2019-10-16 08:31
I was in our ground floor powder room this morning, and I'm pretty sure I heard an animal above me. There's an area above the back of the house where the porch roof goes over the first floor to the slight recessed second floor, leaving this odd area between the porch roof and the top of the first floor for a few feet. I've always been a little concerned about animals getting up there, and maybe that has now happened. I guess I'll need to get the ladder out this weekend and see if I can get a look. Probably should have boarded that space up long ago.
It's a cool, rainy day today. When I woke up it was probably the coldest it's been yet this season, almost time to get the heater running. I do like the briskness of my morning walk, wrapped up in my sweatshirt but still sans winter hat.
My current reading is primarily been focused on David Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. I decided I wanted to get a copy recently after rewatching some Ozu movies. When I went to Amazon to look it up, the page claimed I had ordered the book back in like 2010. I searched all around the house and could not find a copy, nor could I remember actually ever reading the book. It's been out of print for a long time, so even back then I had ordered it from a third party seller. I still don't know for sure, but I have this vague memory of the one time a book just never showed up and I have to think it was that one. So I reordered it this summer and thankfully it did show up.
It's an excellent read so far, starting with context about the film industry in Japan, Ozu's life, and different general analyses of his films. The latter part is then a sequential film-by-film discussion of all his work. Like good criticism/theory, Bordwell's writing makes me want to return to the object of his writing so I can get even more enjoyment from it via his insights and analyses. It helps a lot in this context that I've scene a lot of Ozu's movies, so I'm not coming to the text without knowledge of the films (and having read a few other books on Ozu too). Bordwell's focus on narration and structure really appeals to me. He doesn't avoid biography or history or theme or process, but he always comes back to how the films are put together narratively and visually.