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Yasujiro
Ozu by Nick Wrigley Nick Wrigley lives in England, is a musician and co-founder of www.mastersofcinema.org |
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| The films of Yasujiro Ozu examine the basic struggles that we all face
in life: the cycles of birth and death, the transition from childhood to
adulthood, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Their titles
often emphasise the changing of seasons, a symbolic backdrop for the evolving
transitions of human experience. Seen together, Ozu's oeuvre amounts to
one of the most profound visions of family life in the history of cinema. Ozu's career falls loosely into two halves, divided by the Second World War. His breezier early works are unafraid to acknowledge the influence of Hollywood melodramas or to flirt with farce. Such films contrast greatly with his later masterpieces, which portray a uniquely contemplative style so rigorously simplistic that it renounces almost all known film grammar. Ozu's Background Ozu was born on December 12, 1903 in Tokyo. He and his two brothers were educated in the countryside, in Matsuzaka, whilst his father sold fertilizer in Tokyo. In 1916 he began middle school at Uji-Yamada and was an unruly pupil who loved mischief, fighting, keeping a photo of actress Pearl White on his desk, and drinking alcohol. (2) Drinking was a habit he gained early in life and one that he was to keep. Ozu developed a love of film during his early days of school truancy, but his fascination began when he first saw a Matsunosuke historical spectacular at the Atagoza cinema in Matsuzaka. (3)
Ozu's uncle, aware of his nephew's love of film, introduced him to Teihiro Tsutsumi, then manager of Shochiku. Not long after, Ozu began working for the great studio—against his father's wishes—as an assistant cameraman. It may be thought nowadays that Ozu more than landed on his feet when he began work in the movies, however, in 1923 the Japanese movies were not considered 'respectable' or 'proper' employment and there was consequently a shortage of enthusiastic, bright young men involved in their production. Even Ozu's father initially refused his son's wish to work in the movies and had to be persuaded otherwise by the uncle. Ozu's work as assistant cameraman involved pure physical labour, lifting and moving equipment at Shochiku's Tokyo studios in Kamata. (4) After becoming assistant director to Tadamoto Okubo, it took less than a year for Ozu to put his first script forward for filming. It was in fact his second script The Sword Of Penitence that became his first film as director (and only period piece) in 1927. Ozu was called up into the army reserves before shooting was completed, and upon seeing the film afterwards stated that he would rather not call it his own. No negative, prints or script exist of The Sword Of Penitence—and, sadly, only 36 out of 54 Ozu films still exist. Ozu's Films Ozu's career began with an early fondness for American films and he later told Donald Richie that he particularly liked those of Ernst Lubitsch. However, in other conversations, Ozu seems unwilling to admit to influence. He did see large numbers of Japanese films after joining Shochiku in order to study his seniors' techniques and famously said, “I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others…for me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.” (5) Audie Bock points out that it's difficult to look for parallels between Ozu's life and his films: “College, office, and marital life—none of which Ozu experienced—are the subjects of many of his films; army life never appears, and provincial life, such as he lived with his mother in Matsuzaka, only rarely.” She concludes that Ozu must have approached film as an art of fiction from which a realism was to be distilled: “His inspiration came from outside his own life, from his mind and the lives of others observed to perfection with that mind.” (6) Days Of Youth (Wakaki Hi, 1929) is Ozu's earliest extant picture, though not especially typical (and preceded by seven others, now lost) as it is set on ski slopes. A variant on the then popular comedies depicting students at work and play, in this film two students endeavour to pass their exams and impress the girl to whom they have both taken a fancy. Stylistically it is rife with close-ups, fade-outs and tracking shots, all of which Ozu was later to leave behind.
In the 1930s, Ozu's protagonists were all lower/middle class ordinary folk. During this time in Japan the shomin-geki (“drama about people like you and me”) was highly regarded for its honesty and relevance. Poverty was the bane of these characters' lives, along with class differences, but as early as the 1930s Ozu's message of acceptance was already clear. The restrained, lyrical work Story Of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari, 1934) is the story of the leader of a small group of traveling players who returns to a small town and meets his son, the product of an earlier affair. Ozu transforms the slightly melodramatic tale into an atmospheric and intense study. Donald Richie has called this film “the first of those eight-reel universes in which everything takes on a consistency greater than life: in short, a work of art.” Its depiction of life on the boards—the pantomime 'dog' who misses his cue, bowls to catch raindrops through the leaking roofs, and the quick cigarettes between exits and entrances—is classic Ozu. He would later remake the film in colour as Floating Weeds. A year later, Ozu pursued his examination of socio-economic conditions by showing Depression-hit Japan in An Inn In Tokyo (Tokyo no Yado, 1935), one of Ozu's most moving pictures. A father and his young sons trudge the backstreets of Tokyo vainly seeking work and, with few possessions, must choose between food and shelter. In many ways it anticipates the neorealism of De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948), but with an even more powerful ending. Although 'talkies' had reached Japan by 1935, Ozu, like Chaplin, held out for silence, but he couldn't stop the studio adding music. His subsequent films were all 'talkies'.
As the 1940s came to an end Ozu began to fuse his early American influences with an overriding desire to reduce his techniques. In his later films, he reduced all camera movement (pans, dollying, and crabbing) to nil; he disregarded classical Hollywood cinema conventions such as the 180 degree rule (where the camera always remains on one side of an imaginary axis drawn between two talking actors) and replaced it with what critics have termed the “360 degree rule” (because Ozu crosses this axis); and he replaced traditional shot/reverse shot techniques with a system whereby each character looks straight into the camera when speaking to someone else. This had the unusual effect of placing the viewer directly in the centre of conversations—as if being talked to—instead of the Hollywood convention of alternately peering over characters' shoulders during such sequences. Furthermore, Ozu decided to reduce his choice of transition effect; gone were fades, wipes, dissolves, all replaced with the straight cut. Reducing his techniques in this way focused all attention on his characters—and their humanity shines through. Ozu went further than limiting his vocabulary of film punctuation; he also sought to de-emphasize his films' plots—the direct opposite of what Hollywood cinema of the time was doing. He worked out the entire script, dialogue and camera positions himself before he started shooting. Ozu regular Chishu Ryu recounts: In addition to being motionless in his later work, Ozu's camera—from early in his career—was often placed at a very low level as if the viewer were sat crosslegged. It has been noted that this is at the same level one sits on tatami for a tea ceremony in a Japanese home, or while meditating, sitting in silence, observing, reaching meaning through extreme simplificaton. (8) It is also the height Ozu had to position his camera when making a film about children, and it is said he liked it so much that he stuck with it. Ozu clearly had many reasons for adopting such a low position for his camera and it became one of the few facets of his pared down technique. 1951's Early Summer (Bakushu) is an extraordinary film about the lives of ordinary people, centering on a young woman who rebels against the wishes of her family by choosing her own husband. Through tangential stories and brief moments Ozu meticulously observes the lives of some 19 characters, expanding the boundaries of the film's simple plot with an elliptical narrative. The film is driven forward not by its plot but rather by Ozu's use of space, time and the constantly changing rhythm of the action.
Early Spring (Soshun, 1956) is Ozu's longest film. In it, a young salaried office worker is bored with both his job and his wife. He has a small affair with the office flirt, he and his wife quarrel, and eventually he accepts a transfer to the country. Ozu said of the film: Thirty years into his filmmaking career Ozu was making films which, like Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), questioned the sense of spending your whole working life behind a desk—something that many of his audience must have been doing.
All subsequent films were now to be colour, and none look more glorious than Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959), a remake of his earlier similarly titled film, this time photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa—one of Japan's greatest cinematographers (Rashomon [Akira Kurosawa, 1951], Yojimbo [Akira Kurosawa, 1961], Ugetsu Monogatari [Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953]). Ozu said, “About this time, CinemaScope was getting popular. I wanted to have nothing to do with it, and consequently I shot more close-ups and used shorter shots.” (Reacting against the long shots and long scenes typical to Scope movies of the time). Donald Richie called Floating Weeds, “the most physically beautiful of all of Ozu's pictures.” Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960) is one of my personal favourites. A young woman living with her widowed mother (Setsuko Hara, now moving up the character ladder from eternal daughter to eternal mother) finds the thought of her mother's remarriage offensive. Neither wants to leave the other to marry or remarry, and one of them eventually does. Ozu works his magic for two hours and achieves a pitch at the end whereby the simplest little expression seems momentous and heartbreaking. Late Autumn contains some of the funniest moments to be seen in all of Ozu. Mariko Okada plays the feisty young friend of the daughter in an unusually forthright way for Ozu—a reflection of the modern Japanese woman in the 1960s. She cuts through tradition, chastising the comic chorus of old rogues who are trying to sort out both women's future, and ensures a happy ending—proof that not all Ozu characters are meek and passive. Sadly, Ozu's last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962) was undoubtedly influenced by the death, during filming, of his mother, with whom he had lived all his life. It is a serene meditation on ageing and loneliness as well as a final display of Ozu's wicked humour. Having arranged the marriage of his only daughter, a widower becomes painfully aware of his advanced age and his isolation. Solace is sought in alcohol and drunken comradeship which give rise to some more of the funniest scenes in Ozu's later films. Ozu died a year after its making, so it exists as his last thoughts on a recurring subject that recalls Late Autumn and Early Spring. (Literally, the Japanese title Samma no Aji means “the taste of mackerel”.) Ozu's Legacy
Remarkably, Ozu's films were rarely seen in the West until the early 1970s (there had been a small tour of his films in the US in the 1960s). His barebone narratives and idiosyncratic style never appealed to distributors at the time who apparently felt they were just “too Japanese” for Western audiences. These distributors never accused Bresson of being “too French” however, and it seems that they alone were responsible for Ozu's delayed exposure to the West. Maybe they thought Ozu's themes and titles were too similar and thus confusing? After all, most of Ozu's later work (1950s/60s) centered on the same motif: the marrying off of a loyal daughter so that she could begin to live her own life. When Ozu's films did start getting shown in the West, art cinema aficionados of Bresson, Bergman and Antonioni's formal styles were ecstatic to find a Japanese master whose films spoke as eloquently about Japanese life as their favourite European films did of their respective homelands. There is an overwhelming sensibility running through all Ozu films that is difficult to put into words but Donald Richie does well to describe it as “a point of view of sympathetic sadness”. (12) To expand upon this, the Japanese concept of mono no aware can be related to Ozu's sensibilities and worldview. Mono no aware is the perspective of a tired, relaxed, even disappointed observer, perhaps someone sagely approaching death. It is not limited to reflection on death but touches all aspects of life and nature: a pure, emotional response to the beauty of nature, the impermanence of life, and the sorrow of death. The scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) invented the unique concept of mono no aware to define the essence of Japanese culture (the phrase derives from aware, which means “a sensitivity to things”). He believed that the character of Japanese culture encompassed the capacity to experience the objective world in a direct and unmediated fashion, to understand sympathetically the objects and the natural world around one without resorting to language or other mediators. (13) This concept became the central aesthetic concept in Japan, even into the modern period, allowing the Japanese to understand the world directly by identifying themselves with that world. Film director Kenji Mizoguchi said, “I portray what should not be possible in the world as if it should be possible, but Ozu portrays what should be possible as if it were possible, and that is much more difficult.” (14) Whilst in China during his war service, Ozu asked a Chinese monk to paint the character “mu” for him (an abstract concept loosely meaning “void” or “nothingness”). Ozu died painfully on his sixtieth birthday in 1963 of cancer and his tombstone in the temple of Engaku in Kita-Kamakura bears the inscription “mu” from the monk's painting that he had kept all his life. At the time of writing, it is Ozu's centenary year—a wonderful opportunity for the world to look back on his films and for the young to see them for the first time. Celebrations, retrospectives and brand new DVD transfers are appearing around the world and Ozu's legacy is becoming even more cherished with passing time. © Nick Wrigley, March 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography The
following are films still in existence (either partially or wholly):
What Did The
Lady Forget? (Shukujo wa Nani o Wasuretaka) (1937)
73 mins 
Bibliography David
Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics Of Cinema, BFI Publishing, Princeton
University Press, 1988, reprint 1994
Articles in Senses of Cinema Is
Ozu Slow?
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Web Resources Film
Directors - Articles on the Internet
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