The traveling retrospective celebrating the late Yasurijo Ozu’s one-hundredth birthday and showing his thirty-six extant films has already passed through New York and San Francisco. But if you are lucky enough to live within driving distance of Vancouver, Canada, Toronto, Detroit, or Washington, D.C., you still have a chance to see some of this extraordinary filmmaker’s works projected on the luminous white, before they recede again into whatever hole great films vanish for lack of an interested public.

An Ozu film can be a disconcerting experience for filmgoers accustomed to the fast-paced cuts, copious camera movements, and tightly-honed narrative arcs of the average modern film. Ozu’s camera sits three feet off the ground and rests there for almost every shot. He never changes the lens, the same locations come up again and again, and the plots are loose and seem to repeat themselves — in other words, an Ozu film can seem static and frustrating.

But if you can embrace the slowly developing drama in its archetypal scenes of nostalgia, love, defiance, and familial conflict, and if you are able to let the films open themselves to you so that you can see their shots and cuts as a succession of pure cinematic images — not merely as devices to further the plot, but as the play of projected light and shadow — then the world of Ozu will begin to reveal its sublime vision.

Many regard the well-known Tokyo Story (1953) as Ozu’s masterpiece, but, in my opinion, it does not begin to match the perfection of Late Spring (1949), or even There Was a Father (1942), The Only Son (1936), or The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952).

Late Spring and The Only Son

In Late Spring, everything comes together: Ozu’s penetrating understanding of intricate family intimacies; his and editor Yoshiyasu Hamamura’s beautifully-sharp editing; crystalline shots of trains, stones, and daffodils; and wonderful performances by Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu. The film’s narrative follows the iconic Ozu themes of familial change, generational conflict, and resigned acceptance of a new beginning.

Noriko (Hara), a daughter devoted to her aging father (Ryu), cannot bring herself to separate from him, even though it is time she gets married and start her own life. Played masterfully by Hara (known in Japan as the “eternal virgin” for the innocent happiness she exudes), the daughter’s filial devotion and perennial radiant smile descend almost shockingly into defiant anger and jealousy, and then resigned sadness, as her father regretfully forces their lives to change.

In the final sequence the film cuts from the white and drooping gray of a peeled apple framed by the darkness of the father’s hand and study to the wider shot of the father’s lowered head, and then to the much wider and brighter shot of the timeless ocean. Through its brightness and expanse, the light of the sky and breaking waves in that final shot cleanses and opens the mind to the characters’ tender rebirth on the heels of the sad darkness of the father’s study and unraveled life. Here we can sense the power of Ozu’s shots and cuts as light on the wall — as pure cinema.

The Only Son is another beautifully subtle rendering of the sorrows and disappointments of the parent-child relationship. We are no longer in the familiar Ozu terrain of agonizing marriage machinations, arrangements, and decisions. This time, the anguish comes from the mother’s and son’s disappointment at the son’s failure to amount to anything despite the mother’s great sacrifices for his education. At times, the montage itself manifests their resigned sadness. In a wrenching scene on a forlorn hilltop, as industrial smokestacks billow in the background, mother and son confide in each other their disappointment in life.

“Self-symbol” in Ozu

As Nathaniel Dorsky discusses in his Devotional Cinema, the smokestacks in The Only Son are not just a surface symbol of contamination or failure. Rather, the open quality of the hilltop shot and the cuts from hill, smokestacks and the quiet pair to the expansive and empty sky, and back again to the hilltop, are “the poetic mystery and resonance of self-symbol” — things presented for what they are. We, as viewers, are then “awed into appreciation.”

This quality of openness in shots, cuts, and story, and the feeling that we are not being manipulated by meaning, that we are being presented with a world that rests in itself, that lets us receive and discover it for ourselves — what Dorsky refers to as “self-symbol” — belongs to only a handful of filmmakers. In Ozu, we are constantly confronted with shots that exude self-symbol and offer themselves to the viewer as themselves, free of the violence of egotistical imposition.

Of course, Ozu is not perfect, and one encounters failed Ozu montage. But for every unsuccessful sequence like the painfully forced montage of the erect phallus-tower and vaginal-like tree towards the end of the magnificent and disarming The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, we are treated to many more breathtaking sequences: the rusting sewer pipes and commuters hurrying to work in Early Spring; the husband’s speech at a friend’s wedding about his bad luck to have had an arranged marriage and the matchless ambiguity of his wife’s awkward expression in Equinox Flower; or the stunning rock garden montage towards the end of Late Spring, where from the dark outline of a vase in a play of dancing bamboo shadows we cut to the bright white of the rock garden’s sand and lonely black stones.

The variety of these examples illustrate how the revelatory quality of Ozu’s films plumb at the same time the human world and existence itself. In Ozu we are immersed in timeless human conflicts and age-old generational dramas, revealed with the utmost economy and precision: a Setsuko Hara smile, an innocuous comment about some daily trifle, a well-timed grunt by Chishu Ryu. But next to this human world, Ozu also presents us with magnificent shots and cuts of objects (hats, trains, girders, rocks, tea pots, shoji screens) that, in the way a wall reflects a shimmering pond or a wind-blown tree canopy flits in patches of revealed sky, seem to hover on the surface of consciousness, revealing something, even if we aren’t quite sure what.

A friend of mine, with whom I went to many of the films, spoke one night, after our tenth Ozu screening, of what we came to call the Ozu Holy Triad: power-line insulators and girders; trains; and clothes on clotheslines. One could do well in summarizing most any Ozu film by taking the triad as a base: an opening shot of power lines, trains passing power lines and telephone poles, insulators gleaming in the sunlight. The trains snake through the frame, fill the frame. People are departing, people are arriving, families are splitting up. Lonely laundry seems to call out nostalgically for the way lives were, but now there must be a new start. A new start and a new horizon, pierced by the lone power pole in the opening shot — this horizon is bound: iron-bound, custom-bound, and ego-bound, but nevertheless new, new despite the intransigence of thoughts and life.

Discovering Ozu

Many of these films are rarely shown in theaters, and most are not even available on video or DVD; of my recommendations, only Tokyo Story, Equinox Flower, Late Spring, and Early Summer are currently available. Now is possibly your only chance to experience Ozu’s films as they are meant to be experienced, the only way their shots and cuts can manifest their full power: as projected light, large and on a white screen. My must-see list includes: There Was a Father, Late Spring, The Only Son, A Hen in the Wind, and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. But close behind are: Tokyo Story, Equinox Flower, Early Spring, Early Summer, Woman of Tokyo, What Did the Lady Forget? , and Late Autumn.

STORY INDEX

EXHIBITIONS >

Toronto
Cinematheque Ontario
January 16 to March 13
URL: http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/cinematheque/home.asp

Vancouver
Pacific Cinematheque
January 23 to March 20
URL: http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/JanFeb04/ozu.html

Washington D.C.
National Gallery of Art
March 6 to April 10
URL: http://www.nga.gov/programs/film.htm

Detroit
Detroit Film Theater
March 22 to May 24
URL: http://www.dia.org/dft/

PEOPLE > OZU, YASURIJO >

Biography
URL: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/ozu.html

In The Fray Contributor