The End of Summer (1961): In his penultimate film, Ozu examines the relationship between an aging father (Ganjiro Nakamura) and his three caring daughters (Setsuko Hara, Yôko Tsukasa and Michiyo Aratama), who needlessly worry that he'll spend the rest of his life alone. Little do they know that dad is anything but solitary, having recently reconnected with his former mistress.
Late Autumn (1960): Ozu explores the flipside of the traditional mother-daughter bond in this touching family comedy set in postwar Japan. Reluctant to marry and leave her widowed mother (Setsuko Hara) all alone, a dutiful daughter (Yôko Tsukasa) resists selecting a suitor. But her late father's friends, who are eager to see both women happy, insist on stepping in to play matchmaker.
Floating Weeds (1959): Ozu teamed with acclaimed cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa to remake his 1934 masterpiece and came up with an elegant update of a classic tale. An actor returns to his old hometown with his girlfriend and discovers he still has feelings for an old love who bore him a son he now wants to get to know. What results is awe-inspiring pain and heartache that threatens to destroy them.
Good Morning (1959): Depicting suburban Tokyo in the 1950s and the ordered social structure of Japanese culture, this film tells the story of two Japanese boys who beg their parents for a television set, nagging incessantly until they're ordered to be quiet. The children take the command literally and refuse to speak -- at all. Their disobedience and bad manners begin to take a toll on their family as well as the community in which they live.
Equinox Flower (1958): In his first color film, Ozu explores the tension between modern romance and family tradition in postwar Japanese society. A prosperous businessman (Shin Saburi) with a reputation for doling out sound, objective relationship advice to his friends finds it difficult to practice what he preaches when his oldest daughter (Ineko Arima) announces her engagement to a man he doesn't like.
Tokyo Twilight (1957): In this black-and-white drama, Ozu shines a light on the dark side of sisterhood, exposing shame and family secrets in postwar Tokyo. While living at home with their aging father (Chishu Ryu), two sisters (Setsuko Hara and Ineko Arima) face shocking revelations, the most profound of which is that their mother -- whom they long assumed to be dead -- may still be alive.
Early Spring (1956): Ozu explores the bleak hopelessness of the white-collar corporate world in this postwar tale of marriage, infidelity and passion. In an attempt to break out of a mind-numbing daily routine, an ordinary office worker embarks on a risky affair with a stenographer, all the while hoping that his colleagues -- and his wife -- never find out.
Tokyo Story (1953): Ozu focuses on an elderly couple in post-World War II Japan who travel to Tokyo to visit their children. The parents (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) are received coldly by their two children; the only one who is happy to see them is their widowed daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara). The children shuttle their aging parents off to a health spa in an attempt to get them out of the way, a decision that could come back to haunt them.
Early Summer (1951): The Mayima family is seeking a husband for their daughter, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), but she has ideas of her own. Noriko impulsively chooses her childhood friend, at once fulfilling her family's desires while tearing them apart. A seemingly simple story, this drama is in reality an emotionally complex, nuanced examination of life's changes across three generations.
Late Spring (1949): In post-World War II Japan, grieving widower Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu) takes comfort in the presence of his only daughter (Setsuko Hara), who's old enough to marry but chooses instead to care for her aging father. Knowing she'll never take a husband as long as Shukichi remains alone, he crafts an innocent lie to push her out of the nest. This lyrical black-and-white drama distinguished Ozu as one of Japan's leading directors.
A Story of Floating Weeds (1934): When the leader of a small theater troupe (Takeshi Sakomoto) returns to the provincial town of his youth, he reconnects with an old flame and the now-grown son they share (who believes he's his uncle). Not surprisingly, this doesn't sit well with his current flame, the lead actress in the troupe. With its elliptical storytelling and familial focus, this early masterwork from Ozu displays many of the hallmarks of his later work.
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 workStory 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.
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.
In 1958, Ozu made what was for him the giant leap into the world of colour
filmmaking. Equinox Flower (Higan-Bana)was another
close examination of family life, presented from the viewpoint of the younger
generation. Focusing on a modern young woman (Fujiko Yamamoto) who wishes
to choose her husband over her father's objections, Ozu opens an age-old
discussion on respect for the beliefs and values of elders and the tensions
born of youthful rebellion. As the father is slowly won over, the entire
family is subjected to Ozu's teasing irony and loving detail. The colour
enhances the tone and mood of the film and showcases Yamamoto's famous beauty.
The film begins and ends cheekily on the railway, first with a warning
sign, strong winds expected, finally with a train chugging away
into a blissful autumn afternoon, everyone reconciled.
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], UgetsuMonogatari [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.
" L'humanité est constamment aux prises avec deux processus contradictoires dont l'un tend à instaurer l'unification, tandis que l'autre vise à maintenir ou à rétablir la diversification."
"Mankind is constantly faced with two contradictory process which one seeks to achieve unification, while the other seeks to maintain or restore diversification."
[Claude Lévi-Strauss]
Le secret de la longévité, c'est de continuer à respirer. Sincèrement, Botti, votre humble débiteur.
The secret of longevity is to continue breathing. Sincerely, Botti, your humble debtor.
Happy birthday! I don't know why...but you are really in my heart. Here no light or dark, no life or dead only love and respect for our humanity. Thank you Mister Ozu to bring me so lot in my contemporary life, andrea
Thank you for allowing us onto your page, we are truly honoured. We are huge admirers of Ozu's masterpieces and, strange as it may sound, they influence our music considerably.
