Yasujiro Ozu

Started by cine, September 17, 2003, 02:52:57 PM

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MacGuffin

Yasujiro Ozu excelled in his quiet moments
The Japanese director was so confident in his steady shots that understatement ruled his palette.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Legendary director Yasujiro Ozu's rigorously spare style was often marked by long, slow takes — the camera set at the eye level of a person sitting on the tatami matting that cover the floors of a traditional Japanese home. With so little camera movement, the rare pan shot became a uniquely expressive event.

His films remain tremendously evocative, with a flourish of superbly composed images introducing key scenes. Shots of people entering and exiting a room — Ozu loved to shoot down corridors — become expressive not only of everyday life being lived but beyond that, of the transitory quality of life itself. (It's not coincidental that his post-World War II films frequently had one of the four seasons in their titles.)

It wasn't until years after his death in 1963 on his 60th birthday, however, that Ozu came to be regarded by filmmakers, historians and critics as an all-time-great filmmaker. Among Ozu's admirers are such internationally renowned auteurs as Jim Jarmusch, Stanley Kwan, Aki Kaurismaki, Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wim Wenders.

Ozu, who never married and lived with his mother until his death, was also a master delineator of family life and relations between adults and their children. His films, which will be featured this week by the UCLA Film Archive and LACMA, are suffused with warmth, compassion and humor and are remarkable for the power of their understatement.

"Any filmmaker who really loves movies and is interested in what they can do gets to Ozu, who becomes lovely, sacred soil to them, a very special achievement," said another admirer, filmmaker Paul Schrader. "Really, all you can do is stand back and look at his movies and be baffled by how they're done."

Schrader became intoxicated with Ozu's style when he was a film student at UCLA and later published "Transcendental Style in Film," a 1972 exploration of spirituality in film, which focused on Ozu as well as Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer and French director Robert Bresson.

Currently preparing the release of an "Exorcist" prequel, Schrader took time out to discuss Ozu by phone from his Manhattan office. The filmmaker said his own work — including "American Gigolo," "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" — was influenced by Ozu.

Schrader said that tracing Ozu's influence on other directors is "a hard angle to take — first, because Ozu is unique to the Japanese cinema, and second, the Japanese culture he reflected in his films is long gone. But Ozu shows us what movies can do when they go quiet.

"To watch an Ozu film makes you think about not moving the camera so much, to slow down on the editing and the performances, letting the performances unfold," Schrader said. "When you start to do this you start getting things you don't expect from movies. This lets the audience know you're playing for big stakes. Making a movie is like playing poker: if you're just going to have a good time you play for low stakes. But if you play slower you let the viewer know that there's a lot of money in the pot at the end of the game, and that somebody is going to get rich.

"But how do you do that? Ford could stop a movie and go with lyrical passages, but nobody can do it like he could."

Slowing the pace

Even so, Schrader has discovered that it's worth trying to go slower than action-oriented American audiences expect. "Ozu shows us that movies can work in a different way from what Americans have assumed. That … seeps into your consciousness as a filmmaker."

Schrader, who grew up in Michigan, said he lived a sheltered childhood and saw his first movie at 17. When he discovered Ozu after arriving at UCLA as a young man, the filmmaker's work struck a chord within him.

Schrader, now 58, was a film student at the university in the 1960s when the major Japanese studios still had their own theaters in Los Angeles and catered to the city's large Japanese American community. Schrader recalls watching Ozu's final film, the 1962 "An Autumn Afternoon," during a revival there. When Schrader became a fellow at the American Film Institute, he persuaded Shochiku, Ozu's longtime studio, to screen Ozu's postwar films for him.

"I came to UCLA fresh from theological school — Calvin College, a Dutch Calvinist college in Grand Rapids," Schrader said. "All this theology fell in line with my interest in films in relation to their spirituality."

From fall 1968 through 1969, Schrader was film critic for the pioneering alternative weekly the Los Angeles Free Press and made a name for himself with provocative reviews that echoed the concerns of the movies and screenplays of his own films, "The Yakuza," "Mishima" and "American Gigolo." Schrader also wrote "Taxi Driver" for Martin Scorsese and co-wrote Scorsese's "Raging Bull."

In Ozu, Schrader discovered an Asian counterpart to the revered and better-known Dreyer and Bresson. He was moved to spend a year and half writing his book, linking Ozu, Dreyer and Bresson. He says in retrospect he was really too young to write the book but knew that only at that age would he devote such a period of time to such a project. Looking back, he says, "It's a very cautious book, very elitist, with lots of footnotes."

'You can't top him'

Schrader said that although Ozu is without parallel — "You can't make an Ozu film any more than you can make a Sturges comedy or a Ford western. You can't top him" — his distinctive styles have been reflected in a number of films.

He cites Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk's "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring" as a recent example, and Hirokazu Koreeda's 1995 "Maborosi," which means "illusion" or "mirage," has the feel of an Ozu classic, sharing an understanding of the power of precisely composed images coupled with an innate understanding of how long to hold a shot until it's suffused with meaning and emotion.

Two films recently screened at the Toronto festival were homages to Ozu: Abbas Kiarostami's "Five" and Hou's "Cafe LumiƩre."

Schrader ranks his favorite Ozu films starting with "Tokyo Story" (1953), widely regarded as Ozu's masterwork; "Late Spring" (1949) and "An Autumn Afternoon." Schrader is quick to add that some of Ozu's many films didn't always work but were peerless when they did.

"Tokyo Story" is replete with deceptive simplicity: an elderly couple (Chishu Ryu, Ozu's reflective alter ego virtually throughout the director's career, and Chieko Higashiyama) visit their adult children in Tokyo, only to find that they are not as successful as they had assumed, and have little time for their elders. The couple returns home and the wife dies soon after. So detached, yet so committed is Ozu's approach that "Tokyo Story" reverberates with the brevity and preciousness of life.

"Late Spring" contains one of the defining moments of all Ozu films and is played by the actors Schrader believes Ozu revered most: Ryu and Setsuko Hara. A widower, Ryu, listens as his adult daughter, Hara, says that she would rather stay with him than marry. But the father, whose devotion to his daughter is palpable, tells her with the utmost reticence, and yet with kindness, that she must leave him and make her own life. "That's the cycle that is the history of human life," the father says.

Schrader mused for a moment about Ozu, an intensely private man and the solitary life he lived. It may be that Ozu simply poured all of himself into his work, he said, adding that the love Ozu expressed onscreen through Hara surpasses what most people are capable of expressing for their own mates.

All anyone can do in regard to Ozu, Schrader said, is view his towering achievements with "reverence and bafflement."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

samsong

I'm so excited about the Ozu retrospective... Tokyo Story projected on the big screen this Friday, bitches.

Stefen

samsong, you are sexy.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

Just Withnail

Zooey in the av, Bresson and Fassbinder in the sig, posting on Ozu. Can we go steady?

krakpot

I am going to see Flavor of Green Tea over Rice tonight at an Ozu retrospective. I can't wait. Has anybody here seen that film? I wish more of his films would get picked up by Criterion. I heard Criterion has their hands on a couple of his films, but I would love to see I Was Born, But..., and Late Spring get a good transfer and some good features.

ono

Quote from: In the 'I just bought...' thread, on Tokyo Story, samsongI just saw it and it fucking crushed me.  Tokyo Story is a work of pure genius and is, alongside Kurosawa's Ikiru, the greatest Japanese films... no, fuck that, one of the greatest films ever made (Ikiru included).  This is an essential for anyone and everyone, the perfect remedy for the "wretched excess" (Friedkin, Decade Under the Influence.... i love that term) in cinema today.  Ozu implements a style so mind-bogglingly simple yet MUCH more effective than just about any other stylistic choice I've ever seen.  Ozu offers in Tokyo Story (my first experience with him) one of the most beautifully observant works ever put on film, whose influence is very clear in the works of Ozu worshippers like Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch (others include Aki Kaurismaki, Hou Hsiao Hsien and Claire Denis but I haven't seen their films... yet).  People will lead you to believe that this is just a stellar exploration of family, which it most definitely is.  But the film holds within it the very geography of life, perfectly mapped and brilliantly illustrated.

Simply put, Tokyo Story is a masterpiece.  An absolute masterpiece.  I can't wait to revisit it (which will probably be tomorrow... and I still have six blind buys to go through).

I'm not that familiar with Ozu, but I've known for a long time that he's one of the giants of Japanese cinema.  I'm a Kurosawa enthusiast and after seeing Tokyo Story, I feel comfortable in saying that Ozu is in every way Kurosawa's equal.
I'm wondering if we saw the same film.  Not to sound like a philistine or a modage or anything, but YAWN.  It went on way too long after the denouement (it was a 2+ hour movie that could've been 90 minutes), static shots do not a great film make, and neither do shots of characters looking into the camera, delivering their lines in singsong voices, and in tones that don't even fit the words they're saying.  It's not the least bit sad.  It goes a great way to expressing an idea that isn't explored in that many other places, and I really hand it to Ozu for that.  It made me think.  But it's so heavy handed.  I didn't hate it, and it is worth a look, but it's really not the masterpiece people make it out to be.  Maybe I need to watch it again.  I saw this in a class, on a VHS, and I don't know if that had anything to do with my lack of enjoyment of it, but I must've missed something.  Kurosawa > Ozu.  By a long shot.

Pubrick

Quote from: ono mo cuishledelivering their lines in singsong voices, and in tones that don't even fit the words they're saying.
dude, it's in japanese..
under the paving stones.

ono

I realize that.  Still, there's such a thing as intonation.  That doesn't change across languages.

Pubrick

ono, do u know anything about languages? intonation can change even between regional dialects, as in japanese.

perhaps ur problem with ozu is based on total ignorance of japanese culture.
under the paving stones.

ono

Quote from: Pubrickono, do u know anything about languages?
Considering I'm somewhat fluent in Spanish, and I've studied a lot about linguistics, yes.  That gives me a great understanding of Romance languages.

Japanese is not a Romance language, true.  But still, the principles apply.  My roommates both take Japanese.  So hearing them speak, and having watched many Japanese films (both anime and live action), I think I'm a good judge of that.

Pubrick

i am also fluent in spanish and italian, but this is not a dick measuring contest. cos discussion of romance languages, distinguished by their grammatical form, has little if anything to do with pronunciation of japanese.

hav u never encountered the basic joke that a chinese person can say Mother and Horse by just changing their "sing-song voice"? why do u think russians are made fun of in the simpsons when one of them is giving lisa directions and she thinks he's threatening her?

those are just simple observations supporting what i thought was common knowledge: intonations are not a 'universal language constant'. u truly are a product of the american educational system.
under the paving stones.

ono

Quote from: Pubrickthis is not a dick measuring contest.
Quote from: Pubricku truly are a product of the american educational system.

Pubrick

so u've abandoned ur misguided position?

and that quip was in reference to this japanese waiter impersonating an american:

[Lisa: Don't you serve anything that's even remotely Japanese?]
Don't ask me! I don't know anything!  I'm product
of American education system. I also build
poor-quality cars and inferior-style electronics
.[/b]

the irony was too delicious to resist.
under the paving stones.

cine


03

it is early so i might expound later; but everything bricks said is correct, there really isn't anything technically wrong with the way they are speaking, (in a language context, not an acting one) if you feel it is any different from the delivery of lines in current japanese cinema, then it is for the same reasons as the changes in the delivery of lines in american cinema. if you're comparing kurosawa and ozu, maybe you should watch rashomon again and see if you feel the same about kyo machiko's performance, which is kind of melodic at times. you can simply say that you just did not like it, instead of being mean by gauging it with 'technical information'.