Welcome to my Yasujiro Ozu tribute page. Send a friend request, if you love his work.
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-Carletto
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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 emphasize 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. 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.
Despite having few qualifications, Ozu secured a position as an assistant
teacher in a small mountain village some distance from Matsuzaka, a
post for which a college diploma was not needed. Little has been written
or spoken about Ozu's time teaching in this community except that it is
known he drank almost continually. Friends came to visit him and stayed
for extended drinking sessions for months on end. Eventually, his father
had to wire him money to pay off his drinking debts and Ozu went back to
Tokyo, after a decade away, to live with his family.
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.
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." 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.
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.
Three years later came what is generally recognized as Ozu's first major
film, I Was Born, But... (Umarete wa Mita Keredo...,
1932). This moving comedy/drama was a great success in Japan both critically
and financially. One of cinema's finest works about children, the film begins
as a riotous Keatonesque comedy but quickly darkens as it portrays a classic
confrontation between the innocence of childhood and the hypocrisy of adults.
A tracking shot of a line of exercising schoolchildren cuts to a tracking
shot of a line of office workers yawning at their desks. Using a technique
he would later discard, Ozu here effectively associates school and office
work as regimentary and the transition between the two as inevitable. Ozu
liked I Was Born, But...so much that he remade it as Good
Morning (Ohayo) in 1959.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'.
During the war, Ozu only made two films, Brothers And Sisters Of The
Toda Family (Toda-ke no Kyodai, 1941) and There Was
A Father (Chichi Ariki, 1942), the latter of which won
the second prize in the Kinema Jumpo, made money at the box office, and
became one of Japan's most treasured cinema classics. After the war Ozu,
no war criminal, was placed in a British POW camp near Singapore for six
months where he cultivated his love of poetry whilst doing the dishes and
cleaning toilets. In February 1946 he returned to war damaged Tokyo and
set about trying to make more films. Ozu's later, more refined style had
been gradually percolating throughout the 1940s and Late Spring (Banshun,
1949) became the first and finest telling of a story Ozu was to remake,
with variations, many times. A young woman, (Setsuko Hara) who lives happily
with her widowed father (Chishu Ryu), will not consider marriage, preferring
her state of comfortable dependence to the responsibilities of childbearing
and household duties. The father, afraid that she will live a lonely and
barren life, leads her to believe that he intends to remarry in order to
free her. A dispassionate observation of the characters' environment and
emotions, Late Spring was one of Ozu's own favourites (along
with There Was A Father and Tokyo Story).
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 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:
Mr. Ozu looked happiest when he was engaged
in writing a scenario with Mr. Kogo Noda, at the latter's cottage
on the tableland of Nagano Prefecture. By the time he finished writing
a script, after about four months' effort, he had already made up
every image in every shot, so that he never changed the scenario after
we went on the set. The words were so polished up that he would not
allow us even a single mistake.
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 cross-legged. 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. 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.
The crown jewel in Ozu's career is widely regarded as being
Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953). It consistently
makes all-time top ten film lists around the world along with Citizen
Kane, Rules Of the Game and Vertigo. It is Ozu's sad,
simple story of generational conflict where an elderly couple's visit to
their busy, self-absorbed offspring in Tokyo is met with indifference. This
ingratitude only serves to reveal permanent emotional differences, which
the parents gracefully accept and then return home. It is in Tokyo Story
where Ozu's form reaches its zenith. The apparent lack of plot (not of story,
but of story events) is replaced by a series of moments which have a cumulative
effect, and of ellipses. David Desser highlighted the different kinds of
ellipses in Tokyo Story, identifying
them as follows. Minor ellipsis; denotes the dropping of a minor
plot event;for example, a character discusses sending their parents
on holiday and the next shot shows the parents on holiday (Ozu having elided
scenes where the parents are persuaded to go on holiday). Surprise
ellipsis can be demonstrated by Ozu preparing the viewer for a scene
and then simply eliding the whole event for effect a risky strategy,
as the greater the ellipsis the more alert the viewer must be. Finally,
dramatic ellipsis is concerned with the offscreen occurrence
of something dramatic, which the viewer only hears about later for
example, the sudden illness of the mother that we only hear about secondhand.
Ozu maintains the mood and tone without needing to portray the events that
he is eliding (unlike classical Hollywood cinema which would, generally,
base itself around the things that Ozu leaves out). Indeed, the ellipses
convolve and dictate the pace of the film. Ozu's examination of the slow
fracturing of the Japanese family in Tokyo Story is filled with quiet
resignation, a neverending acceptance and the realization that tradition
is subject to change.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:
Although I hadn't made a white-collar story
for a long time, I wanted to show the life of a man with such a job; his
happiness over graduation and finally becoming a member of society,
his hopes for the future gradually dissolving, his realizing that,
even though he has worked for years, he has accomplished nothing.
Floating Weeds
Add to My Profile | More VideosAll 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 Ozu's films represent a lifelong study of the Japanese family and the changes that a family unit experiences. He ennobles the humdrum world of the middle-class family and has been regarded as "the most Japanese of all filmmakers", not just by Western critics, but also by his countrymen. However, this accolade led to Ozu being regarded as "traditional", and a "social conservative" by young filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave (such as Shohei Imamura, who had worked as an apprentice with Ozu). Like the children in Ozu's movies, the young filmmakers rebelled against his "old fashioned" acceptance of life as they saw it. Much has been written about the "most Japanese of filmmakers" tag; Hasumi Shigehiko believed it showed a lack of understanding of his work. Hasumi wrote that Ozu chose a persistent approach towards film and its limits, liberating himself from the ambiguity of outlines, dampness and shadows. He describes Ozu's filmmaking as preferring dry sunlight conditions (as opposed to Mizoguchi's fog, or Kurosawa's rain); its sole purpose being to "approach the dazzle of midsummer sunlight", something that Hasumi points out is in many ways the opposite of those said to have a "very Japanese" aesthetic sense.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". To expand upon this, the Japanese concept of mono no awarecan 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 awareto 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. 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."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