In praise of boredom and the legacy of a tradition in contemporaneity : Mu, Ma and Yasujiro Ozu

Abstract

In the early 1970s, Paul Schrader, speaking on film, identified a specific type of work, which he referred to as transcendental, in which tedium or boredom played a constitutive role. In Schrader’s opinion, this ability to construct – to build a relationship between the film and the spectator – using a supposed “counter-action” is a tried and trusted part of the work of several filmmakers. The Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu is a member of this small group. The architect Kengo Kuma, also Japanese, alluded later to his own profession, to the advantages of treating boredom as a process of the rooting of an identity and of us returning that identity in an inventive system of growth. Whilst Kuma seeks a path towards redemption through the conscientization of boredom, Schrader sees the transcendental as a cinematographic style that precisely uses the boring or every day as a means of engaging the spectator. This chapter, using examples of the cinema of Ozu and concepts that are inherent to Japanese traditional culture, such as mu (無) and ma (間), aims to be a short reflection on a particular outlook inherent in architecture and in film-making, where boredom would seem to be an operational “tool” that can provide a path to a future.