Happy Birthday, Yasujirō Ozu! Born today in 1903, this Japanese screenwriter and film director began his career during the era of silent films; his last films were made in color in the early 1960s. Ozu first made a number of short comedies before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s.
Born in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo, Japan, Ozu was the second son of five brothers and sisters. His father sold fertilizer. Ozu attended Meiji nursery school and primary school.
In March 1913, at the age of nine, Ozu and his siblings were sent by his father to live in his father's home town of Matsusaka in Mie Prefecture, where Ozu remained until 1924.
In March 1916, at the age of twelve, Ozu entered what is now Ujiyamada High School. He was a boarder at the school and did judo. However, Ozu frequently skipped classes to watch films.
These included the 1913 Italian silent black and white film 'Quo Vadis' or the 1913 Italian silent black and white drama/adventure film 'Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei' ('The Last Days of Pompeii').
In 1917, Ozu saw the 1916 American silent black and white pacifist allegorical drama film 'Civilization'. It was then that he decided that he wanted to be a film director.
In 1920, at the age of seventeen, Ozu was thrown out of the dormitory after being accused of writing a love letter to a good-looking boy in a lower class, and afterwards had to commute to school by train.
In 1922, Ozu took the exam for a teacher training college, but failed.
In March of that same year, he began working as a substitute teacher at a school in the Mie prefecture.
Ozu is said to have traveled the long journey from the school in the mountains to watch films on the weekend.
In August 1923, he with his uncle acting as intermediary, Ozu was hired by the Shochiku Film Company as an assistant in the cinematography department. However, this against the wishes of his father.
Exactly one month later, Ozu's family home was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. Fortunately, no members of his family were injured.
In December 1924, Ozu started a year of military service. In November 1925, he finished his military service, leaving as a corporal.
In the early 1950s, Ozu co-wrote and directed the first film of which he is best known. This was the 1956 Japanese black and white drama film 'Tokyō Monogatari' ('Tokyo Story').
The film tells of the elderly Shukishi Hirayama (Chishū Ryū) and his wife, Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama), of whom take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo.
Their elder son, Koichi (Sô Yamamura), a doctor, and their daughter, Shige (Haruko Sugimura), a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko (Setsuko Hara), the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-law's company.
Ozu, along with Japanese screenwriter Kôgo Noda, wrote the script for 'Tokyo Story' in one hundred and three days.
Both had loosely baed the film on Leo McCarey's ('Duck Soup', 'The Awful Truth', 'An Affair to Remember') 1937 American black and white drama/romance film 'Make Way for Tomorrow'.
Noda had suggested adapting the film, which Ozu had not yet seen. However, Ozu had used many of the same cast and crew members that he had worked with for years.
Released in Japan on November 3, 1953, 'Tokyo Story' did not immediately gain international recognition and was considered "too Japanese" to be marketable by Japanese film exporters.
Two years after 'Tokyo Story', Ozu served as president of the trade union Directors Guild of Japan from 1955 until his death in 1963.
During this time, 'Tokyo Story' was screened in 1957 in London, England, where it won the inaugural Sutherland Trophy the following year, and received praise from American film critics after a 1972 screening in New York City, New York.
The Sutherland Trophy was created in 1958 by the British Film Institute (BFI) as an annual award for the "maker of the most original and imaginative film introduced at the National Film Theatre during the year".
Two years after the screening of 'Tokyo Story' in London, Ozu co-wrote and directed the second film of which he is best known. This was the 1959 Japanese Eastmancolor drama film 'Ukikusa' ('Floating Weeds').
The film follows the head of a Japanese theatre troupe of whom returns to a small coastal town. This was where he left a son who thinks he is his uncle, and tries to make up for the lost time. However, his current mistress grows jealous.
The film is a remake of Ozu's own works, being the 1934 Japanese silent black and white drama film 'Ukikusa Monogatari' ('A Story of Floating Weeds').
Three years after 'Floating Weeds', Ozu co-wrote and directed the third and final film of which he is best known. This was the 1962 Japanese drama film 'Sanma no aji' ('An Autumn Afternoon').
Shot in color, the film tells of the aging Shuhei Hirayama (Chishū Ryū). He struggles to maintain balanced relationships with his three children in the wake of his wife's death.
However, he tends to spoil his eldest, the happily married Kazuo (Shin'ichirô Mikami), who spends more of his father's money than his own.
The middle child, twenty-four-year-old Michiko (Shima Iwashita), is looking for love herself, but feels obligated to run Shuhei's household and care for his youngest child, teenaged Koichi (Keiji Sada), who can't connect with his father.
Ozu’s striking abstractions of the image and reinvention of cinematic grammar had reached its apogee by this point.
Despite the film’s overriding cheery tone, the cutaway ‘pillow shots’ of smoking factory chimneys, television aerials on high-rise roofs and piles of stacked up oil drums in rundown neglected backstreets suggest a director fully aware that his own era was coming to an end.
'An Autumn Afternoon' was Ozu's last film. Today, it is considered by many to be one of Ozu's finest works.
According to his personal life, Ozu remained single throughout his life. He lived with his mother until she passed, less than two years before his own death.
Ozu was well known for his drinking. He and longtime Japanese screenwriter Kôgo Noda measured the progression of their scripts by how many bottles of sake they had drunk.
Ozu passed of throat cancer on his birthday in Tokyo, Japan on December 12, 1963. He was 60.
The grave Ozu shares with his mother bears no name—just the character "無" ("mu" or "nothingness"). This is a key word in Buddhism, especially Zen traditions.
Ozu is probably as well known for the technical style and innovation of his films as for the narrative content. The style of his films is most striking in his later films, a style he had not fully developed until his post-war sound films.
Ozu did not conform to Hollywood conventions. Rather than using the typical over-the-shoulder shots in his dialogue scenes, the camera gazes on the actors directly, which has the effect of placing the viewer in the middle of the scene.
Ozu did not use typical transitions between scenes, either. In between scenes he would show shots of certain static objects as transitions, or use direct cuts, rather than fades or dissolves. Most often the static objects would be buildings, where the next indoor scene would take place.
It was during these transitions that he would use music, which might begin at the end of one scene, progress through the static transition, and fade into the new scene. He rarely used non-diegetic music in any scenes other than in the transitions.
Ozu moved the camera less and less as his career progressed, and ceased using tracking shots altogether in his color films.
However, American film theorist and film historian David Bordwell argues that Ozu is one of the few directors to "create a systematic alternative to Hollywood continuity cinema, but he does so by changing only a few premises."
Ozu invented the "tatami shot", in which the camera is placed at a low height, supposedly at the eye level of a person kneeling on a tatami mat.
In actuality, his camera is often even lower than that, only one or two feet off the ground, which necessitated the use of special tripods and raised sets. He used this low height even when there were no sitting scenes, such as when his characters walked in hallways.
In Wim Wenders' ('The American Friend', 'Paris, Texas', 'Wings of Desire') 1985 American/West German documentary film 'Tokyo-Ga', the director travels to Japan to explore the world of Ozu, interviewing both Japanese actor Chishū Ryū and Japanese cinematographer Yûharu Atsuta.
In 2003, the centenary of Ozu's birth was commemorated at various film festivals around the world.
Japanese movie studio, cinema chain, and production company Shochiku Company Limited produced Hou Hsiao-hsien's ('The Time to Live and the Time to Die', 'A City of Sadness', 'The Puppetmaster') 2003 Japanese drama film 'Kōhī Jikō' ('Café Lumière') as homage to Ozu.
This was also with direct reference to the late master's 'Tokyo Story'.
Ozu later became recognized internationally when his films were shown abroad, via influential monographs by Paul Schrader ('Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters').
This also included Bordwell and American film theorist and film historian Donald Richie. Each have ensured a wide appreciation of Ozu's style, aesthetics, and themes by the English-speaking audience.
In the 2002 BFI Sight & Sound poll of critics' top ten directors, Ozu was voted the tenth greatest director of all time.
Ozu's 'Tokyo Story' has appeared several times in the Sight & Sound poll of best films selected by critics and directors. It is widely regarded as Ozu's masterpiece and is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made.
In 2012, 'Tokyo Story' topped the poll of film directors' choices of "greatest film of all time".
Ozu eschewed the traditional rules of movie storytelling, most notably eyelines. In his March 1997 review of 'Floating Weeds', Roger Ebert recounted:
"[Ozu] once had a young assistant who suggested that perhaps he should shoot conversations so that it seemed to the audience that the characters were looking at one another. Ozu agreed to a test. They shot a scene both ways, and compared them. "You see?" Ozu said. "No difference!""
Among his credits, Ozu is also known for directing 'I Was Born, But...' (1932), 'Dragnet Girl' (1933), 'A Story of Floating Weeds' (1934), 'Late Spring' (1949), 'Early Summer' (1951), 'Early Spring' (1956), 'Equinox Flower' (1958'), 'Good Morning' (1959), and 'Late Autumn' (1960).
Labelling Ozu as “the most Japanese of all the Japanese directors” has at best served as a distraction from the merits of his films, at worst a complete turnoff.
Too often have English-language writers misleading emphasized the role of his country’s artistic and philosophical traditions in shaping his distinctive aesthetic.
If anything, Ozu was a modernist, his finger fixed firmly on the pulse of the here and now in which he created his works.
Early films drew influence from Hollywood comedy and melodrama, while the later ‘home dramas’ for which he is most celebrated exude a warmth and pathos that can be universally enjoyed.
Ozu's idiosyncratic approach is characterized by an unusually low static camera position that flattened the image, his films unfurling as a series of meticulously composed tableaux.
Speaking characters are usually framed in medium close-up, positioned at unconventional angles to the camera, resulting in his much commented upon mismatched eyeline effect, while his transitional 'pillow shots' – cutaways to everyday items such as teapots, vases or laundry on the line – appear to serve no narrative purpose other than linking individual scenes.
Ozu pared down his aesthetic throughout his working life, to the point that towards the end he had eradicated all moving camera shots and devices such as wipes, dissolves and fade-ins and outs.
There’s a dramatic minimalism as well, with the stories relayed objectively through no single character perspective, and key plot points such as courtships and marriages often omitted entirely.
This has led to another misapprehension, that Ozu’s gentle portraits of family life are slow and nothing much happens, which may be true if approached with conventional narrative expectations.
However, watching Ozu without all the baggage, one discovers a world that is charming, poignant and often funny.
Late in his career, Ozu became the target of criticism by the iconoclastic directors of the Japanese New Wave. Many decried his film style as rigid, while others criticized his refusal to address social issues.
Ozu's remarkable sensitivity to the human condition and his nuanced understanding of the patterns of everyday life give these seemingly mundane conflicts a tremendous emotional power rarely found in conventional Hollywood dramas.
His quiet, transcendent vision of humanity, however, has stood the test of time and has been an influence on such diverse Western directors as Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch ('Stranger Than Paradise', 'Down by Law', 'Dead Man').
Few filmmakers outside the avant-garde have developed a personal style as rigorous as Ozu.
While his films are in a sense experimental, he worked exclusively in the mainstream Japanese film industry, making extraordinary movies about quite ordinary events.
His early films include a ghost story, a thriller, and a period piece, but Ozu is best known and admired for his portraits of everyday family life shot in what one critic has called a most "unreasonable style."
Also known as James Maki, Ozu had been active from 1929–1963.
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