by Mark Cousins
Yasujiro Ozu did not marry, had no experience of factory life, did not attend university and yet for more than thirty years made films about the calm everyday lives of married people, factory workers and students. Contemporaneous Japanese culture did not generally value pure self-expression, and filmmakers have often told stories about subjects of which they have no personal experience, but perhaps it was Ozu’s particular rejection of autobiography that gave his films such additional equilibrium.
Ozu was born in Tokyo in 1903, the son of a fertilizer merchant and from the age of ten, he lived in the countryside with his mother. At school he was a rebel and was expelled. In the 1920s he defiantly watched hundreds of American films, which did not conform to Japanese notions of restraint and when he started directing in 1927, his early efforts show their influence. By 1932, one year after Clair’s The Million and A Nous La Liberté, he had shed Western cinema’s influence and evolved a style and a recognizable world which remain distinctive today. Ozu’s first box office hit, I Was Born, But… (Japan, 1932) is a good introduction to this fascinating world. It is a funny, wise and fresh film about two brothers who go to a new school, are bullied and realize that power in life comes from how strong you are and how many pigeon eggs you can eat. Following this ethos, they themselves become bullies, and when they discover that their father, Mr Yoshii, is subservient to his boss, they are ashamed and go on hunger strike. Gradually they start to understand an important lesson of the adult world: that it is money and social standing that gain respect. Most of Ozu’s films are about the relationship between ordinary parents and their children. In this example, typical of his work from this period onwards, the sons come to a deeper understanding of the pressures on their father. Ozu’s themes are the opposite of much of Western individualistic cinema, in which young people are forces for change and their energies are directed away from the family home. Instead, Ozu, the master of reconciliation, quells the sons’ rebellion. His first sound film, The Only Son (Japan, 1936) ends with a mother saying, “My son’s really made good. And he’s found a good wife. Now I can die in peace.” In the finale of a much later work, Early Summer (1951), a wife says, “We were really happy”, and her husband mumbles “Hmmm”. These might sound slight, downbeat or even reactionary moments, but provide beautifully calming alternatives to either Hollywood’s happy endings or Russian cinema’s tragic closures. Ozu’s films derive from what the Japanese call, “Momo no aware”, this sense that life is essentially static and sad. He saw human nature as not only balanced between parent and child, but also poised between hope and despair and public and private life. Remarkably few filmmakers share this vision. Their medium is called the “movies” and they see life as something that moves. One writer wrote, “Eliciting sorrow and happiness through drama was easy,” and he felt that it “smothered the basic truth of character and life.”8 Closed romantic realism strived for the emotions and Ozu wanted to avoid them.
Ozu not only pared down feeling, but the plot itself was reduced in his system. Most of our story so far has been about the way filmmakers used tools to tell stories and now we come across a direc-tor who was “not only bored by plot. He actively disliked it.”9 Ozu’s films provide plenty of incidents in homes, offices, tearooms and other locations, in masterpieces such as I Was Born But…, Late Spring (1949), Early Summer and his most famous film, Tokyo Story 1953), but despite the fact that his characters often learn something about life by the end of his films, they do not undergo a driven “journey”, in the sense used by American actors and directors of a psychological process of life-changing discovery.
Then to feeling and story, add style. From the late 1920s onwards, “Ozu honed, pared down, refined his form to a spare essence allied with the devastatingly simple, everyday problems his characters face.”10 By 1932 and I Was Born, But… he had started rejecting dissolves from one image to the next as well as fades to black, and dolly shots were reduced in number. What remained were shots and cuts and, famously, he even made these his own. The shots in I was Born, But… are exquisitely beautiful and unlike almost any sequences in Western cinema. They are filmed from a different height from most Western films and the legs of the tripod used by his cinematographer and editor, Hideo Shigehara, are purposefully set much shorter than those of Griffith, Vidor, Lubitsch or any of the directors discussed in previous chapters. This would continue during most of Ozu’s career.11 When the camera is pointing at Mr Yoshii or his sons, they look above it. This is remarkable. For a few years around 1907, Pathé filmed with the camera at waist height (86), but adult shoulder or eye level had otherwise become the norm in film’s evolution. This height approximated the perspective of an adult onlooker, if they were standing on the edge of the set watching the action unfold. Ozu’s continuous use of low angles cannot be read in this way and some critics have tried to find a simple explanation for this, claiming that the director might be approximating a child’s point of view. However, this argument is not convincing, because many of his films without children are also shot from a low level, while in the still (87), the children are looking above the camera, which is below their height. Other critics have argued that the low camera position and the frequently seated characters in Ozu’s scenes reflect the Japanese cultural tradition in which people sit on the floor. However, low-level shots also occur in his exteriors, in which people are not sitting and if this visual level is so ingrained in Japanese culture, why don’t other Japanese directors use this viewpoint consistently?
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Before Ozu, Pathé was one of the few companies to film at waist height. In this shot the legs of the tripod are shorter than usual and the camera is pointing upward.
Ozu’s lowered horizon has a threefold spatial effect. First, it sets the human being’s centre of gravity, (the navel, as Leonardo Da Vinci had shown in his 1492 drawing [88]) at the centre of the movie frame. The result of this is that no images in world cinema are more at rest or less likely to topple or twist, than those of Ozu and Shigehara. Secondly, the camera tends to look up slightly in order to frame its characters and consequently the ground features much less in medium and even wide standing shots. Repeated throughout a film and throughout a career, this gives Ozu’s characters a weightlessness absent from more grounded cinema traditions. Thirdly, a new area of space above the camera is opened up; ceilings are shown in interiors and Ozu was one of the first directors in the world to insist that his interior sets were built with them. Critics have long argued that as well as responding to the narrative and psychological aspects of films, we also intuit them as complicated spaces: Westerns are geographic spaces, road movies are ribbon-like linear ones, the films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin are fragmented spaces like cubist paintings, and so on. If this is true, and I believe it is, then Ozu’s films are some of the most spatially original and distinctive in the history of the medium.
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Although this is a publicity shot it reveals how Ozu filmed his characters from below eye level, with his camera looking upward. The spatial implications of this were profound. I Was Born, But …. Director: Yasujiro Ozu. Japan, 1932.
Tokyo Story will be considered in a later chapter but despite its failure to be shown in the West, the spatial, stylistic and human equilibria of I Was Born, But … can now be seen to herald the mature phase of a career with profound implications for those who consider the spectrum of world filmmakers. No one before had found a way of centring the human body as Ozu did; no one had found a more satisfying balance between movement and stasis than he would in the coming years; no one was more interested in 90 and 180-degree angles and rejected 45-degree ones to the same extent; few shunned heightened human activity to the same degree; few attempted as often as Ozu to photograph the human face in the calm consideration of life’s problems.
It is difficult not to see, in this vision of Ozu’s, the values of the classical tradition in Western art. Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture prized order and repose over action and rejected emphasis or exag
geration. Fundamentally, they required style to be rigorous. Their buildings were to be constructed to create maximum visual balance and not to dwarf human beings. Exactly the same could be said of Ozu’s visual system. With this in mind, it is revealing to consider the aesthetic map of world cinema. If Ozu’s films have profound elements of classicism, where should he be situated on that map? One starting point is clear: while America has dominated world cinema economically and technically since around 1918, and much of the world has been entranced by its entertainment values, it has never been the axis around which other film styles can be understood. Hollywood in all its glory and attendant, intermittent barbarity cannot be judged the norm. Perhaps Ozu’s aesthetic is closer to this idea of a conceptual centre of film aesthetics, with closed romantic realism over on one expressive flank and a range of austere filmmakers and minimalists, such as Robert Bresson, Andy Warhol, Chantal Ackerman, and Bela Tarr, on the other. If Ozu’s people are most clearly at the spatial centre of his films than they are in any other filmmaker’s work and if his world view – his sense of the possibility of social and psychological change – is so measured, then in this sense at least, his body of work, more than any other’s, is the centre of the map.
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A famous Western precedent for Ozu’s technique of putting the human body at the centre of his composition: Leonardo da Vinci’s Study of Proportions. Pen and ink, Accademi, Venice.
Not all film historians will be comfortable with this idea, and it certainly does not mean that he was the most influential director in film history. On the contrary, his films were not much seen outside his own country until the 1950s and even then, their un-showiness meant that they didn’t attract attention. Also, even if Ozu is the most classical of world filmmakers – in the specific sense set out above – this does not explain his cultural roots in Japan. Although fascinated by Western cinema, he did not derive his balance of form and content from ancient Greece and there is one most distinctive aspect of his filmmaking which is profoundly unclassical.
In Western filmmaking, a new scene, especially if it set in a new location, is usually introduced by an establishing shot, which can be a wide general view of a city, street or a building, in which the subsequent action occurs. Often one of the characters, whose story has been followed, walks through such a scene, after which the shot will cut to a more important piece of action. However, Ozu approaches things differently and from I was Born, But… onward, he moved from one scene to another in increasingly interesting ways. In one scene Mr Yoshii and the boys walk past a lamp post and in the next shot we see a long angle shot of a similar lamp post, with no indication of how it relates to the previous image (89). The subsequent image shows Mr Yoshii stretching between washing lines of shirts which are strung between poles. Then, Ozu and his editor cut to another shot of the father exercising in the foreground. The poles from the last shot are visible in the background, but no washing can be seen). This transition does not take you progressively into the next coherent situation as does a Western establishing sequence. There are visual connections between the four shots of poles, but they have no clear purpose, either for the point of view or the story. They do not represent the viewpoint of one of the characters, nor are they an objective general view to give the audience its bearings.
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One of Ozu’s first “intermediate spaces” – shots that neither clearly establish a location nor introduce a new scene.
The significance of Ozu’s use of “intermediate space” or “pillow shots” as such images have been variously termed, has been much debated. The American film critic and director Paul Schrader, who would subsequently write Taxi Driver (USA, 1976) and Raging Bull (USA, 1980), wrote that they are similar to the Zen philosophical idea represented by Mu, “… the concept of negation, emptiness, void … Mu is the character used to refer to the spaces between the branches of a flower arrangement.”12 He claims that to try to understand Ozu’s imagery as either the point of view of an individual person or as the story’s objective overview is to categorize a non-divisible Eastern approach in a Western way. What is seen on screen is neither the character looking, nor is it Ozu looking, but it is the world looking. The story stops flowing; there is a moment of graceful abstraction.
For many years the West remained oblivious to Ozu’s Zen classicism. Japanese films only began to be seen internationally after Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the top prize at the Venice film festival in 1951. By the 1970s, however, Wim Wenders, the key figure in Germany’s filmmaking revival, claimed that Ozu was the greatest director the cinema had witnessed. The Belgian director Chantal Akerman filmed her most famous work, Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (France, 1975), with cameras placed on low tripods, as in Ozu films (90). Yet, even his native Japan rejected Ozu in the late 1950s. One of his apprentices, a rebellious doctor’s son called Shohei Imamura, repudiated Ozu’s traditional qualities. When Imamura started making movies in 1958, they were as earthy, sexual and impolite as Ozu’s films were serene. Distancing himself at every opportunity, Imamura and others such as Seijun Suzuki rejected the Zen qualities which Schrader was to write about. These filmmakers appear later in this story, when cinema exploded in the 1950s, Imamura becoming one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation.
Ozu was not the only significant Japanese director of the 1930s and two in parti-cular expanded his ideas of cin-ematic balance. Mikio Naruse was the director of the first Japanese sound film to be shown in the West, which was the strikingly entitled Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935). Naruse had one of the poorest starts in life of any filmmaker in the history of cinema. His family was impoverished, he had to leave school aged fifteen to work, and when he finally entered the film industry he was intensely lonely. His best films, unlike those of Ozu, are marked by his experiences. He said, “From the youngest age, I have felt that the world we live in betrays us … This thought remains with me.”13 Despite its exclamation marks, Wife! Be Like a Rose! reflected his bleak view of life. In the film, a daughter, Kimiko, tries to assert herself and marry the man of her choice. Her father, Yamamoto, involves himself in the plans. His mistress is helpful behind the scenes, and his former wife, Kimiko’s mother, is his intellectual superior (91).
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Decades after Ozu’s example, Chantal Ackerman filmed Jeanne Dielmann 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles at waist level. Belgium, 1975.
The situation is pure Naruse: A ring of self-aware women surrounding a weak man who, nonetheless, holds sway because of how society operates. Not all his films are as good as Wife! Be Like a Rose! or those made in the 1950s, but his best share with Ozu’s an ironing out of life’s peaks and troughs. They, are bleak and beautifully controlled.
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A typical scene in a Mikio Naruse film in which a man is surrounded by self-aware women. Wife! Be Like a Rose! Japan 1935.
This could also be an apt description of the films of Naruse’s more famous contemporary, Kenji Mizoguchi’s films. His work also centred around women,14 but unlike the work of Naruse or Ozu, they were often set in the past, usually the end of the previous century, when social norms limited women’s choices even further. Mizoguchi is said to have loved and hated women in equal measure and his work enacts a similar tug of war. This began with Osaka Elegy (1936) and Sisters of Gion (1936) of which he said, “It is only since I made [them] that I have been able to portray humanity lucidly.” His method in so doing set form against content brilliantly. Associated with leftist filmmaking in the late 1920s, Mizoguchi introduced rare elements of realism into Japanese film at the time. The Sisters of Gion of the title are Kyoto Geishas. One is traditional, the other is more modern, but both are dealt with in a psychologically penetrating way. In Osaka Elegy, Mizoguchi started to use the long flowing shots that would become his trademark. They are striking because they frequently pull in the opposite direction to the human feeling they elicit. In scenes where his female characters are undergoing intense emotional pain, the actresses often tu
rn their backs to the camera, or move away from it, or Mizoguchi moves the camera away from them (92). As in the films of Ozu, the effect is one of balance.
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Emotions are under-stated in the films of Kenzo Mizoguchi, such as here where the woman walks away from, and turns her back to, the camera. Osaka Elegy. Japan, 1935
CHINESE CINEMA IN THE 1930s
The unsettling coincidence of Japan’s brutality abroad and domestic creativity in the 1930s becomes more galling when viewed from the Chinese perspective in these same years. There had been very little Chinese filmmaking before the fall of the last Manchu emperor in 1911 and the earliest available film is probably Loves’ Labours, made by Zhang Shi-chuan in 1922. At least 400 films were made between 1928 and 1931, mostly film versions of famous Peking operas, which would be influential subsequently, and folk tales. China’s first significant entry into the story of film occurs in 1931, the year of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and in the next six years over 500 films would be produced. They were mostly silent, like their Japanese counterparts, and were broadly in the closed romantic realist mode. The best of these were by filmmakers who were opposed not merely to the invasion but also to the emergent Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. Their work anticipates the great Italian neo-realists of more than a decade later.15
The Peach Girl (1931) is a tentative example of this. It was directed by Bu Wancang in Shanghai, then one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Its story is a parallel one, of a girl and a peach tree, each being a metaphor for the other. The film is chiefly remembered today because of its astonishing lead actress, Ruan Lingyu (93), often called the Chinese Greta Garbo, whose dramatic life eclipsed her Swedish counterpart’s. Ruan was one of the first Chinese movie stars and in films like The Peach Girl and Small Toys (China, 1933) she played characters whose stories debated women’s roles in society and, more broadly, in modern Chinese life.16 Naruse and Mizoguchi were focusing almost exclusively on Japanese women during the same period, the German director Douglas Sirk would do the same in his 1950s American films, and 1960s French directors would explore how life was changing through actress-muses like Jeanne Moreau and Anna Karina.