Where the Eye Sits

What is measured

How long each shot holds comes from Cinemetrics, the shot-length database Yuri Tsivian started, now at the University of Chicago. Volunteers log a film by marking every cut. 38 of the 57 films on the list have a full log, and 9 more by the same directors were added where a listed film has none. Each row on the sheet is one log, named in the table below with the person who made it.

Where the camera sits has not been measured shot by shot for any of these films. Ozu’s height is documented. David Bordwell, in Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), finds his camera “clearly lower than is usual” from 1931 or 1932 on, used “consistently throughout a film”, so his rows sit at a kneeling adult’s eye. Bordwell also notes “Mizoguchi’s fondness for steep high angles”, so his rows sit above everyone’s heads; that is a habit, not a measurement. No source was found for anyone else, and their rows sit at a standing adult’s eye as an assumption. That is why none of Miyazaki’s flying reaches the sky band yet. The films where he flies most have no shot logs, and nobody has marked which of the logged shots are in the air. The first of the three squares after each title says which.

Whether the camera moves was tagged shot by shot by four loggers. Wei Zongliang did four Miyazaki films, D. van Sas did Ikiru, JBdV did Cruel Story of Youth and The Human Condition, and Paul Monticone did The Crucified Lovers. Bordwell writes that Ozu’s camera movements “persist until Equinox Flower (1958)”, so his five later films are drawn still on that authority. Every other row is flat because its movement was never recorded.

Shots with nobody in them were counted by Mohsen Nasrin for seven films and tagged by Feikens for Drunken Angel. Those shots are left as bare paper. So are the intertitle cards in two silent Ozu films whose loggers tagged them.

What the logs show

Mizoguchi holds a shot longer than anyone here. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum averages 59 seconds a shot and spends 88% of its running time in shots over half a minute; its longest runs 6 minutes 21 seconds.

After the war Ozu cut faster. Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story average 8.7 to 10.5 seconds a shot; Good Morning, Late Autumn, The End of Summer and An Autumn Afternoon each average 6.9, and their shot lengths vary less. His silent films were quicker still, 4 to 5 seconds.

In Tokyo Story the 58 shots with nobody in them come in 34 short runs, about one every three minutes. An Autumn Afternoon opens on 19 of them in a row, 1 minute 47 seconds before anyone appears.

Kurosawa’s late epics do not hold longer on average. Kagemusha and Ran average 11.1 and 10.8 seconds a shot, quicker than Ikiru or High and Low. Kagemusha does hold his longest shot on the sheet, at 6 minutes 16 seconds.

Miyazaki cuts every 5 seconds or so. In Wei Zongliang’s logs the camera moves in 17% to 30% of his shots, most often in a travelling shot.