Background
Yasujiro Ozu was born on 12 December 1903 in Tokyo, Japan.
小津 安二郎
Yasujiro Ozu was born on 12 December 1903 in Tokyo, Japan.
Not enough of Ozu is available; little can be seen easily, or in ideal circumstances. But these are key films to look for: I Was Born. But (32), a picture of the world as seen through childrens eyes, aware of pain, but boisterous, funny, and earthy; A Story of Floating Weeds (34), about traveling players in the countryside, a movie filled with the chanciness of weather; Late Spring (49), a very delicate study of a father and a daughter both wondering about marriage, but anxious not to offend the other; Tokyo Story (53), the film that established Ozu in the West; and the late masterpieces, still lifes with intense movements of hope and yearning passing across the fame of the family—Late Autumn (60); The End of Summer (61); and An Autumn Afternoon (62).
It may be that Ozu’s greatness depends on stories about the family, and so often parents and grown-up children. But something should be said about his versatility. In his rich silent period, he was often very funny—never so much as when dealing with children: I Was Born. But . . . finds enormous comic spirit in the kids. Dragnet Girl. from 1933, is a kind of film noir, about a gangster and his woman; equally, That Night's Wife was a tribute to von Sternbergs underworld films. Then again, in the 1930s, Ozu did several movies—like An Inn in Tokyo—that prefigure Italian neo-realism. During the war, lie made movies about stability and family dramas that ignore the state of war.
There is one crucial way in which Ozu is, if not purely Japanese, a challenge to American movie habits. The Western moviegoer will hardly be able to resist Ozu (he is a treasury), but there is some truth in the claim that he is resigned or conservative. The world, the family, and ordinary persistence hold firm in his pictures. For example, in A Hen in the Wind, a soldier returns from the war to discover that his wife has turned to prostitution in his absence. Disruption threatens. But the couple find compromise, reconciliation, and the necessary sadness of going on. In so many family pictures, the suffocation of a relationship is not escaped. Kindness may free the young to marry (as in Late Spring and its companion, Late Autumn), but marriage is only another room in the same small house. The use of the seasons in so many titles suggests the circular and impregnable round of life. Ozu is conservative: he does not believe in escape, and so he arranges his tales in moods of acceptance and quietism.
That disturbs some American viewers because so many American films are pledged to the energy that “breaks out. ’ Our stories promote the hope of escape, of beginning again, of beneficial disruptions. One can see that energy—hopeful, and often damaging, but always romantic—in films as diverse as The Searchers, Citizen Kane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Run of the Arrow, Rebel Without a Cause, Vertigo, Bonnie and Clyde, Greed, and The Fountainhead. No matter how such stories end, explosive energy is endorsed.
Those explosions are a metaphor for the light of movies and for the emphasis on indulged fantasy in American pictures. Our films are spirals of wish fulfillment, pleas for envy, the hustle to get on with the pursuit of happiness. By contrast, Ozus films seem to be modeled on novels or plays—Tolstoy or Chekhov—certain that there is no escape, no getting away, and no proper place for fantasy in living. Which is not to say that Ozus people lack energy or the habit of dreaming. But that urge is contained within the sense of fatality and certain outcome—as it is, say, in The Earrings of Madame de . . . , The Shop Around the Corner, The Magnificent Ambersons, French Can Can. So Ozu is a vital lesson to American film, and provocation to us to be wise, calm, and more demanding; in what we want of our films.
When Roger Manvell’s Film and the Public was published in 1955, it had not one mention of Ozu, and would not have been attacked for the omission. Penelope Houston's Contemporary Cinema. published in the year of Ozus death, had no doubt about his significance, but still employed Ozu as an example of filmmaking too austere, slow, or quietist for large audiences.
The West caught up with Ozu only a few years before his death, when his greatest movies urged their way into European film festivals. The story is not so different from the late appreciation of Mizoguchi. But Mizoguchi’s films—especially the “monogatari”—are more eventful, more passionate, and more “moving” than Ozu’s contemplation of the seasons. There is an easy joke that no one can tell one Ozu film from another: but is that a failing or a virtue? After all, we notice a similar consistency in Hawks, Godard, Bergman, or Buñuel.
Ozu’s most important characteristic is his way of watching the world. While that attitude is modest and unassertive, it is also the source of great tenderness for people. It is as if Ozu’s one personal admission was the faith that the basis of decency and sympathy can only be sustained by the semireligious effort to observe the world in his style; in other words, contemplation calms anxious activity. As with Mizoguchi one comes away from Ozu heartened by his humane intelligence and by the gravity we have learned.
The intensive viewing of Ozu—and such stylistic rigor encourages nothing less—makes questions of Japaneseness irrelevant. There have been attempts to explain Ozu by reference to his native culture, and it is easy to pin his mysticism to facile notions of the East. Even Ozu himself believed that his subject matter was too provincial to travel outside Japan. Some critics have tried to illuminate his films by reference to Buddhism, Japanese pottery, domestic ritual, and haiku.
All of those are worth considering. But the most useful point to make is that Ozu uses a minimal but concentrated camera style: static, a little lower than waist height, with few camera movements, dissolves, or fades. The intentness of the image, and its emotional resonance, is not only as relevant to the West as to Japan; it is a return to fundamental cinema, such as we can see in Dreyer, Bresson, Lang, and even Warhol, whose charac-ters sit as habitually as Ozu’s. Nor is there anything limitingly Oriental in Ozu’s ability to create deep anguish or joy in the cross-cutting of faces. There are similar moments in Hitchcock or Lang, when we are made to apprehend the unverbalized feelings that rush between people, and which are only defined by the constructive power of editing.
This Ozu is less difficult than demanding. When you watch him, think more of the camera than of what little we know of Japanese culture. The seeming repetition of his work—of middle-class domestic interiors, marital stories, the same actors, and abiding camera setups—is a proof of his constancy. The family relationships he describes are by no means un-Western. Ozu has a sense of pathos that travels easily, while only Mizoguchi can treat overwhelming feelings with such restraint. Ozu is worthy of attention by the highest claims of an international art; demurring from rhetorical outburst, expressive camera angles, and the turmoil of melodrama, he insists on the photographic substance in faces, interiors, and the spaces between people.