It is simple enough to understand the difference between the foreground and the background in a novel or a film. “Pride and Prejudice” has a background of small villages and manor houses and smaller homes who at least have a few servants, as well as roads to London and comfortable places there in which people can live, while the foreground, the action of the story, concerns how young people of various stations of life pursue courtship and marriage. That is the adventure or story of the novel, even though by the time Jane Austen does his last and best novel, “Persuasion”, the foreground of the story is about love lost and then regained has also changed its background in that a class situation dominated by property and station is transmuted into social position dominated by wealth. Sometimes, there is a novel or film preoccupied with the background rather than the foreground. Tolstoy shows the social life of upper class Russia in both “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina”, the characters appealing enough but not highly distinctive. Pierre, in “War and Peace”, is the type of someone who doesn’t belong, useful as a companion to go with and elucidate battlefields, while Levin, in “Anna Karenina”, is a type of person trying to be progressive by becoming reactionary, he becoming a bit more human when he notices that he is old enough so that his teeth are beginning to rot. (I guess there were few dentists.) The same focus on background also applies to “Gone With the Wind”, a way of life overturned and ended after what was its brief flourish, the author making believe, as it was for historical consciousness, a way of life that had lasted for only a few generations from the time when the plantations were established and the destruction of the South brought about by the war. Enough figures populate the present so that the background is explored. The same is true with much greater effect in James Gould Cozzens’ much underappreciated “Guard of Honor” where a dashing World War II Air Force officer is tested as a leader, the foreground, when the real drama is how his air base, as an organization, measures up to adapt to changing circumstances. The background, not the foreground, is the issue.
Even more complex for a reader or an audience is to see the two, foreground and background, changing simultaneously without asking which one changed the other. For all his atmospherics, I think that Dickens makes the foreground have the upper hand. The stalwart and cleareyed even if illiterate Noddy Boffin in “Our Mutual Friend” will craft his life despite the fact that his circumstances suddenly made him wealthy. He had a clear moral temperament to guide him. He was a man that in a later time would be considered “inner directed”, knowing his moral and emotional compass while others were more or less gifted with that same nature. Modernism, from on, returns to making the background more important, Bloom’s trip through Dublin more about Dublin than Bloom, however much readers see how tangled a person the protagonist can be, and so the opposite of James Fenimore Cooper protagonists whose simplicity and straightforwardness allows the reader to focus on the background. Sometimes, in very great works of art, both foreground and background are very strong: both Huck Finn and the river, and Ahab and whale hunting.
I muse about this matter because of re-viewing Yasujiro Ozo’s great film masterpiece, “Late Spring”, which shows both foreground and background each changing, the two spheres as very different from one another and the intersection between the two apparently very difficult to appreciate. The background is Japan changing after the Second World War (the movie was made in 1949) and the foreground is concerned with a daughter reluctant to marry who finally decides to do so. Rare is so subtle a weaving together of foreground and background so that the protagonists will not think the soap opera events are impinged by history in that history cannot make much difference to eternal things having to do with fathers and daughters (which was the title of the novel on which the movie was based.) The permanent and the transitory, the existential and the cultural, are juxtaposed and the viewer will sort out how the two transact, as happens in real life, where I wonder my memory of the boys coming back to the neighborhood after the war was just a taste of the times, like noticing that you could look into bar windows so as to see early television sets, or had something deep about them, the young veterans creating a middle class before my eyes. Ozu makes the audience wonder in that he is a kind of existentialist in history, eternal things in a particular concatenation of forces, something very similar to what Sartre was also doing at about the same time.
Film critics understandably emphasize the background of “Late Spring” because it is filmed and set just four years after the end of the Second World War and Japan is undergoing tremendous change as it shifts ever more quickly modern even though the emergence of Japan as a modern rather than a traditional society had already been regarded among all observers as spectacularly swift, a feudal like society that had become a military power in less than fifty years, a place that had modernized by adopting the model of government found in Wilhelmine Germany and given to industrial expansion as if it had invented the Protestant Ethic. The heroine opens the movie by wearing a kimono while she and her friends do a tea ceremony, but the reader is taken aback at how she then changes into fashionably modern western dress so as to go shopping to nearby Tokyo. She seems free in that she can go about without a chaperone and that she takes long bicycle trips with a young man who works with her father, a scholar of European classical music, and her friends thought that she and the young man would marry but she later learns that the young man is engaged with someone else. They were just good friends, no hint of romance, which is a puzzle, as that indeed becomes, but at first seems just a part of the new female liberation. The heroine also has a friend who is a divorcee and makes her living as a stenographer capable of handling both Japanese and English. These women are no shrinking violets, stereotypically blushing and retiring. There is also a continual contrast in the background between the present and the past. There are Coca Cola signs and trams where men and women mingle and a tall university building where her father works. The ground floor of the house she shares with her father has mats on which to settle but the second story, where the daughter lives, has tables and chairs in the Western fashion.
Against this backdrop of a changing scenery is the soap opera of a daughter who is reluctant to marry even though everyone is advising her to do so, the viewer more interested in that quirky and distinctive moment of history, which Ozu renders as having everyone remarkably cheerful, with no bitterness about the war, the appeal of all the characters as decent people a hallmark of Ozu’s moviemaking. After all, everyone has to live someplace at a time and place, and so Ozu is a documentarian making available to the viewer an observation of the times for their peculiarities while moving along a melodrama as happens when a Western shoot ‘em up is an excuse for scenes of the great outdoors. The background is quaint and distinctive but the story that unfolds in its present could be anywhere, and rather pedestrian, or so it seems.
Why the daughter is reluctant to marry, which is the main story line, only gradually becomes clear. She had only slowly recovered from her illness from the time of the war and so that might have delayed marriage, but she has now, in her late twenties, become a charming and modern woman. She says to friends that she thinks marriage disgusting and indecent, but that is passed off as a joke or exhibiting a modesty which will not sustain itself when she marries. She declares, reluctantly, to her father, that she would like to stay at home with him, attending to his food and clothing and amenities, rather than go off into life. So she is too attached to her father, however amenable the two of them are, and so he offers her a long speech about how marriage is difficult and is slowly built after a struggle, something many fathers may say to reluctant daughters. There is no question of incest, just amiability that suits both of them but which should be overcome in the name of the succession of generations. After all, he is old and could die and he plans to marry someone and so will have a companion who will look after his needs.. People have to move on. That is the nature of life. But it is clear that things are more complicated. He later says, in the penultimate moment, after she had finally married, that lying to her that she would soon himself wed was the hardest thing he had ever done, presumably for her own good. She had finally acquiesced to a marriage as a sacrifice to her father in that he obeyed his wishes whatever he might have wanted. She agreed that she should not be selfish and so had gone off in traditional high regalia to her wedding after having had a final vacation with her father in Kyoto, the more traditional city than the bustling Tokyo, Kyoto a set of shrines and pagodas where he found that life most at peace and to which the professor had not previously returned since before the war.
So the foreground is not about psychological drama or the background concerned with the dilemmas of postwar life or even the inevitability of the separation of the generations. It is about tradition: that women should marry and that women should obey their fathers. The daughter may seem modern but is still wedded to the customs of the traditional life, as does the father. Neither of them have moved along in the evolution of Japanese society as others had done. After all, if they had realistically assessed their current situation, there was no reason not to have remained with one another in an amiable and loving companionship, just as the ugly duckling in James’ “Washington Square” could have married her man even if he was a golddigger. It would have been worth it. Both of these Japanese, however, do what is ceremonial and self sacrificial, as is indicated when the father comes home to his house afterwards, in the last scene, and feels pained and maybe regretful that she is gone. Poignant, misguided, but everyone working through Ozu’s tone of good spirited but faliable people where the pace of the movie is very slow in unfolding until it rushes through its final few events that make it complete and inevitable.The background informs the foreground but in a particularly subtle way and so could not have worked in some other time when tradition would have been more clear or when the present was tugging people to be more adventurous in their choices.
Ozu does not always use this three part structure of the background of history with the foreground where people deal with tragic and longtime issues and the intersection of those two. “A Hen in the Wind” was made a year earlier and it tells another soap opera story which is much closer to a social problem raised by the war. A woman whose husband who years later had still not returned from the war sells herself for one time as a prostitute so as to pay for the hospitalization of her young child. The background is a poor neighborhood illustrated by the giant cylindrical steel structures which are gasoline storage units. Her house is very modest. The husband when he does return is angry at what she cannot but admit to him out of her shame for what she had done. The suspense and the poignancy of the story is whether the returned husband can overcome his anger of a wife who is made by the author totally sympathetic but reduced to temporary iniquity so as to protect her son, she rationalizing that her son had become sick due to her own fault and so she should pay for that. These are the costs of war, another background factor that sets the scene for the unfolding of the story in the foreground. In both stories, characters are appealing and straightforward and given to good social values, and the pace of the stories is slow and mellow. Even the people in the bordello in “A Hen in the Wind” are appealing and the moral of the story is to forgive all because of their circumstances, a very modern Liberal theme. This is very different from the film noir movies of the time in the United States, where the characters are mean and selfish and violent and are regarded retrospectively as a response to post-war distress, but seem to me to have been about bad gangsters replacing the appealing gangsters of the Thirties. Rather, seeing “A Hen in the Wind” is like seeing Ibsen’s “The Enemy of the People” where people claim that they will be better and overcome their individual or collective weakness. An audience will root for prostitutes to be understood as people led astray by circumstance rather than to be maligned. That is the Ozu progressive view. So “A Hen in the Wind” is nothing fancy but also not very deep, however much the movie is well done by the depiction of the woman’s plight and the general straightforwardness by which Ozu’s Japanese are willing to manage adversity, as was also the case in “Late Spring”. But “Late Spring” is a masterpiece because of its layered meanings rather than just because of Ozu’s distinctively calm style.