About/Contact Archives Twitter

Cinema Ozu (2): Ozu and Me

I wanted to take this second installment as my chance to add some context to my series on the work of Ozu. I was first exposed to Ozu's work through the Criterion Collection DVD of Good Morning (1959, a relatively late Ozu film), which I picked up my senior year in high school.

It was the only Criterion disc I found at Fry's that they sold for $20. This was on a day when I wanted to get something and only had about twenty-five bucks in my pocket. Good Morning is about two suburban Japanese kids who refuse to talk after their parents tell them that they can't have a TV, the must-have gadget of the 50's. The movie is a remake of Ozu's silent comedy I Was Born, But... (1932) and is one of the most unique among all his films in that it's told from the perspective of children instead of an adult. The movie is wonderful, and I'll be talking about it in greater depth in a few weeks.

I enjoyed Good Morning, but didn't revisit Ozu for a couple of years, when I discovered Tokyo Story and Floating Weeds in college. The 2003 release of Story was the gateway drug to 2004's Weeds, which I was additionally drawn to by the Roger Ebert commentary track. He is one of the best "film scholar" commentarians out there, and of the various yack tracks he's contributed to, this one is my favorite, closely followed by Citizen Kane. I like it enough that I've decided to specifically dedicate a supplemental entry in this series to Ebert's Weeds track.

As for the movies, the themes of traveling and generational strife really hit home for me, as I was 1,000 miles from home for the first time in my life. The few times that I would visit my parents' house in those first years were always odd. I felt as if back in a comfort zone, yet at once an intruder, a prisoner even, in some respect.

These aren't terribly unique feelings among those who go away for school, but it struck me as an interesting reverse parallel relative to Tokyo Story. I could empathize in an odd way with the elderly parents who go to visit their children. Mom and Dad are made to feel as if they are more an inconvenience than a welcome, deeply-loved presence. I'm not saying that I was unwelcome in any way at my parents' home, not at all, but being disconnected from the household transforms you into a visitor, no matter how integral a part of the household you once were. Bonds of kinship mutate as a result, and interpersonal conduct is transformed, sometimes in jarring ways.

These simple but far-reaching transformations are at the core of what interests me the most in Ozu's films. From an anthropological standpoint, his films are an essential part of the Japanese cultural record, bridging the silent-to-sound and pre-to-post WWII gaps.

His particular perspective on how the Japanese family evolved and coped with change during these periods is unmatched by his peers in terms of depth. His static camera underscores his dedication to these emotional connections above all else, and the non-moving camera was so different that I knew I was hooked. I've seen a few more Ozu pictures in the years since then (Early Summer, Late Spring, and An Autumn Afternoon to name a few), but there have always been more of them available one way or another that I haven't managed to see. Many of the films I'm covering are ones I've never seen, and I'll identify them as we go. The main reason I decided to do this series is to finally buckle myself in and explore stuff that's been lingering on my to-do list for far too long, by my estimation.

Our next installment examines what we can of his earliest films; all of which have been lost. If you had asked the man himself, he apparently considered them no great loss.

Cinema Ozu is a limited-run series of articles about the career and impact of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. My primary intent is to chronicle my own journey through his films, a fair number of which I have seen, but even more of which I have not. The most essential research tools I have used are David Bordwell's book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and definitive Ozu fansite "Ozu-san".

The series is also timed to celebrate the July 2010 U.S. release of The Only Son and There Was a Father as a DVD double-set by The Criterion Collection. You can find all entries in Cinema Ozu here. New to the series? It's best to start from the beginning.