KEEPING THE WAR OUTSIDE THE FRAME: ELLIPSIS AS A MEANS OF REDIRECTION TOWARD WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVES IN TWO WAR NARRATIVES

This article explores how cinema’s material discontinuity can stimulate the attention of a distracted audience and prompt reflection on historical violence. By examining Yasujiro Ozu’s Sanma no aji (1962) and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), it argues that ellipsis is a powerful technique used to construct an argument about the relationship between war and women’s social roles. Specifically, the article analyses how these films use the ellipsis to enhance the resistance of women who act against the official thread of History. Finally, the findings highlight the potential of cinema to challenge dominant narratives and encourage alternative approaches to representing violence and social roles.

Mechanical reproducibility opened a time of creation, multiplica tion, and transmission of violence by technical means. The counter part of the saturation of images is a spectator of numb sensibility who closes her eyes to memory, facts, and images. 1 Acknowledging this potential political problem is a good reason to explore alter native ways to treat violence through audiovisual media.
It has been claimed that cinema is the "art of ellipsis." 2 Through framing and montage, a film is produced by selecting and re moving audiovisual fragments from their physical systems of reference and juxtaposing them on a new surface. This uprooting procedure makes the film's spacetemporal synthesis essentially discontinuous. 3 Still, the film's elliptical and inorganic nature has been assumed with ambivalence. It has been hidden or shown

OZU'S SANMA NO AJI
In his postwar films, Ozu used ellipsis to stress the memory of II World War's experience in his contemporary society. Further more, Ozu's postwar cinema is about the consequences and present agency of the war. Ozu draws the viewer's attention to a past that cannot be represented visually or verbally from the viewpoint of an everpresent time in which the linearity of narrative adapts to the successive form of film without flashbacks, flashforwards, insertions of archive material, voiceover, text, photos, or frames Bernardita M. Cubillos that register the violence of preceding incidents. The past is mate rially silenced, but it is the dramatic center of gravity of the film.
Ozu's films are set in postwar Japan's urban environments of the 1950s and 1960s. There is peace, but the traditional institutions are internally damaged. Even if violence is inhibited, Ozu's work after 1945 concerns the fractured structures of postwar society.
The spectator must recognize the implicit past-with the impos sibility of openly referring to it-to interpret the story and aes thetics of the film.
Ozu's use of ellipsis and silence is rooted in his cinema to graphic style, which gets its consistency from the restrictions in framing and montage selfimposed by the filmmaker: the immo bility and low placement of the camera, the absence of transitions between frames, and the patterns of the succession of long and close shots are parameters that become codes of a cinema tographic grammar and syntax that unify the whole corpus. 6 The theme is as persistent as the cinematographic form: family bonds and domestic struggles. A typical conflict is the situation of daughters who have reached the age of marriage and must leave their pa rental home. Through this subject, Ozu points to the relationship between the war and the resetting of women's roles in a modern sensibility. 7 We can appreciate an example of this linkage in his latest work, Sanma no aji. The film presents the story of Michiko and his father, the widower Mr. Hirayama. Michiko has reached the age of mar riage; her father worries that if he does not push her to marry, she will eventually become a spinster and remain unhappy. Michiko, who has taken her mother's place as a homemaker after her death, is secretly concerned about leaving her father and states that she is not ready to marry. Father and daughter never openly discuss their concerns with each other, but we learn about them indirectly. Scenes designed as modules define the film's architecture. 8 There is tension between the selective material shown on the geometri cally compartmented screen and what is left outside the borders.
Ozu stresses the quadrature of the frame with his closed forms.
The frame is built as "squares inside squares." Moreover, the rep lication of modular scenes and spaces in the film's sequence allows us to reconstruct a parabolic form of settings and circumstances that mutually reverberate with narrative and formal variations. that during the war, the mother changed and had to adapt to a new role. Heir of this new womanhood, Michiko cannot mirror her mother before the war, which altered everything. 9 Therefore, she must stop replacing her mother at Hirayama's home.
In Sanma no aji, modern women appear in the middle of a pro cess of transformation that affects their life decisions. Although their role is not entirely redefined, the impossibility of following the tradition is rooted in concrete social impediments seeded by previous events. Because a new social order is arising, they are internally conflicted, as they can't make decisions simply by imi tating an institutionalized social order. In this way, the war becomes the "elephant in the room," or the main idea that drives the tensions in the movie and explains how women's social posi tion has changed over time, even though this link between events is hidden in between the frames and montage.

GERWIG'S LITTLE WOMEN
Ellipsis serves another purpose in Greta Gerwig's Little Women to highlight values and facts that were present in the original novel but obscured because of the socially expected happy ending. 13 In this way, she shows us the typical process of recontextualization and juxtaposing recycled materials that constitute cinema and emphasizes its elliptical nature to leave the narrative causes out side the frame. Now the war is discarded in favor of the relevance of the "little stories about domestic struggles and joys," which, according to Jo, "are not important" for most readers. The film authentically vindicates the sisters' feminine perspective because artworks are not just mimesis of historical conditions but actively productive. Amy states that writing these little stories "will make them more important." However, Gerwig's film is not just about telling facts but how to tell and retell them over time using new media and techniques.

CONCLUSION
The previous cases of cinematographic ellipsis exemplify how omission can be used for distraction or attention in war narratives.
Using ellipsis, Gerwig and Ozu create tension between what is inside and outside the frame. Ozu does it to connect their charac ters to violence, while Gerwig questions events that have habitually earned a hierarchy of importance in cinematographic narratives.
Ozu's omission of war is directed to focus the receptor's attention on it; Gerwig distracts the receptor by emphasizing a new perspec tive that develops outside the eye of History.