Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Only Yesterday
1991 · Isao Takahata · Only Yesterday on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch where the background simply stops in the 1966 scenes. (light)
The 1982 material is painted fully to the frame's edge, but the 1966 material dissolves into blank white paper at its borders.
Payoff: The unfinished edges mimic how memory keeps a center and loses everything around it. In the reading: any-space-whatever: emptiness. Deleuze calls a space stripped down to pure affect an any-space-whatever; the blank borders are exactly that kind of emptiness.
Notice how the film jumps between decades with no dissolve at all. (cutting)
A phrase, a food, or a sound in 1982 lands the film straight into 1966, with no transitional device announcing the jump.
Payoff: The past arrives the way it actually does in memory, uninvited and unannounced.
Watch how long the film lingers on ordinary farm labor. (structure)
Safflower picking runs at the actual length safflower picking takes, with no dramatic payoff waiting at the end of the scene.
Payoff: The film spends its time on labor that has no plot use, because the labor is the point.
Notice who sits closest to the table and who does not. (staging)
Takahata blocks every household scene by exact position, who reaches for what, who is looked at and who is not.
Payoff: The seating arrangement tells you the family's whole hierarchy before anyone says a word.
Listen for Hungarian or Balkan folk music under the Japanese countryside. (sound)
The score reaches for Eastern European folk material rather than Japanese idiom, refusing the sentimental nostalgia music this kind of scene usually gets.
Payoff: The choice keeps the film from turning rural life into a postcard of itself.
Once you have seen it
Watch what happens in the space usually reserved for the credits. (structure)
The ten-year-old Taeko and her 1966 classmates physically push the adult Taeko off her departing train and back toward Toshio, staged entirely over the cast list.
Payoff: The film's actual resolution happens where a movie usually just lists names. In the reading: sheets of past (order of time / coexistence). Deleuze calls this sheets of past: the past does not get retrieved here, it simply shows up and acts.
Watch the adults' cheekbones and jaw while they talk. (performance)
Takahata recorded Imai and Yanagiba's voices first and animated the faces to match, so the muscles move with the real hesitations of their actual speech.
Payoff: The faces read as having lived a certain number of years, not as a designed character type.
Track every scene that touches the safflower crop directly. (structure)
The petals that become city women's red rouge are picked by hands that get scarred by the plant's own thorns, one object at both ends of a supply chain.
Payoff: Taeko turns out to be standing at the consumer end of a chain she is only now meeting in person.
Carry this in: Watch how long scenes run after a line has landed. That pause is where the film thinks.