Time And Space,Life And Poetry Of Camera Language

Yasujiro Ozu and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are not driven by breathtaking plots and magnificent scenes but rather by revealing remarkable truths beneath the minutiae of family life and creating exquisite films of simplicity and restraint. Notably, they portray a rigorously simplistic style that amounts to one of the most profound visions of familial life on earth. Since the essentials of the good life are distilled by the two directors from small stories and smaller moments in the microcosmic society of their masterpieces, the audience always equates their films with tea, the taste of which still lingers on the tip of tongue long after you finish the last drop. Nowadays, Hollywood melodramas prevail, yet YaOzu and Hou have respectively made great contribution to the promotion of film art by sticking to their peculiar ideas on film, their distinctive narrative style, clear and concise lens language, and unique aesthetic sentiment, by focusing on the nuances of emotions and meticulously observing the lives of characters.This paper intends to analyze Ozu and Hou’s idiosyncratic styles of the Orient in terms of the three basic film-making steps—script writing, shooting and editing, film language as well as the directors’ unique use of space and time. The typical feature of the two directors’ films is the use of the fixed long take, but they vary from each other in the using. Ozu employs simple shots to create subtle and delicate stories. Just as the Chinese character"无"(means voidness)inscribed on his tombstone embodies existence. Time stagnates in the void space, leaving the audience in deep meditaion. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long shot took a wait and calm position. He deliberately alienates the history and takes no position in it which is the integration of Eastern introspection and concise, as well as Western objectiveness and alienation.The author analyses and studies the two directors’ texts from the above-mentioned three-step prospective like the creation of the script, theme and structure,actors and performers,the emotion of the film,the camera settings,scenery shot and still object.