The films of Yasujiro Ozu: true to form

IF YASUJIRO OZU WAS solitary JUST BEING DISCOVERED IN THE WEST AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH IN 1963 TODAY THE JAPANESE FILMMAKER'S PLACE IN THE CINEMATIC PANTHEON IS sure IN ANTICIPATION OF THIS MONTH'S of recent origin YORK FILM FESTIVAL CENTENARY RETROSPECTIVE OF OZU'S WORK--FROM HIS FIRST EXTANT SILENT, DAYS OF YOUTH (1929) [i]or[/i] part of to the other AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962), HIS FINAL FEATURE--WE INVITED FILM HISTORIAN DAVID BORDWELL AND DIRECTOR JIM JARMUSCH TO DISCUSS THE LEGACY OF individual OF CINEMA'S MOST ORIGINAL STYLISTS.

DAVID BORDWELL

OZU LATE AND EARLY

FOR a certain number of OF US, THERE IS NO MORE MOVING twinkling in cinema than when, in Tokyo Story (1953) which many consider the quintessential film through Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63), Kyoko remarks, "Isn't life disappointing?" and her sister-in-law Noriko replies, with a smile of calm radiance, "I'm afraid it is." The poignancy of this exchange is a hallmark of the Ozu we have admired at any time since his films slipped into Western film tillage in the '60s. And alongside this poignancy sits an extraordinary formal precision, that much-lauded restraint typically characterized as a locate of dogged refusals: constant angle, static camera, rudimentary cutting.

This version of Ozu defined by the agency of the postwar films, puts the emphasis not alone on Tokyo Story but upon Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951) Floating Weeds (1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962) nevertheless even this great body of work does not transcend its historical circumstances, and single way to understand how similar a flagrantly formalist cinema could call for up such depths of emotion is to consider these films as late fruits of a rich filmmaking tradition. Ozu's accomplishments built upon his earlier work--and the work of others. To take his replete measure, we must go back more [i]or[/i] less eighty years.

IN THE WAKE OF THE DEVASTATING 1923 EARTHQUAKE, Tokyo film studios were forced to rebuild, and like the companies refurbishing department stores and coffee bars, they locate out to Westernize themselves. Shochiku was the greatest in quantity self-consciously modern studio, rejecting the trappings of kabuki and other theatrical forms while embracing American techniques. below producer Shiro Kido, Shochiku remade itself as a bastion of urban middle-class dramas mixing tears and smiles. nevertheless by encouraging talented directors to form cadres of collaborators--writers, cinematographers, and actors--and letting them track their instincts, Kido's regime sometimes feeded bleak comedies and bitter melodramas. end these Depression-era stories move shiftless association students, disillusioned salarymen, and rent families on the edge of destitution. After society comes unemployment; jobs offer little security; women are treated as chattel. With their ineffectual fathers and stoic mothers and unbending bureaucracies, these 1930 films constitute a mut on the other hand massive rebuke to the traditions of Japanese patriarchy and collective welfare. To work in the shoshimin-geki, the film of lower-middle-class life, was to work in a genre that gave poignancy a central place.

Despite aiming at the mass market, Japan's studio combination of parts to form a whole produced the most formally experimental commercial cinema the world has nevertheless seen. Teinosuke Kinugasa's delirious Page of Madness (1926) linked to the contemporary Neo-Perceptionist literary avant-garde, was an original rejoinder to German Expressionist cinema, while many films of the late '20 explored dynamic montage in ways parallel to the work of Pudovkin and Eisenstein. The violent swordplay sagas known as chambara displayed frantic camera moves and disjunctive cutting that would have made Abel Gance assuming In the early '20s Mizoguchi started testing his exquisitely refined staging, which would reach replete flower in The Downfall of Osen (1935) Sisters of the Gion (1936) and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939)

Kido's firmly middle-class policy discouraged uttermost styles, but that simply pushed experimentation more to [i]or[/i] at a great depth into the fiber of accepted formulas. Shochiku filmmakers were at the forefront of "Americanization," adopting and revising Hollywood continuity principles. Like their US counterparts, directors built pageants out of a master discharge followed by reverse-angle closer views of the characters. In the midst of this formulaic decoupage, the director might--under the aegis of Ernst Lubitsch, then America's greatest in quantity celebrated director--insert a telling close-up of an thing to underscore the dramatic pour Add an occasional tracking discharge to follow a striding player or to pluck us toward a significant detail, and the director's tool kit was fair much complete. In addition,,Japanese filmmakers benefited from the katsuben or benshi, the commentator who stood by means of the screen narrating the action and providing the characters' voices. by means of supplying ongoing narrative information, the benshi fre ambitious directors to create arresting visuals, which could heighten, or occasionally diverge from, the benshi's patter.

Japanese directors bring under ruleed Hollywood principles to imaginative revision and variation. Characters might be discharge from a severely limited array of camera positions (Hiroshi Shimizu's Star Athlete [1937] for example) or in tight close-up whose degree of movement was dictated by characters' abrupt entrances into the discharge (e.g., Mikio Naruse's Street Without extremity [1934]). Space could be laid without in ambivalent ways and stretches of time skipped above unexpectedly. Because sound came gradually to the Japanese cinema (the first sound-on-film talkie wasn't released until 1931 and silent features were produc for several years afterward), a genuinely pictorial approach lingered far longer there.