Yasujirô Ozu

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.

Filmography

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