YASUJIRO OZU: A CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
OZU'S GENRES: A THEMATIC APPROACH
October 4 - November 5, 2003
A Special Event of the 41st New York Film Festival
Sponsored by
Grand Marnier
Text
by Derek Lam
(http://www.camerastylo.com).
If in our century something sacred still existed...if there were something like
a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the films of
Yasujiro Ozu -- Wim Wenders
INTRODUCTION:
In the past, scholars and critics have tended to group Ozu's output chronologically into phases (such as late or "postwar" Ozu vs. early Ozu). While this has the benefit of allowing viewers to trace the development and maturation of the director's style, it tells us little about the thematic preoccupations that course throughout Ozu's career, as he often moved freely among areas of interest and exploration, making it hard to pigeonhole any particular period as devoted to a single genre or form. Likewise, the oft-cited claim that Ozu's specialty was the shomin-geki, or home drama, homogenizes social comedies and domestic tragedies under the same rubric while neglecting Ozu's many forays into non-family fare at various stages of his career. That said, it might be more fruitful to group Ozu's filmography into those genres he turned to most prominently, namely:
STUDENT COMEDIES
Days of Youth, I Flunked, But..., The Lady and the Beard
For a number of Ozu protagonists in adulthood or old age, college days would be referred to nostalgically in many a bar and restaurant scene as a carefree period before one had to submit to the economic realities and dull routines of the workplace. In these early student comedies, much indebted to Lubitsch, Lloyd, and Keaton, Ozu gives us some idea of what that time in school might have been like. Exams might be hell, but the students take a devil-may-care attitude towards them, whether this means taking to the ski slopes and flunking as a result, or having your crib notes mistakenly taken away by the laundry lady. Family is a conspicuous absence in these films, barring the occasional allusion to faraway parents, while Ozu, as he would for much of his career, eschews depicting any romantic relationships in progress, choosing instead to focus on the comedy of courtship, from a markedly male point-of-view. One might also note the many references to Western fads and cultural icons, to be replaced in later work by a more self-consciously constructed Japan of carefully selected traditional artifacts.
SALARYMAN FILM
I Graduated, But..., Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?, Tokyo Chorus, Early Spring
Or, "exam hell" becomes "office hell." Ozu's salaryman films of the '30s faithfully reflect the dismal state of unemployment in Japan at the time, as economically depressed as the rest of the world. A whole generation of graduates, often the first in their families to attend college, suffer job search humiliations, while Ozu depicts with irony a work environment where coworkers nervously try to figure out each other's bonuses, all under a hierarchical system where low-rank employees play lackeys to their feared, authoritarian superiors. Hardly a coincidence, then, that Ozu includes a clip in Woman of Tokyo from Lubitsch's If I Had a Million (1932), where Charles Laughton fantasizes giving a raspberry to his boss. The category dovetails with Ozu's films on children, where the director depicts childhood as a period of resistance to the injustices of the workaday world that ultimately ends in defeat and submission.
ON CHILDREN AND ADULTS
A Straightforward Boy, I Was Born, But...,Good Morning, Early Summer
Extending the scope of his critique of the inequalities of the workplace and social hierarchies, Ozu made a number of films contrasting the rules and behavior of adults with those of children. Ozu hardly left ambiguous which side can learn from the other when he subtitled his most famous film in the genre, I Was Born, But..., "a picture-book for adults." And yet childhood rebellion inevitably ends in capitulation, already demonstrating Ozu's consistent view of life as one of sorrowed resignation. The intergenerational conflict that would preoccupy Ozu for most of his career begins here: those who think of Ozu as conversative may be surprised to learn how often he sides with the young and the open-minded against their stuffy, intractable elders, particularly in the social comedies. Again, one might notice Ozu's bent towards a male-centered universe: this is a playground that belongs exclusively to boys, and his lifelong interest in patriarchal authority often sidelines female characters or at least obscures their perspective.
GANGSTER FILMS:
Walk Cheerfully, Dragnet Girl
An interesting note on Ozu's extravagantly stylized gangster films: the director, who never married, tended to elide romantic relationships in his non-genre fare, often blatantly avoiding them altogether (perhaps most spectacularly so in Late Spring), with tantalizing lacunae in the narratives left to the viewer's imagination. Not so in these genre fantasies, the most obviously westernized of his films: doomed romance is the key note, as moody protagonists get caught between innocent maidens and vampish seductresses. Love hurts in these carefree days of Ozu's youth, as he indulged his love for Hollywood movies and their iconography. There would be the occasional reference to Gary Cooper in his later work, but here the love for Tinseltown glamour is full-blown, as evidenced by the copious Sternbergian borrowings and a world populated by bad and beautiful underworld types.
MELODRAMA:
That Night's Wife, Woman of Tokyo, A Mother Should Be Loved, A Hen in the Wind, The Munekata Sisters, Tokyo Twilight
Ozu claimed that Tokyo Story was one of his most "melodramatic" films, but in fact any hint of excess in that actually rather restrained film pales besides the full-blown, near histrionic melodramas he made throughout his career. In such films as A Hen in the Wind, Woman of Tokyo, or Tokyo Twilight, Ozu indulges his dark side with scenes of uncommon savagery and violence. Suicides figure prominently in these certifiable melodramas, as well as acts of physical aggression (most notoriously the scene in A Hen in the Wind where Kinuyo Tanaka's husband pushes her down the stairs in a disastrous row). Scholar Shiguehiko Hasumi has noted the predominantly sunny skies in Ozu, but there's plenty of rain and darkness in these dramas that often revolve around acts of self-sacrifice and the guilt that they induce in the beneficiaries. As in the education films, Ozu more clearly sides with the older, self-abnegating generation in these serious dramas, where, unlike the social comedies, youth is often portrayed as self-absorbed and naively self-destructive.
EDUCATION FILMS:
The Only Son, There Was a Father
In these allegories of national development, an older (in the case of The Only Son, illiterate and laboring) generation performs acts of self-sacrifice in order to provide for its offspring and give rise to the newly educated and smartly modernized. The irony, of course, is that the youth end up unemployed. On one level, Ozu was disappointed with Japanese society's failure to provide opportunities for its well-educated youth. On another, the inevitability of parental disillusionment and the failure of the young to live up to their promise and the expectations of their elders were part of his melancholic and resigned weltanschauung. As in the majority of his films, Ozu represents the gulf between generations along lines of taste, as the older generation prefers kabuki and finds incomprehensible if not outright soporific the Hollywood movies and TV shows their kids are enamored of.
KIHACHI/EDOKKO FILMS:
Passing Fancy, Story of Floating Weeds, An Inn in Tokyo, Floating Weeds, Record of a Tenement Gentleman
Ozu grew up in Fukagawa, one of Tokyo's downtown districts strongly imbued with the spirit of the Edo era, and the brash, earthy types he remembered from his childhood inspired his series of Kihachi films, so-named for the recurring, central persona embodied by actor Takeshi Sakamoto. Ozu's proletarian Everyman, Kihachi may possess slightly different qualities from film to film, but the character's happy-go-lucky nature and stubborn sense of pride and honor remain constant. Ozu was quite fond of the communal spirit that was a characteristic of this earlier era, and the generosity of neighbors in these films ready to help those in need with food, money, or care contrasts sharply with the petty disputes and alienating gossip to be found in the more modern urban communities of Good Morning and An Autumn Afternoon. Some social commentators found disappointing Ozu's turn from this earlier, proletarian milieu to the upscale settings of his social comedies. Suffice it to say that Ozu carried his downtown mindset with him when he satirized bourgeois manners in films like What Did the Lady Forget? and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. The Kihachi films can also be seen as the urtext for Yoji Yamada's phenomenally popular series of Tora-San films, centered on a recognizably downtown type reminiscent of Kihachi and always played by character actor Kiyoshi Atsumi.
SOCIAL COMEDY:
What Did the Lady Forget?, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, Equinox Flower
Ozu's favorite Hollywood director was Ernst Lubitsch, and he learned his lessons well from such films as The Marriage Circle in satirizing the manners of the bourgeois. The title says it all: The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. Ozu, who once modestly compared his film output to the food offered by a tofu seller ("Tofu is what I make. Those looking for steaks or pork chop need to look elsewhere"), was clearly fond of the downtown milieu of his childhood and its virtues of modesty and frugality. Thus he always viewed the polite environs of his bourgeois films with an ironic distance, quietly mocking its manners and occasionally letting his bathroom humor rip, sending a few gentle (if smelly) shock waves into the rarefied air.
DOCUMENTARY:
Kagamijishi
Ozu's only documentary was made to order; he hardly showed any interest otherwise in the form, despite a few "city symphony" sequences here and there in his output, most notably the morning commute montage in Early Spring.
FAMILY SAGA:
Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Tokyo Story, The End of Summer
Ozu made a handful of films featuring a large cast of characters and an extended family structure. With the exception of Early Summer, these films revolve around the death of an elder (a mother in the case of Tokyo Story, patriarchs in Toda Family and The End of Summer), and the tenor is far more somber than in the comedies and the marriage films. In contrast to the marriage films, where Ozu portrays sons and daughters considerate almost to a fault of their widowed parent's feelings and lonely predicament, the family sagas depict any number of self-absorbed offspring too busy, mindless, or simply self-obsessed to take care of their parents (the daughter in Tokyo Story being a prime example). Parents are the victims of their children's callousness in these films, shunted from one offspring's household to another, with Mambei in The End of Summer a notable exception: here, it's the patriach who arouses the ire of his children by selfishly neglecting the family business and philandering with a former mistress.
MARRIAGE FILMS:
Late Spring, Early Summer, Late Autumn, An Autumn Afternoon
These, perhaps, are the films Ozu is most famous for. Ozu's favorite, Late Spring, set the template for the reworkings: a widowed parent is confronted with the dilemma of marrying off an aging daughter. Both parent and child are considerate to each other, almost to a fault. The child doesn't want to marry and leave the parent alone and uncared for; the parent doesn't want the child to grow past the appropriate age for marriage and lead a lonely life. The theme was clearly close to Ozu's heart, as he never married and lived with his beloved mother to the very end of her life, and it inspired the director to some of his most moving and indelible work. The depictions of an empty household at the end of Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoon, where Chishu Ryu's father is confronted with a deafening silence in the void left by his daughter's marriage, easily belong among the all-time greatest sequences in cinema, with Ryu's hugely eloquent gestures and Ozu's spatial montages as apparently simple as they are profoundly moving. Best seen as a tetralogy that marks the changes in societal values over time, these variations on a theme beautifully demonstrate the way Ozu took note of nuances in evolving cultural codes, as evidenced by the change from the quietly obeisant daughter of Late Spring to the emasculated patriach and his openly assertive daughter in An Autumn Afternoon.
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