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Cinema Ozu (1): The Fascinating Ordinary

Welcome to the first installment of a multi-part, mixed-media, and (mostly) chronological journey through the career of Yasujiro Ozu. In the next few installments, I'll examine how I discovered him, discuss Ozu's early lost films and his oldest surviving features and shorts. We'll then proceed through phases of his career and cover each of his films, whether found on import DVDs or the more thorough and clean versions presented by The Criterion Collection.

This is the one photo I've seen of Ozu that I feel evokes his independent spirit and enigmatic aura the best. Is he just an ordinary man in a sharply-tailored suit, or is he The Devil? Is he merely staring into the camera lens, or can he see your doubts and insecurities? Then again, is he anything or nothing in the first place? These are the thick philosophical knots into which I am tied by his quiet dramas.

This trip will be spread out over the next three months to conclude in celebration of Criterion's July release of The Only Son & There Was a Father, which we will briefly touch upon and then double back to cover once I have obtained review material. This should be the most academic and scatterbrained piece of the bunch.

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I share the opinion of David Bordwell, Elvis Mitchell, and many other critics that Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is one of the greatest directors the cinema has ever seen. His film work spanned 35 years (1927-1962) and over 50 films, from silent to black & white talkie and finally to color. His career crossed the pre and post-WWII era in Japan, and saw lengthy gaps (1937-1941 and 1942-1947) as a result. The greatest of his films come after the war, though his first commercial success came in 1932 (I Was Born, But...).

He never married and never had children. It is rumored that he may have once proposed to one of his actresses.

His most-acclaimed film has been Tokyo Story (1953), a story about an elderly couple visiting their children (who treat them like an imposition). He died of cancer on his 60th birthday before his final film, An Autumn Afternoon, debuted at the New York Film Festival in 1963. His grave reads simply "mu" ("nothingness"), as can be seen in Wings of Desire director Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga, included in full on Criterion's release of Ozu's Late Spring (1949).

He lived with his mother until her death in February of 1962.

He began his career as an assistant camera operator for Shochiku. He did not take on his early films voluntarily. The "180 degree rule" did not exist in Ozu's filmmaking methodology as a director. He felt no need to pledge himself to the religion of an imaginary line that requires all of his shots to match angles when cutting from one person in a conversation to another. Contrary to the opinion of most film school professors, this does not make his shooting continuity confusing or jumbled whatsoever. Forty years of austere English period dramas could have put less people to sleep by employing such a technique.

His filmography focused so intently upon tradition and modernity coming to blows that just as many scholars and critics who love him will line up to assert that Ozu made the same film over and over. Of course, the same could and has been said of various other greats.

My read is that his critics have difficulty navigating the variances in emotional currents between Ozu films due to barriers of ethnocentric prejudice. It's easier for Americans to make arrogant, empty arguments against him than other icons because Ozu's work is so firmly entrenched in the Japanese culture of his time. We're conditioned in school to know that Japan of the time was our sworn enemy and the source of evil, even though we love their sushi, sake, and Pocky now.

His early films lean more toward "entertainments" and overt comedies, but they retain Ozu's signature social conscience (even the ones he personally disliked making). In this respect, they couldn't be more different than most American films from the same era. The best-known Ozu films come from his domestic dramas made just before, during, and after World War II. What can be overlooked too easily by the dismissive is that his style is all about honing and precision. Radical, showy gestures and pageantry have no place in his kitchen. If his films are a set of implements, there are no cleavers or tenderizers, just utility and paring knives.

As a whole, Ozu's films are a great testament to how storytelling in all forms owes so much to the oral tradition, wherein familiar elements are reworked over time to meet the evolving needs of civilization. His subtlety and poetic style are still so much more affecting than most of our modern films (made at many times his budgets) nearly half a century after his death.

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.