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The script of Tokyo Story (1953), held together by a piece of string, written on cheap, low-quality sheets of now-faded straw paper, consists of a hundred and twenty-four pages, ready to be broken into pieces just by a touch. Over forty years since the script was written, to this writer, who was not yet even born at the time when Ozu died in 1963, this physical fragility seems all the more daunting, because although forty-some years have passed since it was made, the film itself still stands to be seen, despite the loss of the "original" negative in a fire.Brittler than a film, a script is designed as a blueprint meant to be abandoned later, once the film is completed. Tokyo Story is no exception. Not a few of the memos, records, sketches, notes, signs and letters written on the script are totally indecipherable, or at least hard to read today. Some have become illegible, some faded, and all of them, this jumbled, blurred series of signs, reveal the ambiguous character of a script a blueprint turned into a trace left by a film.
This transition from a blueprint to a trace is made in conjunction with the shifts that occur during the ongoing production. All of the notations and scribblings left by Ozu which can be seen on top of any random page of the printed originalÑletters, his own system of code-like signs peculiar to his working system , drawn-in lines, and sometimes storyboard-like sketches must in principle correspond in some fashion, to some stages of the production: location scouting, shooting, watching the daily rushes, editing, mixing, etc.. It is nevertheless difficult to pick out one scribble from another, or rather, one sign from another. For instance, eye-catchingly large red checks found on each page normally indicate the end of shooting of the page on which they appear. Yet, not a few of them are drawn in twice, sometimes in blue or by pencil. What might this inconsistency mean? One might explain it away in terms of reshooting, that the blue or pencil overruled the original red, as simple as that. But the very fact that so many pages contain only one check, usually in red, and that there is no page which contains more than three checks makes this explanation rather suspect. The point is, when there are two marks, one is prior to the other, but the meaning of checking twice remains, in this case, uncertain.
In what order and for what purpose did Ozu write down what kind of notes or signs when he scribbled on the script? For anyone who would want to clarify, or even think through, the process of the production of Tokyo Story, this is the first problem that he or she will confront. The next part of this essay will first focus on how we might classify the notes left by Ozu through the entire production of the film. In other words, the aim of this part of the essay is how we might establish some simple guidelines which will contribute to an understanding of the composite of various signs. In the last part, I hope to show the importance of the script of this film not just as a blueprint or a trace, but as a crucial key to the processes of production which enables us to see the film under different aspects when we see it again on a screen.
II
In the script of Tokyo Story, Ozu uses various writing instruments including pencil, colored pencil and ink-pen. Since there seems to be a systematic use of the different utensils, we will look first, briefly, at the ways he uses each instrument.
Pencil
There are three kinds of information drawn in with pencil. First is mark designating the number of the shot (the division between shots) that would be drawn in before shooting. For instance, on page sixty-seven, the three characters played by Chishž Ryu, T™no Eijir™ and Toake Hisao meet in a small Japanese restaurant to drink together after not seeing each other for a long time. The three of them are sitting around a table talking rambunctiously, in the kind of scene which often plays a part in Ozu's films. The shot numbers for the scene are drawn in a straight line like a string of beads, which indicates to us that before the shoot began, Ozu had already thought through the arrangement of the shots of the character he would photograph. The reason we know this was done before the shoot, is that within the shot numbers written in pencil, there are a few red checks written in. However, it is not the case that all of numbers indicating shots or cuts are written in pencil. There are often cases in which they are written in pencil, but we can hazard that these are marks written in during the shoot. For instance, at the end of page thirty-seven, a scene is plotted out where Nakamura Nobuo is heading up the stairs to the second floor of the store, to invite the old couple to go to the public bath with him, and only shot #9 is written in red pencil, where the rest are plain pencil. The next shot, the second half of a shot-reverse-shot setup, shows Sugimura Haruko getting up and leaving the store, while the camera follows her, and the next shot of Nobuo going up the stairs holding a towel is taken on an axis diagonal to the straight line connecting the first two shots. Indeed, the hook-shaped line in red pencil found just below the notation #9 tells us that this was improvised on the set and added in.Next, pencil was used to write down memos or notes while on the set during a shoot. I have already mentioned how pencil was used to draw rough sketches of composition and the blocking out of actors (see, for example, pages 14, 19 and 61), and other occasions show the changes or additions to dialogue. One example is the scene at the beginning where Murase Zen finds his desk moved out into the hall, and complains to his mother. In the script, the only thing written is "hey, where am I supposed to study?" but underneath the line, "But I have an exam tomorrow..." is written in in pencil, by which it is obvious that the dialogue was modified and the new line was added. In addition to dialogue changes, pencil is also used to indicate changes or additions to directions for mise-en-scne. Staying on the same page, when Miyake Kuniko shouts out as she goes down the stairs the line, "you can study anywhere!," she is not merely going down the stairs, it is written in she go down the stairs "holding a feather-duster." In the same way, it is indicated that Ryu Chishž should be talking "while taking off his coat," after he is ushered to the second floor of his eldest son'' house (page 13), and similarly when Sugimura Haruko questions the elderly couple about their surprise return to Tokyo from Atami, it is written in that she should be descending the stairs "holding a fan" (page 60).
One more kind of information which is written in in pencil is things written in after having seen the rushes of the film after a day's shoot was finished, or during the process of editing, when adding sound and music (indicated by the written-in letter "M"). These include, for example, the number of feet in a shot, drawings of the landscape of Onomichi that will appear at the beginning and near the end of the film (pages 1, 103, 109). However, it is not always necessarily the case that shots corresponding to these story-board like pictures will actually appear in the film that we see today in front of our eyes. The shot of the pier appearing at the beginning of the film is not found in the film. Nor is the corresponding shot to be found of the long-distance shot of the temple which appears on page 61 of the script. It is possible to surmise that these pictures are the traces of the process of considering alternative kinds and arrangements of the landscape footage to be added in, and the same thing can be said of scribblings regarding sound. In the scene where Hara Setsuko invites the elderly couple to her apartment and has food delivered from a nearby soba-ya (page 49), the telegraphic prose notation of "train enters" indicates the addition of sound, and indeed the spectator can hear the sound of a train whistle as if from faraway. On the other hand, following the funeral, when Ryu Chishž learns that this is the day that Hara Setsuko is leaving to go back to (page 107), the script notation indicates the honk of a steamship whistle, which is changed, in the film, into the putt of an engine; similarly, where the same post-production sound of the honking steam-whistle is scheduled to come in on page 106, in fact no sound at all occurs in the film.
Fig. Script of Tokyo Story(1953),p.106-107,Ryu chishu and Hara Setsuko at the Dawn of Onomichi
Ink-pen
Deciphering the temporality of when the ink-pen scribblings were written into the script of Tokyo Story is not as vexing as deciphering the marks written in in pencil. Whether it's a mark indicating landscape footage to be added in (page 57), number of film feet (page 99), the name of the popular song floating through the background at the ryokan in Atami (56), there is little doubt that they are all marks added in after shooting was completed. We also know this from seeing the ink-pen marks written in over the pencil scribblings that were written in during the process of shooting (page 49), and in the case of ink-pen marks added in, and there are a number of circumstances worth investigation that each of this series of revisions calls our attention to. For instance, take the scene where Ryu Chishž and Higashiyama Chieko take the "Hato-bus" tour of famous Tokyo sights (pages 41-42), all of a sudden a cheerful music blares out and the passengers on the bus begin to jounce up and down in unison, in rhythm to the music. We can hazard this strangely unforgettable scene was easily the most hard-to-coordinate in terms of the location shots, but as far as we can see from the shooting script, it doesn't seem to have been included at that point. We might find it surprising that his scene was composed in a scant nine shots, and indeed according to the ink-pen marks that were written in in the interval of what we assume is the editing stage, it was in fact planned as eleven shots, and during production the shots 3 and 4 were omitted. There are other similar cases where we can see on the script ink-pen marks which overrule a part of the script which would to have been plotted out, marking on what changed on the set during actual production. One example occurs on page 117, where Hara Setsuko, who is about to go back to Tokyo, is standing in the entrance of her parents' house, bidding her last farewell to Kagawa Ky™ko, as Kagawa goes off to school. In the script, a smeary hard-to-read pencil mark incidents the adding-in of a shot, and over it is written a red line, over which later the contents of the shot were written in succinctly in ink-pen.
Colored Pencils (Red and Others)
Of the things scribbled into the script of Tokyo Story, among most the most eye-catching and often the most difficult to decipher are the marks made with colored pencils. In any case, from what we can guess, in the case of the things inscribed in yellow or blue above the lines of dialogue at the top of the script, different shots with marks of the same color indicates that the character in question should be shot using the same composition (page 112). Or in the case of the red pencil, most often used of all the colors, even though the earliest colored notations might be red, or blue, or anything, the final mark of completion is made in red. Among these red marks is a huge "X" crossed over each page, which, as I said earlier, indicates that particular part of the shooting has been completed, but what is going on in the case where there are both red and blue "X" marks on the same page (page 72)? The first plausible answers we might light on are that one is a retake, or that they are both "okay takes," one of which will be later eliminated while the other stays in the film. However, this didn't seem satisfactory, as sometimes as on page 68 there will only be a blue "X," or as on page 12, there will be two red "X" marks.Of course it is the case that the division of labor of these red and blue pencils will not be respected without exception, and if we are to consider this in the context of the whole problematic of what the reading of a script brings to the re-viewing of a film, by looking at the differences in the uses of these writing utensils, we can tell distinctions between what happened before and after the stages of preparation, pre-production, shooting, post-production, and editing, and how the different parts of each stage of production may have shifted in relation to each other, over the processes of production. Which is to say, because there is a cycle that happens over each day of production of tinkering with the following day's production while filming one day's work, or writing down memos while watching the rushes of one day's shooting. For instance, there is a difference between the sequence of shots you plan for in the writing stage, and what you actually do when in the throes of production and rethink things as you are doing them. This being the case, first off, pencil scribblings appear in the script in all of these stages of production, but over-ruling these pencil marks are not only the ink-pen marks I mentioned above, but as we see for instance on page 68, there are traces of eraser marks and marks in blue marking off the shots, as a rule we can surmise these are the traces of the first stages of each of these stages of production. Then, sometimes blue and on occasion yellow scribblings are newer than the pencil marks, but as we know from looking at red "X" drawn over the blue marks with the shorthand "A-C," indicating cut-on-action, on page 70, the blue marks are older than the red marks. In the case of the storyboard-like continuity drawings of the landscape footage shots I mentioned earlier, first they are circled with blue pencil, and then stricken off with a red "X" (see page 109). The ink-pen scribblings are not used in the stages of preparation or shooting, but are used in the phases of writing things down as memory aids after shooting, or as aids to help during the process of editing. Lastly the red colored pencil aside from the lines drawn carefully with a ruler to separate the shots from each other on the script, are used to show things that changed during shooting. In accordance with this, for instance, on page 209 of the script, where the number of feet in the shot was originally indicated in ink-pen, the corrected amount is overwritten in red pencil.
Needless to say there are exceptions to these general guidelines. To cite only one example, as the number of feet is written in ink-pen on page 114, we can surmise it was written at the editing stage, but corrected in pencil. But as since I stated in the beginning, what I am trying to establish here is not just a mechanical matching for decoding the script, but rather a method of interpreting what and how each of these changes might mean in terms of the process of production, I propose looking at a series so each of these "exceptions" to get a better sense of that whole process. The most important thing to keep a focus on is exactly how a new object came to be created in the interval between the plain shooting script and the final product on the screen. This means thinking through how the script exists as the leftover traces of the film, and looking at the shifts in these conditions of production might lead us to discover another Tokyo Story. What might this kind of re-viewing imply?
III
In the hundred and twenty-four pages of the script of Tokyo Story, there is a variety of writing instruments and different writing scriptsÑÑ from circles to smudges to re-written lines of dialogueÑÑ and I briefly alluded to the fact that many of these scribblings are difficult to read in any definitive way. But conversely, the consecutive, regulated images we see on the screen turn out to be highly complicated and overdetermined when we look at the script, and can be read that way. As one example, for instance, we could consider the kind of cut-on-action that Ozu frequently used for the purposes of creating continuity. Although the technique that creates it is hardly registered by the spectator, it is specified by the small "a-c" that is written in on the script. To speak in terms of Tokyo Story, we might immediately recall the scene where Higashiyama Chieko goes to take her grandson to play on the riverbank, and there is a cut of her crouching down to squat on the ground which moves from an extreme long-distance suddenly to a close-up. When we look at the script notation to see how the technique of using character movement to suture together two shots is notated, we begin to think that something more complicated is going on that just plain continuity editing. As I described regarding the role played by pencil- notations, there are frequently added notations in the script that affect aspects of mise-en-scne, and most of these turn out to be directions which describe very minute and calibrated movements: Miyake Kuniko descending the stairs holding a feather-duster, Sugimura Haruko entering the store "holding a fan," Ryu Chishž in a series of movements "picking up a sake bottle" and offering it to his interlocutor, "taking out his watch" from a drawer and "winding it," (page 120), and sitting down while "taking out a fan". Of course, these movements often serve as the impetus for starting, or putting a space in, a conversation, or alternatively, as a means for introducing movement into the whole frame through the introduction of visual rhythm into a scene. This is supported by the way the notations of "fan," "stop," "move fan," "stop" written in on pages 92 and 93 function in tandem with the dialogue through movement. In instances such as this, as when Hara Setsuko begins to fan herself as a lull comes in the conversation, talking to the elderly couple, or in the way that the dramas of glances transpire through the direction "nod eyes" while drinking sake (page 68) or "lower head," "raise eyes," or "Hara raise eyes," while talking, perhaps even go as far as to articulate the emotions of the characters. However no matter much directorial intervention there might be, even if a fan is a prop you would naturally expect to see in the summer, the notations applying to these scenes are strikingly different. How could this be? Most of Ozu's directions pertain to a character grasping something in his or her hands, especially when shots are linked together by cutting on action. For instance, in the case of the place where the notation "lower eyes" occurs on page 118, it is the occasion of the last conversation between Hara Setsuko and Ryu Chishž as she leaves for Tokyo. In fact she does not simply just lower her eyes, but she begins to fold the laundry, which she had put aside earlier, just as her neighbor did in an earlier scene when Hara Setsuko Hara went to visit her neighbor and borrow a bit of sake for her father in law. Right before this notation "lower eyes" in the script, as is indicated in the script, Ryu Chishž sits down and Hara Setsuko sits down. However, Ozu does not cut on action at the point where she sits, but rather, where she lowers her eyes and picks up the laundry. And the action of Hara Setsuko picking up the laundry corresponds exactly to the action of Ryu Chishž picking up the fan, which he did just after he sat down. Needless to say, the other cut on action occurs at the moment Ryu Chishž picks up his fan. Similarly, in the scene where Hara Setsuko says good-bye to Kagawa Ky™ko, a cut on action occurs at the moment when someone picks up something, rather than on the more conventional moment of someone siting down. The characters sit down one after the other in the scene, but the cut on action occurs at the moment when Kagawa Ky™ko picks up her books and puts them in her bag, after sitting down.As we have just seen, because the action of picking up or grasping something happens so frequently in Tokyo Story, it can be said that this kind of movement is very singular in Tokyo Story because of seeing the script notations. These kind of actions are not only apparent in movements one can see on the screen, but also in the use of dialogue and props. One example is the place where "bandage" is written in, Yamamura So's line "hey, give me a bandage!" Or, alternatively, where the parasol of the elderly couple a parasol altogether inappropriate for city slickers is consistently forgotten somewhere and retrieved again. To call attention to scenes of this phenomenon, such as the movement where Ryu Chishž picks up his cup of sake and moves it toward his mouth, or when his eldest son "picks up" his bags and goes upstairs, it is not to say that Ozu was always conscientious about matching on action. The technique of cutting on action is conventionally used to naturalize movement to the spectator. "Hide what the spectator most wants to see," in Ozu's words, and it is true that it is not likely that there are many spectators lured to movie theatres to watch someone just pick up an object. Or it could be said that it is Ozu who is hiding something he is reluctant to reveal to spectators. It remains uncertain the reason that Ozu so persistently and distinctively cleaves to scenes which show the movement of the film through the movement of small objects, but at least on this point, and based on what we know from reading the script notations, on re-viewing, it is certain that Tokyo Story once again becomes an enigmatic story.
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