The mysterious power of the "pillow shot"
How cinema's empty spaces tune us to life’s fleeting wonders and eternal questions
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Film is a language spoken through shots.
We’ve become fluent in its basic vocabulary: close-up, wide shot, tracking shot, etc. Over time, new techniques have expanded the lexicon - Steadicam shots, drone shots - while older ones have fallen out of fashion (iris shots, crank ramps). Mostly, the shots have remained the same for the past 130-ish years.
Thanks to smartphones and online video, we’re more visually literate than any people before us. We’ve learned what a close-up means, what a high-angle wide infers, how a well-choreographed oner builds tension, and so on.
Even so, one of cinema’s most evocative shots often goes unnoticed. It’s been with us since the silent era, hiding in plain sight.
The pillow shot is a contemplative cutaway to an empty landscape, quiet room, or still object - a brief pause in the action that invites us to reflect. The term was coined in 1979 by film critic Noël Burch, who borrowed it from the “pillow-words” of classical poetry: seemingly incidental addendums that subtly altered the meaning of the lines around them.
“Some pillow-words are unclear in meaning; those whose meanings are known function rhetorically to raise the tone and to some degree also function as images.”
- Noël Burch, “To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema”
Unlike an establishing shot, which only tells us where we are, a pillow shot asks us how we feel about where we are, while contemplating life’s banalities and absurdities. They can suggest the passing of time, or hint at danger ahead. The most impressive pillow shots, in my view, manage to distill a film’s central tension into a single image.
Here are some of my favorite pillow shots from movies you should definitely not sleep on…
Junebug (2005, Phil Morrison)
Junebug tops this list for a personal reason: it’s the movie that taught me to love pillow shots.
An art dealer from Chicago travels to her new husband’s North Carolina hometown to court a reclusive folk artist, and walks straight into the charged emotional weather system of his family. Amy Adams, in a breakout performance, plays Ashley, a relentlessly sunny, deeply lonely pregnant woman who talks too much. If you’re like me, you will also talk too much - about this movie - decades after you first saw it.
Editor Joe Klotz peppered the film with quiet, unoccupied rooms - shots that conjure North Carolina so vividly, it raises hairs on my neck (much of my family lives there). You can see it now on the Roku Channel.
Good Morning (1959, Yasujiro Ozu)
Many of my favorite films focus on the everyday problems of ordinary people. Over time, we’ve been blessed with entire movements devoted to such stories, from Italian Neorealism to British kitchen sink dramas.
In Japan, there’s the shomin-geki genre, which roughly translates to “people like you and me.” Yasujiro Ozu was a pioneer and master of shomin-geki, and the pillow shot has been a recurring phrase in his meticulously restrained visual vocabulary since the silent era.
In 1932’s I Was Born, But…, two young brothers lose faith in their father after witnessing him yield to a domineering boss. More than two decades later, he loosely remade the movie as Good Morning, a rollicking technicolor comedy loaded with fart jokes. This time, the two young brothers take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a TV.
Ozu’s pillow shots pack a staggering amount of subtext: intergenerational conflict, man’s disruption of nature, irony, sadness. Ozu drops us into mundane moments that seem both chaotic and schematic, precious and inconsequential.
You can watch Good Morning and I Was Born, But… on the Criterion Channel.
Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)
“Komorebi” is a Japanese word that isn’t easily translatable. Literally, it refers to sunlight passing through trees. Figuratively, it describes the spirit of the fleeting moment.
Komberi was one of Wim Wenders’ central inspirations for Perfect Days, which follows Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo, as he fulfills his daily tasks with quiet pride while enjoying a simple life of music, books, and photography.
Wenders named Hirayama after the main character in Ozu’s last film, An Autumn Afternoon (1962). “Ozu was present… he was sort of the film’s guardian angel,” Wenders confirmed in an interview. Cinematographer Franz Lustig and Wenders shot the film somewhat spontaneously over sixteen days, with minimal preparation.
“In cinema, anonymity is usually a form of tragedy or a temporary cover for greatness. But Hirayama seems perfectly content with his unassuming routine, and Wenders films him with a subtle sense of awe. Watching him, we might feel envy for a man who has the time to fully enjoy his music and books and the pleasures of nature. Is such simplicity not the stuff of so many of our own dreams?” - Bilge Ebiri
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