Yasujirō Ozu

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Yasujirō Ozu
Born December 12, 1903(1903-12-12)
Tokyo, Japan
Died December 12, 1963 (aged 60)
Tokyo, Japan
Years active 1929 - 1963
In this Japanese name, the family name is Ozu.

Yasujirō Ozu (小津 安二郎 Ozu Yasujirō?, 12 December 1903 – 12 December 1963) was a prominent Japanese film director and script writer. He is known for his distinctive technical style, developed since the silent era. Marriage and family were among the most persistent themes in his body of work.

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[edit] Life

Ozu was born in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo. At the age of 10, he and his siblings were sent by his father[1] to live at his father's home town of Matsuzaka, Mie Prefecture, where he spent most of his youth. He was educated at a boarding school, but spent much of his time in the local cinema instead of the classroom. He worked briefly as a teacher before returning to Tokyo in 1923 to join the Shochiku Film Company. Ozu died in 1963 of cancer on his 60th birthday. His grave at Engaku-ji in Kamakura bears no name - just the character mu ("nothingness") [2].

[edit] Career

Ozu was initially hired as an assistant cameraman. He became an assistant director within three years, and directed his first film, Zange no Yaiba (The Sword of Penitence, now lost), in 1927. He went on to make a further 53 films: 26 in his first five years as a director, and all but 3 for Shochiku studios. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. His Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born, But…, 1932), a comedy with serious overtones on adolescence, not only marks the beginning of this transition, but was also received by movie critics as the first notable work of social criticism in Japanese cinema, winning Ozu wide acclaim.

In 1935, Ozu made a short documentary with soundtrack: Kagami Shishi, in which Kokiguro VI performed Kabuki dance of the same title. This was made as per a request by Ministry of Education. [3] Like the rest of Japan's cinema industry, Ozu was slow to switch to the production of talkies: his first film with a dialogue soundtrack was Hitori Musuko (The Only Son) in 1936, five years after Japan's first talking film, Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine.

Ozu's grave at Engaku-ji

In July 1937, at a time when Shochiku was unhappy about Ozu's lack of box-office success (despite the praise and awards he received from critics), the 34-year-old Ozu was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army, and he served for two years in China as an infantry corporal in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The first film Ozu made on his return was the critically and commercially successful Toda-ke no Kyodai (Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, 1941). He followed this with an autobiographical theme: Chichi Ariki (There Was a Father, 1942), describing the strong bonds of affection between a father and son despite years of separation. In 1943, Ozu was again drafted into the army to make a propaganda film in Burma. However, he was sent to Singapore instead, where he spent much of his time watching American films that the Japanese army had confiscated. According to Donald Richie, Ozu's favorite was Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.

Ozu's films were most favorably received from the late 1940s, with works such as Banshun (Late Spring, 1949), Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953) – considered to be his masterpiece – Ochazuke no Aji (The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, 1952), Soshun (Early Spring, 1956), Higanbana (Equinox Flower, 1958, his first film in colour), Ukikusa (Floating Weeds, 1959) and Akibiyori (Late Autumn, 1960). Ozu often worked with screenwriter Kogo Noda; other regular collaborators included cameraman Yuharu Atsuta and the actors Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara and Haruko Sugimura.

As a director, Ozu was eccentric and a notorious perfectionist. His films were typically infused with the Japanese concept of Mono no aware, an awareness of the impermanence of things. He was seen as one of the 'most Japanese' film-makers, and as such his work was only rarely shown overseas before the 1960s. Ozu's last film was Sanma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon) in 1962.

Ozu was also well-known for his drinking. In fact, Ozu and his co-screenwriter Kogo Noda used to measure the progress of their scripts by how many bottles of sake they had drunk. Occasionally, visitors to his grave pay their respects by leaving cans and bottles of alcoholic drink. Ozu remained single and childless all of his life, and stayed alone with his mother who died just two years before his own death.

[edit] Legacy and style

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Ozu is possibly as well-known (if not more) for the technical style and innovation of his films as for the narrative content. The style of his films is most distinctive in his later films, and he had not fully developed it until his post-war talkies. He did not conform to most Hollywood conventions, most notably the 180 degree rule. Also, rather than use the typical over-the-shoulder shots in his dialogue scenes, the camera gazes on the actors directly, which has the effect of placing the viewer in the middle of the scene. Ozu did not use typical transitions between scenes, either. In between scenes he would show shots of certain static objects as transitions, or use direct cuts, rather than fades or dissolves. Most often the static objects would be the buildings, where the next indoor scene would take place. It was during these transitions that he would use music, which might begin at the end of one scene, progress through the static transition, and fade into the new scene. He rarely used non-diegetic music in any scenes other than in the transitions. Ozu moved the camera less and less as his career progressed, and ceased using tracking shots altogether in his color films. He also invented the "tatami shot," in which the camera is placed at a low height, supposedly where it would be if one were kneeling on a tatami mat, However this is mistaken, as the camera is often much lower than the eye level of a kneeling person, often around 1-2 feet off the ground. He used this low height even when there were no sitting scenes, such as when his characters walked down hallways. This style of filmmaking produced quiet and thoughtful films of rare beauty and elegance.

Ozu also eschewed the traditional rules of filmic storytelling, most notably eyelines. In his review of Floating Weeds, film critic Roger Ebert recounts

[Ozu] once had a young assistant who suggested that perhaps he should shoot conversations so that it seemed to the audience that the characters were looking at one another. Ozu agreed to a test. They shot a scene both ways, and compared them. "You see?" Ozu said. "No difference!"[4]

In narrative structure, Ozu was also an innovator in his use of ellipses, in which many major events are left out, leaving only the space between them. For example, in An Autumn Afternoon a wedding is mentioned in one scene, and then in the next, a reference is made to the wedding that already occurred. The wedding, however, never occurs on screen. This is typical of Ozu's films. Usually, Ozu elides moments that Hollywood films use to stir an emotional reaction from the audience, thus eschewing melodrama.

One aspect of Ozu’s films that is little commented upon is his almost proto-Feminism. Most notably in the Noriko trilogy (Late Spring, Early Summer, and Tokyo Story), his female characters exhibited an independence and intelligence that was a departure from more traditional views of women. The films Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Good Morning and Early Summer all feature young brothers named Minoru and Isamu.

Though he made some of his greatest work decades before auteurs like Eric Rohmer even made their first films, Ozu's work predated the styles of such art-film directors: infrequent use of non-diegetic music, a distinctive visual style, minimalist storytelling, and a character-driven emphasis on quiet and intelligent conversation.

Ozu's influence on the modern art film has been tremendous. Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Mike Leigh, Deepa Mehta, and Aki Kaurismaki have all admitted to having been profoundly influenced by his films. Paul Schrader had a high opinion of him as well, and in his book Transcendental Styles in Film, relates Ozu to Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Bearing in mind that Schrader was a critic before he became a director, there's a grain of truth in noting that it's oftentimes been finicky western critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum and Susan Sontag that have promoted Ozu most passionately.

Ozu had some famous detractors. Japanese 'New-Wave' filmmakers Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima were completely uninterested in Ozu's style of filmmaking. Akira Kurosawa's more gentle criticism was that Ozu's work was too rarefied; he wrote in his autobiography that he disliked their "dignified severity".

[edit] Tributes and documentaries

  • The 2003 movie Five Dedicated to Ozu, by Iranian master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, is a tribute to Ozu. The film consists of five long takes, averaging about 16 minutes each.
  • In the Wim Wenders documentary film Tokyo-Ga, the director travels to Japan to explore the world of Ozu, interviewing both Chishu Ryu and Yuharu Atsuta.
  • In 2003, the centenary of Ozu's birth was commemorated at various film festivals around the world. Shochiku produced the film Café Lumière (珈琲時光), directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien as homage to Ozu, with direct reference to the late master's Tokyo Story (1953), to premiere on Ozu's birthday.
  • John Walker, former editor of Halliwell`s Film Guide, placed Tokyo Story top in a list of the best 1000 films yet made.

[edit] Filmography

Main article: Filmography of Yasujiro Ozu

The following 33 films have survived:

[edit] References

  1. ^ Mark Weston, "Giants of Japan", Kodansha International, 1999, p. 303
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ Google Book Result from Donald Richie's book
  4. ^ Roger Ebert’s Great Movies review of Floating Weeds

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

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