Yasujiro Ozu Retrospective
These labels don’t apply even remotely to another of his greatest films, the silent Tokyo Chorus (1931), also showing this week. Each of the 9 silent films in the retrospective is being screened only once, each of the 16 sound features twice. This is understandable given the bias against silent pictures and the cost of hiring a pianist (though the accompaniments of David Drazin alone are worth the price of admission). But it reinforces a skewed perception of Ozu. His first 35 films were silent, and his last 20 were talkies. Many of the silent works are now lost, but the ones we still have display a stylistic range and freedom that are almost absent from the talkies. The silents were often assignments, yet Ozu made them his own. The “James Maki” credited with many of the stories (and those of Ozu’s first two sound features) is actually Ozu writing under a pen name, and the actors and crew members are many of the ones he would use throughout his career. Made over just nine years, these 35 works display a remarkable diversity and authority; the only comparable stretch in a great director’s career that comes to mind is Jean-Luc Godard’s work in the 60s.
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On my first trip to Japan six years ago I appeared on a panel discussing Ozu and learned that all his silent films were available on video. He’d just come back into fashion in Japan, yet none of the many young film buffs and Ozu fans I spoke with in Tokyo had seen even one of his silents. Many critics seem to have concluded that Ozu spent his first nine years as a director looking for a style and a subject and that the essence of his greatness lies in his later refinement of such techniques as a low camera angle and a motionless camera. But to understand his work one needs to consider some of the skills he discarded, skills apparent in such exciting if eccentric American-style thrillers as That Night’s Wife and Dragnet Girl and in the more overt and rebellious social criticism of such early features as Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But… (my favorite of his films, showing next week), Passing Fancy, and An Inn in Tokyo (regrettably missing from the retrospective).
Ozu is characteristically playful with the formal beauty of this theme and variations and relatively indifferent to conventional narrative continuity–implied in the cuts between the second and third shots and blatant in the movement from 3:40 PM in the third shot to 3:32 PM in the fifth. Also typical is his fascination with repeating patterns and sameness–clocks, hats, typewriters, tracking shots–which suggest the conformity and predictability of Japanese society. In I Was Born, But… (1932) the camera tracks to the right past boys at school marching in military formation, then there’s a cut to a track in the same direction past adult workers at a row of desks, each yawning as the camera passes. When one worker fails to yawn, the camera stops and tracks back to him, waiting for his yawn before resuming its path.
This Week:
What Did the Lady Forget?
