Biography: life and films
There are few Japanese filmmakers who have been as influential or are as
highly regarded as Yasujiro Ozu. He began his career in the
silent era, greatly influenced by early American cinema, and in the
course of 35 years he made 54 films, 17 of which are now sadly
missing. Ozu is pretty well unique in that he made most of his
films for one production company - Shochiku - and devoted most of his attention to
one specific kind of film, the contemporary home drama (
shomin-geki or
homu dorama) depicting the everyday
experiences of ordinary Japanese folk. It was through this
popular middle-brow genre (the equivalent of today's television soaps)
that Ozu was able to make some of cinema's most penetrating
observations on human nature. Despite the fact he enjoyed critical and
commercial success in his own country, Ozu was practically unknown outside his
native Japan for most of his career. It wasn't until many years after his
death that he achieved a sizeable following in the West and became
accepted as one of the great cineastes of the 20th century.
Ozu's films, particularly his later work, are remarkably narrow in their
scope. Time and again, Ozu would return to the
same themes - marriage, inter-generational conflict, the erosion of
parental authority and the decline of the family. In doing so he
was providing both a subtle critique of his era and a precise record of
the immense changes that were taking place in Japanese society, driven
mainly by western influence. The conflict between the old
traditions and modern values underpins much of Ozu's cinema, and Ozu
was himself hugely influenced by western culture in his youth, becoming
addicted to Hollywood movies at an early age. As a
screenwriter, Ozu would often credit himself as James Maki, as he liked
to think he was half-American.
The impact of the Great Depression, WWII, post-war industrialisation
and consumerism can all be felt in Ozu's films. Ozu may have
contented himself with banal subjects but his cinema has a timeless,
universal quality that makes it consistently rewarding. His
greatest achievement is unquestionably his most famous film,
Tokyo Story (1953), but there
are many, equally moving masterpieces to be found in his rich
body of work. These include
Late
Spring (1949),
Early Summer
(1951),
Floating Weeds (1959) and
An Autumn Afternoon (1962) - all
heartrending explorations of the most brittle of human relationships,
that between parents and their children.
To understand Ozu's cinema, it is helpful to know something about his
own personal background. He was born on 12th December 1903 in the Fukagawa district of
Tokyo. His father was a fertilizer salesman and he was the second
son of five children. When Ozu was ten years old, his father sent him,
along with his brothers and sisters, to Matsusaka in Mie prefecture,
where he stayed until 1924. It was whilst he was attending high school
that the young and rebellious Yasujiro nurtured his obsessive interest
in cinema. He would often play truant from school so that he
could indulge his voracious appetite for (mostly) American films.
After leaving school in 1921, he planned to study economics at Kobe
University but failed the entrance exam. The following year, he
worked as a supply teacher at a school in Mie prefecture.
By this time, the rabidly cinephilic Ozu had ambitions to become a film
director. In 1923, with the help of an uncle, and against the
wishes of his father, he found work at the Shochiku Film Company in
Kamata, Tokyo, as an assistant cameraman. At first, his duties
mainly involved carrying heavy camera equipment around, but by 1926 he
had risen to the position of third assistant director. He lobbied
hard to make his own films and in 1927 his bosses gave him his first
break, to direct a cheap
jidai-geki (period
drama) entitled
Sword of Penitence.
Ozu wrote the script with Kogo Noda, who would work with him as a
screenwriter on many of his subsequent films. Partway through the
making of this first film, Ozu was called up by the military and it had
to be completed by another director. In common with around
half of Ozu's silent films,
Sword of
Penitence no longer exists.
When Yasujiro Ozu returned to Shochiku in 1928, the studio had decided to
focus its efforts on nonsense comedies (
nansensu
eiga), which combined slapstick and farce. Many of Ozu's
early comedies revolved around student life and were very much
influenced by American film directors such as Harold Lloyd and Charlie
Chaplin. A good example of this is
Days of Youth (1929), Ozu's
earliest surviving film. Within a few years, Ozu's frivolous
comedies had segued into more serious observations of contemporary
life. Films such as
Tokyo Chorus (1931) and
Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?
(1932) offered a wry commentary on graduate unemployment at the time of the
Great Depression.
Despite his high productivity, critical and commercial success eluded
Ozu in his early years. His first hit was
I Was Born, But... (1932), an
entertaining social comedy seen from a child's perspective. The
film was not only popular with the public, it also won Ozu the Kinema
Junpo Critics' Prize for the first time. Ozu received the same
award for five subsequent films, including
Passing Fancy (1933) and
Late Spring (1949). In the
early 1930s, Ozu gravitated from comedy to melodrama, many of his films
employing an unusual diptych structure which combines the two. The
influence of American film noir is immediately apparent in his gangster-themed
films,
That Night's Wife (1930) and
Dragnet Girl (1933), although
Ozu would soon eschew such borrowed stylisation in his striving for a
more realistic portrayal of everyday life.
An Inn in Tokyo (1935), Ozu's
bleakest Depression Era film, prefigures Italian neo-realism in both
its subject matter and its austere aesthetic.
Woman of Tokyo (1933) and
The Only Son (1936), the
director's first sound feature, each betrays a profoundly humanist
concern with the plight of women in Japanese society. In Ozu's
later films (from 1949 onwards), the empowerment of
women would become increasingly evident.
In September 1937, shortly after completing his Lubitsch-like comedy
What Did the Lady Forget?
(1937), Ozu was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He spent
the next two years in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and saw
active service in the Battle of Nanchang and the Battle of Xiushui
River. Returning to Shochiku (recently relocated to new premises
at Ofuna) in 1939, Ozu completed only two films before he was called up
by the army again in 1943. These were
The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
(1941), a
shomin-geki which
was his first major commercial success, and
There Was a Father (1942), a
partly autobiographical film in which Ozu draws on his own strained
relationship with his father. For the remainder of the Second
World War, Ozu was tasked with making a propaganda film in Singapore,
although ultimately nothing came of this.
After the war, Ozu returned to Shochiku and immediately began work on
his next film,
The Record of a
Tenement Gentleman (1947).
Late Spring (1949) marked the
beginning of Ozu's mature phase and provided a template for most of his
subsequent films - a middle-class home drama (
homu dorama) focussing on the
decline of the family and inter-generational conflict. This would
be followed by some of Ozu's best-known and most highly prized films,
including
Early Summer
(1951),
Tokyo Story (1953)
and
Early Spring (1956).
Seven years after Shochiku began making colour films, Ozu finally made
the transition to colour with
Equinox
Flower (1958). He followed this with a mischievous satire
on modern life,
Good Morning (1959), and a
lavish remake of an earlier film,
Floating
Weeds (1959). His final three films were intimate
portraits of family life, concluding with
An Autumn Afternoon (1962), one
of his finest films. Of the 54 films that Ozu directed, all but
three were made at Shochiku. He made one film for Shintoho (
The Munekata Sisters, 1950), one
for Daiei (
Floating Weeds,
1959) and one for Toho (
The End of
Summer, 1961).
Working with a loyal team of actors and technicians, Ozu managed to
achieve a remarkable degree of consistency across his films. He
scripted most of his films with screenwriter Kogo Noda, and the
acclaimed cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta worked on the majority of his
post-WWII films. The immensely gifted character actor Chishu Ryu appeared in
almost every one of Ozu's films, occasionally in the leading role, and
Ozu was fortunate to avail himself of the actress Setsuko Hara, one of
Japan's leading film stars, in several of his later films. Ozu
enjoyed working with the same actors again and again, and would often
cast them in similar or complementary roles, often for ironic or comic
effect.
Towards the end of his career Ozu, was frequently labelled conservative
by left-wing critics and up-and-coming filmmakers (Masahiro Shinoda,
Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima) who favoured a grittier form of
realism. To some extent, the description is
justified, as Ozu rarely deviated from his preferred subject matter
(the family) and never liked to indulge in political posturing. Yet Ozu's
technique is anything but conservative and shows a flagrant disregard
for the rules of filmmaking that have become a kind of holy writ since
the mid-1920s. It is through his stylistic idiosyncrasies that
Ozu gives his films a unique character, a deliberate attempt to break with
filmmaking convention which never seems to distract from the striking
realism of his work. So accustomed have we grown to the standard way of
making films that we can hardly distinguish real life from what we see
on the cinema screen. Ozu reminds us that cinema is a man-made
artifice for telling stories. Like its neglected cousin, the
theatre, it is a mix of distorting prism and filter that conveys the essence of
life; it is not a polished mirror that merely reflects the outer
surface of life back into our faces.
Ozu's most familiar trope is his unusual positioning of the camera.
Rarely does it stand, as custom dictates, at head-height. Usually, it is
placed near to the ground - at waist-height or lower - putting the
spectator in the position of someone squatting on the floor, in
traditional Japanese posture on a tatami mat. The camera hardly
ever moves (except in Ozu's early films). Instead of panning and
tracking shots, Ozu assembles a scene from static shots of varying length.
He rarely uses long takes, so his films have a rhythm that is similar to
that of a typical Hollywood melodrama. The shots are meticulously
composed, and often Ozu frames them with set decor, with partitions and
other household paraphernalia forming a natural proscenium arch.
Ozu's boldest break with convention - the ultimate' no-no' in
filmmaking - is to depart from the so-called '180-degree rule', which is intended to
preserve the spatial relationship between characters on the
screen. Convention dictates that in a scene with two characters the camera must
always stay on one side of an
imaginary axis drawn from one character
to the other. If the rule is broken, if the camera 'crosses the
line', the characters can end up appearing to face in the same direction,
whereas in fact they are facing each other. By flouting this
rule, Ozu achieves some bizarre effects, somehow distancing the spectator from
his characters without weakening his or her emotional
involvement. It is as if the audience occupies a different space to that inhabited by
the actors, one that is outside the theatrical arena and yet, somehow,
also inside it.
Ozu's use of what have come to be labelled 'pillow shots' reinforces
this impression of a spatial-temporal separation between the audience and the characters.
Frequently, Ozu will break the narrative, cutting away to a static shot
of an empty room, a factory chimney, a washing line, a tree, or such
like. These pauses in the narrative are very deliberate and bring their own
poetry to the film's composition, reminding us that there is a
world outside the narrow confines of the story being told. Many
theories have been ventured to explain why Ozu used this kind of
narrative punctuation, some suggesting a basis in Eastern
mysticism. The pillow shot is not unique to Ozu but no director uses it so
frequently, nor so effectively. Like the low camera positioning
and violations of the 180-degree rule, it is a necessary component of Ozu's
cinema, adding charm and a certain mystique to his oeuvre.
Another quirk of Ozu is his habitual use of ellipsis, which is where he
truncates a scene or omits an anticipated scene altogether. A
good example of this is the absence of a wedding scene in
An Autumn
Afternoon (1962) - something which, in a traditional Hollywood
melodrama, would have been the film's dramatic climax. If his
pillow shots expand time, Ozu's use of ellipsis compresses it, cutting back on
narrative superfluity in a way that deprives the spectator a chance of
emotional release. What Ozu gains by this is a far deeper, far more
contained and authentic emotional response, and this could help to
explain why his films are so intense and
powerfully moving.
Although family life is the lynchpin of Ozu's oeuvre, the director
himself never married and never had children of his own. He spent
most of his life with his mother, to whom he became devotedly
attached. Within two years of his mother's death, Ozu died from cancer, on his
60th birthday, 12th December 1963. He was buried alongside his
mother at Engaku-ji in Kamakura, his gravestone bearing the single Japanese
character 'mu', which approximately translates as 'nothingness',
'non-existence' or 'pure awareness'.
It was only towards the very end of Ozu's career that the West began to
take an interest in his work, and it wasn't until a decade after his
death that he was recognised as one of the great
filmmakers of all time. The companies that produced and
distributed Ozu's films were so convinced that he was too Japanese to
be appreciated by western audiences that no attempt was made to sell
his films to the West during his lifetime. It was the influential
film critic Donald Richie who awakened the West's interest in Ozu's work by
publishing articles and taking his films to various film festivals in
the early 1960s. In the year that Ozu died, 1963, he was
virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Since then, his reputation has
steadily grown and he now ranks as one of the most important filmmakers in history, his
quiet, contemplative dramas providing an oasis of calm
and sanity in a world that badly needs it.
© James Travers 2013
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