PROBLEMS OF POETICS 13. Mysterious Man 14. The Family Has Three Sons and Two Daughters out prone on a hovering magic carpet that rises or drops a few inches or feet every time the shot changes. Probably this is too great a price to pay for retaining a concept that has outlived its usefulness anyhow. Late one night, at the home of Daisuke Ito, Ozu drifted out into the garden and set a sake bottle on a rock. He crouched down and exclaimed, 'This low position is great! The sake bottle is precisely the position of the lens and the position one meter behind it is mine. This is exactly it. Absolutely mine. I'd never let anyone sit in this position, the position I've created. You understand.' When his taxi came for him, he was still repeating, 'That stone - that is my position, Ito, and you know it!'24 While we cannot hold directors to all they say under the influence of drink, Ozu was not idly boasting. His camera position cannot be explained as simply a Japanese film convention. Of course in Japanese cinema characters often sit on the floor, and this has certainly encouraged many directors to lower their framing accordingly. (In this respect, Mizoguchi's fondness for steep high angles sets him somewhat apart.) But I can find no films that use Ozu's low height before he adopted his characteristic approach sometime during 1931-32. His camera position is clearly lower than is usual, and he uses it consistently throughout a film. Other directors might include such shots sporadically, and all the evidence I can find suggests that when they do, they are usually imitating Ozu. For example, Gosho's Dancing Girl of Izu utilizes such framings occasionally, as does Mysterious Man (fig. 13), made by Ozu's pupil Sasaki. In Ie ni sannan niji ari (The Family Has Three Sons and Two Daughters, 1943), an Ozu-like shot of children is followed by an utterly atypical framing of an adult (figs.14, 15). Yamanaka uses the low height consistently throughout Humanity and Paper Balloons (1936), but not in his Tange Sazenyowa: Hyaku-man ryo no tubo (Pot Worth a Million Ryo, 1935). There is every reason to think that the later film's framing derives from his detailed knowledge of the work of his close friend. Finally, we must not forget that Ozu's crew and fellow directors were as baffled by his stylistic choice as critics are today. Again and again, directors, cinematographers, and journalists asked him why he chose this camera height, and they seem never to have gotten a straight answer. The evidence clearly indicates that Ozu's low camera position is unique, both in Western and Japanese cinema. We cannot be sure where this camera position came from, but Ozu, an amateur photographer, may have sought to create a filmic analogy for the view through a twin-lens reflex camera. No matter what is filmed, the photographer holds such a camera down at waist or chest level, and the filmed object looms correspondingly higher in the image.25 If this is the source, it would add an extra dimension to Ozu's stylistic appropriation of Western 'ways of seeing'. In any event, the question of the purpose of the low camera setup remains. Instead of asking 'who' the camera represents, we ought to ask how this framing functions and what effects it has. And we ought not to expect that its functions necessarily create explicable meanings. Meaning is only one effect of form and style, and not always the most important. One major consequence of Ozu's decision is its sheer novelty, a factor not to be despised in the history of art. More than in most countries, the Japanese director was encouraged to develop an idiosyncratic visual style. Kazuo 15. The Family Has Three Sons and Two Daughters 78