ceiling.
With the portable hand sets or even with the larger truck type, the
design is complete as a working unit; the equipment is used as
manufactured and there is little or no chance for the user to
endanger the working efficiency of the plant. In permanent plants,
however, as installed in hotels, etc., it is necessary that all points
previously mentioned regarding pipe lines, valves, junctions, bends,
etc., should be considered and acted upon.
The pipe lines should be too large rather than restricted in any
way, the suction flexible should be kept as short as possible, and if
necessary extra connections should be allowed rather than require
flexibles too long for use without “kinking.”
Fig. 31.—Suction Cleaning for Railway Carriage Cushions.
 Fig. 32.—Sturtevant Equipment for Office Cleaning.

Fig. 31 illustrates a stationary suction cleaning plant applied to

cleaning railway carriage cushions, and Fig. 32 shows a similar
installation in use in an office building.
Cleaning by Air Blast. By transferring the hose from the suction
side to the discharge, a suction cleaner may be used to blow dust
from machinery of all kinds and from places that are high up and
cannot be cleaned economically by suction. For cleaning electric
generators and motors by blast, these machines have many
advantages, and on account of the large volume of air handled they
are much to be preferred to the small-volume high pressure jet of the
ordinary air compressor often used for this purpose. With the
portable turbo-blower there is no danger of damage to the insulation
through high pressure, or through the carrying of moisture and oil
into the windings with the air jet.