12/23/16
Tokyo to me felt like a dream, like you pick up an old piece of paper, on which is written your ambitions/outlook for the future, but you don’t remember at all having written them.
being lost in memories—your own memories, is a curious and dangerous thing; to lose subjectivity, impossibly, in something which in itself belongs, whose very definition includes possession, or being possessed.
Wender’s position as coming from Ozu to Tokyo, and from the present to Tokyo, future of the cinematic image, the image is a past for the narrating voice located in the present.
It was not until I was a boy in the subway station, a boy who wouldn’t take a single step further, that I understood why Tokyo felt like a dream to me. It was because I had encountered Tokyo so intimately and so frequently through Ozu’s films, long before I actually managed to go there myself..
again, the dual impression of a city, of confused/multiple temporal subjectivities, encountering it through films—images through the eyes of others, namely of Ozu, the subject in question, and encountering it through your own eyes, and revisiting it since from the camera ‘eyes’ that you don’t remember.
Another image presented itself. One that no longer belonged to me.
de-privatization of memory with cinema? possession; or was this image ever yours truly, given that it was shot with classic Ozu styled height and lens
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