Ozu: The Mundane Made Magnificent

“I believe it was Ozu’s wish to have people feel those things that can’t be described in words.”

-Shizou Yamanouchi, In Search of Ozu, 2018

Chishū Ryū and Chieko Higashiyama in  

an iconic shot from Tokyo Story

I think it’s fair to say that most casual movie fans have never heard of Yasujirō Ozu, and those who have probably aren’t fans of his work. It’s not surprising, Ozu is far from an accessible filmmaker, especially for those already disinterested in world cinema. He made dozens of movies in a career over three decades, and the only ones anyone ever talks about, produced late in his career, are kind of all the same. If you’ve seen two or three of his movies, you’ve seen most of them. They’re usually centred on families, with a particular focus on the relationship between generations, there’s often an arranged marriage, always Chishū Ryū, a modern middle-class setting, commentary on contemporary social values vs. traditionalism, a static camera fixed at a low altitude, strikingly specific compositions, an absence of musical score, and a famously slow pace. More than any other filmmaker I love, Ozu is liable to prompt responses of bafflement and boredom in most of my friends, who would immediately question my taste and forbid me from choosing another movie to watch.

Machikō Kyō and Ganjirō Nakamura in

Floating Weeds

Ozu movies are boring however, and that’s kind of their charm. They’re these minuscule slice-of-life films filled to the brim with an immense naturalism both in story and style. Not a lot happens and yet I feel invested in the narratives; the characters are often distant in their emotions and actions, however I greatly feel for them. I can’t entirely explain why they connect with me and other cinephiles, but they do. I enjoy them, am mellowed by them, and I know it has something to do with Ozu’s brilliant craft as both a storyteller and an artist.

Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963) began his career in the silent era (which lasted into the mid-1930s in Japan), making dozens of movies in the span of nine years, though most of them are lost. Many of them were comedies and gangster movies far removed from the tone of his later work and so obscure even I haven’t seen any of them. He worked in sound for over a decade before Late Spring in 1949 kicked off the final stage of his career where most of his best films would come out of; where his technical prowess was most refined, where he’d discover the stories he wanted to tell.

Answering to a disappointed father. Kinuyo Tanaka, 

Ineko Arima, and Shin Saburi in Equinox Flower

These were simple stories, but stories that held a lot of weight for post-war Japan. To some degree, their realism worked to foster a status quo, a sense of normalcy and prosperity not unlike American post-war films like The Best Years of Our Lives and It’s a Wonderful Life. But there was a deep feeling of melancholy and a search for meaning beneath that exterior, and more often than not a sense of uncertainty rather than outright hope; Japan had lost the war after all. A lot of the themes embedded in the texts of these films were on the minds of everyday people trying to find what the new national identity was, and Ozu explored it through both old and young lenses.

Granted, he very clearly represented the old lens. The impression is always that Ozu was quite conservative, and had a longing for the social traditions that were being redefined in the middle of the twentieth century more than a genuine interest in or open-mindedness for the new order that was shaping up. Tokyo Story equates industrialization and metropolitan life with a dissemination of the family, Good Morning expresses a very cynical view on the genesis of television, and Tokyo Twilight sees a woman seem to be cosmically punished for having an abortion. Marriage is seen as an absolute necessity for women of a certain age and arranged unions are portrayed quite positively. 

Setsuko Hara, Chikage Awashima, Matsuko Shiga, and

Kuniko Igawa in Early Summer

However, every so often a forward-thinking view rears its head. Late Spring ends with a father encouraging his daughters’ agency by urging her into a life without him. Early Summer sees a daughter defying her familys’ expectations and making the choice to move away. And Equinox Flower has a whole moral about how the older generation should just lighten up a little in regards to their daughters’ decisions. As old-fashioned as these stories were, Ozu still had a curiosity for the modern world, a fascination particularly with how family dynamics were changing, explored perhaps most explicitly in Tokyo Story, which ends on an affirmation that parents and children naturally grow apart as the children begin their independent lives. You sense that this is something strange to Ozu, but he doesn’t condemn it -where the younger generation was concerned he at least tried to be neutral.

A bitter confrontation between lovers. Kyō

and Nakamura in Floating Weeds

These stories are also quite comfortable narratives, with the focus on social customs, matchmaking, and families reminding me a lot of Jane Austen novels, funnily enough. And for all the transcendental pacing and style, the lightness of plot, Ozu and regular co-writer Kogo Noda demonstrated a great skill with writing melodrama. Floating Weeds, perhaps my favourite Ozu film, is a good example of this, being the story a middle-aged actor having to confront the grown-up son of an affair he had some decades prior. In addition to the drama of this mans’ life, constantly on the road with his kabuki troupe, unable to have any form of a settled existence, there are a couple major scenes high on the emotion that Ozu often downplays between the man and his mistress and in the tumult of the big revelation. Indeed Ozu knew exactly how to use emotion and when to expose a connection we hardly knew had formed -such as the breakdown at the end of Tokyo Twilight (actually a lot of that movie to be honest) or the solemn grief dotted with bursts of weeping at the culmination of The End of Summer. There’s an incredibly touching moment near the end of An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu’s perfect swansong, where an old veteran drunkenly sings along to a war march with sincerity where earlier he had done so with mockery. These characters and their lives, as unremarkable as they are, have a tenderness to them, a heartfelt empathy and a resonating familiarity.  

Chishū Ryū delivers a poignant

and heartbreaking speech to his

daughter Setsuko Hara in

Late Spring

Ozu had his collection of regular collaborators, like many a director, but he often seemed to work with the same troupe of actors. Aside from the aforementioned Ryū, who appeared in just about every Ozu movie, viewers may notice that the dad in Good Morning is the boyfriend in Equinox Flower is the son in An Autumn Afternoon; or the oldest daughter in Tokyo Story is the neighbourhood gossip in Good Morning is the abandoned mother in Floating Weeds -respectively Keiji Sada and Haruko Sugimura. His favourite leading lady seemed to be Setsuko Hara, who in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and Tokyo Twilight got to play three of Ozu’s richest characters (and who anime fans may know was the loose inspiration behind Satoshi Kon’s masterful Millennium Actress). He had a company essentially, many of whom were more than willing to play bit parts in some movies and leads in others. Watching an Ozu film thus has the quaintness of seeing community theatre productions, but with good actors in the rotating roles playing characters in well-written relationships.

A mother and daughter reunited under melodramatic

circumstances. Isuzu Yamada and Ineko Arima in

Tokyo Twilight

Ozu movies more than anything else, are about relationships –between parents and children, siblings, and spouses, and the multitude of ways those relationships function. And his actors are good enough to carry your investment in these relationships. How sweet is the bond between the elderly couple of Tokyo Story and their daughter-in-law? Or the close father and daughter at the centre of Late Spring; the mother and daughter of Late Autumn? There’s a lovely understanding between the sisters of Tokyo Twilight, and the way the younger daughter of The End of Summer keeps a check on her widowed sister-in-law’s self-deprecating remarks is beautiful. But there are also turbulent or troubled relationships: consider the stubborn father of Equinox Flower, the distant children of Tokyo Story, the ignorant protagonist of Floating Weeds (hell, the plot of Tokyo Twilight hinges on an absentee mother). All of these characters have to make reparations with loved ones, and though often they do, Ozu’s a savvy enough storyteller to know this can’t always be the case –hence the bittersweet ending to Floating Weeds and the cold resolution to Tokyo Twilight.

A couple boys watch sumo wrestling on their new

T.V. in Good Morning

However, what’s really most alluring about Ozu’s movies, what creates the space for the connections to stories and characters to be made, is his most fascinating and alienating cinematic characteristic: his trademark techniques, and strict adherence to them. Ozu’s films all look and feel the same by design, owing to his very particular vision, defined and discussed thoroughly in Lewis Bonds’ terrific video essay Yasujirō Ozu: The Depth of Simplicity –which I’ll try not to regurgitate. What interests me is how his unique artistic choices communicate a relationship to the viewer, or at least to the viewer open to receiving one. How his style in breaking many unwritten rules of cinema is ultimately more cinematic than most films that play their presentation straight. And how this approach to filmmaking gives us an idea of how he saw the world.

Ozu's signature tatami-shot. Yoko Tsukasa

and Mariko Okada converse in Late Autumn

Perhaps his most obvious technique is his tatami-shot, where his camera is perched at about eye-level of someone sitting on a tatami mat (“Crab’s Legs” was the nickname given to the tripod used). For indoor scenes he rarely ever strayed from this specific positioning and had no interest in overhead shots, angular shots, or any shot that would require movement on the part of the camera. Ozu’s transitions were always straight cuts; no fades, no dissolves, no wipes of the kind his contemporary Akira Kurosawa was popularizing. The image remained completely static but for the movement within the frame until the next image was needed. In a way it’s a rejection of cinematic evolution -Ozu quite purposefully refusing to use any of the tricks and methods devised through decades of film innovation. He seemed to see film as merely an extension of photography, of painting -which he was quite fond of himself; preferring to explore film in its purest distillation rather than its limitless potential.

An example of Ozu's head-on shooting technique.

Yoko Tsukasa in The End of Summer

But this was a form of experimentation itself, and Ozu’s unique composition was certainly novel. Few other filmmakers care so precisely about each individual shot, each art design and costume choice, are as specific about what appears in the frame to the point the finished image is a near exact replica of his hand-drawn storyboards. Nothing is by accident. And while there’s no real reason for objects to be where they are (except for a few symbolic paintings), there very much is a purpose for why the people fill the centre of the frame. Often when in conversation, Ozu would shoot the subject in medium-close talking directly to the camera -a technique best recognized now for its adoption by Wes Anderson. Furthermore, they’re usually seated on tatami mats where again, the view of the camera is permanently fixed. This creates an unparalleled atmosphere of intimacy -you feel like you’re in the room with them, that they’re talking to you. 

Feeling a part of the scene. Haruko Sugimura,

Chishū Ryū, So Yamamura, Shirō Ōsaka, Setsuko Hara,

and Kyōko Kagawa in mourning at the end of Tokyo Story 

Even in longer shots when multiple characters are grouped around a table drinking sake as often happens, you get the sense you’re an observer or an eavesdropper on their communion. In addition to the genius of its effect, this style brilliantly fleshes out the characters where they might feel flat or undefined otherwise. They come off as real people, pleasant people, and you just kind of love them. You’re drawn to their relationships, their dramas, their tragedies. And all because Ozu found a way to immerse you in a scene so effortlessly by simply stripping filmmaking of its technical flourishes.

A beautiful Shima Iwashita before her unseen

wedding in An Autumn Afternoon

There’s a purity to that, which I think is what makes Ozu special. His style does away with the artifice of film; by keeping his cinematography and editing choices minimalist and strict, he truly created movies where less was more. He never revealed where his visual technique came from, but I think it had to do with his love of painting. Each shot was its own little work of art that perhaps Ozu didn’t want to disturb the equilibrium of by panning away or using a less conventional transition.  Perhaps he wanted to preserve the moment, and that’s why he would fixate on it, even for a time before or after the action or exposition takes place. This would test the patience of most western audiences, even of his time, but Ozu wasn’t afraid of showing the mundanities of life, because to him they were surely the most important things. It would certainly explain his fondness for ellipses, his tendency to build to moments of great importance to the plot, yet not actually show them. Deaths and weddings almost always happen off-screen despite being major culminations for the stories. Ozu is saying that those “big moments” aren’t what really matters, it’s the relationships and choices in between that make a difference.

A solemn Chishū Ryū drunk and alone at the

end of An Autumn Afternoon

A lot of this is conjecture. Ozu kept a regular diary, but didn’t dispense with his deep feelings about anything, apart from what can be inferred from his art (presuming you don’t ascribe to Death of the Author). I find it curious though that none of his films from that late period of his career focussed on the relationship between mothers and sons, given his closeness with his own mother, living unmarried with her until her death in 1962. Ozu was a lonely man and likely felt especially so after her death. Shizou Yamanouchi, the producer of An Autumn Afternoon, posited that that film was a translation of his feelings of loneliness; and added to its poignancy as his final film is the fact it broke from Ozu’s tradition of Still Life endings to close on his protagonist alone in an empty home. Loneliness is a prominent theme throughout his career, but never in a pitiful light. He was always aware of mortality and the transience of life, how as one begins a new chapter, another ends. But this was never a bad thing, merely a truth to be acknowledged and accepted. Life goes on, don’t grieve, just remember to cherish each moment, each loved one. Says Ryū’s cameo in The End of Summer, “No matter how many die, new lives will be born to take their place.”

Yasujirō Ozu was an unequivocally inimitable artist. There never was nor will be a filmmaker equal to his particular talent. “His style managed to walk a line so narrow that it can’t be taught; the best way to understand it is to feel it.” Lewis Bond is right. Even after all that study, analysis, and personal musing I still can’t fully articulate why I like and admire his work so much, and I certainly can’t do it justice in a mere essay. Ozu movies must be seen by a viewer open to their challenges. As much as he would ignore the maxim of “show don’t tell” given his movies intentionally hide many of their most significant developments, they are still works that can only exist in film. Yes, they are slow and a little dreary with low stakes and low energy, but they are also brilliant. Ozu may be an acquired taste of world cinema, but once acquired it is an insatiable buffet you can’t help but return to again and again.

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