08 · 19 · 26

Yasujirō Ozu: Always the same film?

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

Every time a Wes Anderson film is released, a large part of the audience rushes to punish it on social media without even having watched it: “He keeps making the same film over and over again,” they say. And with this verdict, the anxiety of seeing who wins the contest of creating the most viral post among this generation overflowing with symbolic markets of likes, clicks, and interactions takes over. However, as a result of this, what also takes over is the audiovisual illiteracy of a period when images flood the internet, but, in fact, we have not learned to observe them. If it were the opposite case, we would identify just as easily that almost every filmmaker has recurring patterns in the cinematic language within their filmography. F. Scott Fitzgerald was right to say that an author narrates the same story over and over again, just as a filmmaker repeatedly captures almost the same images. As I already discussed in a previous column—Nostos: The Return (Nostos: Il ritorno, 1989)—not even the most faithful copies can replace the original: there is always something (at least the context of creation) that implies a difference.

Anderson, then, could almost always film symmetrical shots of characters located in the middle of the frame, or create montages of objects that will later be needed for a specific adventure, but none of these is identical to another. And just as he did, Brian De Palma explored, across different genres, the essence of the image and repetition. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)—a film about a double—, Paul Schrader often revisits fanatical characters devoted to a mission that they write down and describe in their diaries; similarly, James Gray tends to explore the life of a Russian-Jewish family in New York, where brothers—or cousins who behave like brothers—face the temptation to betray each other, but always end up choosing to remain loyal to their brotherhood. In other words, everyone ‘errs on the side’ of making the same film—and yet, an inevitably different one—starting with Japan's legendary filmmaker, who considered himself incapable of offering his audience anything but his specialty: tofu, according to his own words.

I became more aware of this during the retrospective of Yasujirō Ozu’s work, which was organized by the Japan Foundation and Cineteca Nacional some weeks ago. Sure enough, watching more than one of Ozu’s films in a single day could be mind-numbing, as they give the impression of being identical: in most of his films made after World War II, the director films his characters using low-angle shots and presents conversations through shot/reverse shot, with the actors looking directly at the camera, answering each other with set expressions, such as “sou desu ka,” which can be translated as “I see.” On top of that, and to accentuate the rigidity, the frames almost always contain rectangles and squares shaped by corridors and byōbus [folding screens] found in Japanese homes.

Furthermore, the plots often portray family life and the tension between a conservative Japan and the intrusions of the Western world after Japan’s surrender to the Allies; and it should be noted that in his book Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō—translated into English two years ago as Directed by Yasujirō Oz—the distinguished Japanese critic Shiguéhiko Hasumi takes on the task of questioning the prevailing belief that Ozu’s filmography is merely repetitive. Because, truth be told, his prewar films contain camera movements and an exploration of genres beyond family melodrama (in opposition to the later static shots). An example of this is the film Dragnet Girl (Hijōsen no Onna, 1933), which is set in an environment of organized crime and shot in a dynamic way, in the same vein as Fritz Lang. If Ozu himself claimed—as I had previously hinted—that he was a humble tofu maker, if he were asked “to prepare a curry, or breaded pork ribs, he would never manage to get them right.” A detailed scrutiny of his remakes reveals that Ozu is far more than an artist of repetition, but instead a poet of the small things, who manages, through each apparently identical shot, to highlight the differences between a film and another.

In Japan, there is a concept called ma, which makes reference to the negative space (or emptiness) between two or more objects; that is to say, it is the relationship between things shaped by an in-between space. An example of ma would be the silence between one musical note and another. Nevertheless, this is not the mu (or absolute emptiness) Paul Schrader referred to in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, whose Buddhist interpretation of Ozu is firmly rejected by Hasumi. Mu is a religious concept that is even engraved on the director’s tombstone; however, the Japanese critic’s opinion is that it is counterproductive to approach Ozu’s filmography from that perspective, since his last films are built around narratives ‘concerning the living present’. This has nothing to do with death, or the nothingness, but rather with living beings who breathe and make mistakes, who keep on living even though others are gone.

We will never know whether Hasumi would prefer an interpretation based on ma or not, but the intervals between images emphasize the debate he initiated against Western critics, who tend to perceive Ozu as a filmmaker of serenity and banality. Although I wouldn’t completely agree with Hasumi’s interpretation, which understands Ozu’s work as the opposite, I would remain somewhere in between: minimalism conceived not as what is absent or insufficient, but rather as what does exist, accentuated by the intervals in the middle—that is, by ma.

Toward the end of his life, Ozu returned to two of his films from the thirties and one from the forties. His remakes were released between 1959 (two films that year) and 1962. This last one remake, called An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no Aji), was, in fact, his final feature film. This may be merely a coincidence, since Ozu could not have known that he was nearing death, but perhaps age led him to look at himself in the mirror, as many artists often do in their twilight years. Ozu reimagined his youth through the lens of old age and found an astonishing parallelism in the smallest details: he recreated visual composition in meticulous detail, yet there are still differences that become evident at once between the original and the copy, as we can notice in a frame from Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959).

The frame seems identical to its predecessor A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa monogatari, 1934),  but many things have changed: even though in both cases the male protagonist confronts his lover for visiting his unacknowledged son and the boy’s mother, in each film the characters exchange their positions within the frame; in addition to that, a colorful film has replaced the black and white; besides—this cannot be inferred from a single frame—but the original version is a silent film. What seems identical at first glance dissolves when examined attentively. By doing so, it becomes evident that Ozu, far from trying to make identical remakes, has evolved and seeks to prove the opposite. If we watch the films as they are meant to be—in motion—both films produce completely different effects: seeing an image without sound—whether or not accompanied by music—is not the same as watching and listening to another in which screams break through the violent dripping of water.

Ozu often reflected on the tension between the traditional and the modern worlds. In these frames, this conflict is manifested through cinematic technology, which transforms one image into another. For instance, the interval between the two—the ma—would represent the passage of time between the two films and the transformation from fear of change to acceptance by embracing it with greater tolerance. In his final years, Ozu’s benign nihilism enabled him to accept the fact that times inevitably die, and that there is nothing left but to make way for the new ones. This is the central theme of Ozu’s first remake, Good Morning (Ohayō, 1959), released a few months before Floating Weeds.

Good Morning is the remake of I Was Born, But… (Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo, 1932). The original film seemed to evoke the prewar atmosphere of the empire before its conflict with the Allies. In this film, two little boys find out that their father is the office clown—and not the respectable man he seemed to be in their eyes—after seeing a company documentary made at his workplace. As a form of protest, the little brothers decide to go on a hunger strike. In this film, made in a country devoted to its emperor, the figure of authority—the father—collapses in a tragicomic way. Moreover, in this nearly martial society, the children are trained as soldiers at school and dream of reaching high military ranks; their everyday life unfolds as a kind of diplomatic interaction—including occasional outbursts of childish warfare—with the kids who bully them. On the other hand, Good Morning also plays with symmetrical images of children: the two brothers dress alike, though one is much taller than the other; however, in this case, their rebellion is expressed through a silent protest against the adults who refuse to buy them a television.

In both cases, we can observe that the conflict has shifted from the disapproval of authority in the first film to the unfulfilled desire to consume in the second. Ozu films his remake with the same pleasure and humor as the original. Aware that the end of an imaginary world does not mean the death of childhood but only of one among many possible forms of innocence—in other words, the absence of television doesn’t spell the end of the world, much as an apocalyptic thinker would imagine—however, a specific world does end: the one our protagonists understood in his younger years.

Perhaps the most powerful difference between Ozu and any other filmmaker is the reinterpretation of his own filmography: a few minutes before the wedding ceremony, Chishū Ryū accompanies his daughter off-camera, mirroring the scene he filmed over a decade earlier in Late Spring (Banshun, 1949). 

Despite this, there are notable differences: first of all, An Autumn Afternoon has a plot that is hard to confuse with that of its predecessor, since it is not—like the original film—about the reluctance of a daughter to marry for fear of abandoning her father, but rather about how he experiences his old age, confronting the disappearance of the world he once knew. This old man, worried about loneliness, sets out to arrange a marriage for his daughter during his encounters with old friends. Ozu ends both films with the wedding and shows us the rest of the day from the father’s perspective. Nevertheless, in Late Spring the man remains devastated, peeling an apple; while, in An Autumn Afternoon the closing image reveals that the man has reconciled himself with solitude and finds peace in it. The tone in the remakes seems more hopeful than sorrowful, since in the scenes before the ending, Chishū Ryū is accompanied not only by his daughter’s friend but also by his other children as well, with whom he lives. Once again, Ozu reveals a more prudent sensibility than his younger self, who perceived separation as the great tragedy. Now, it simply seems inevitable to him.

In addition to this, Ozu’s style has become more modern. In Late Spring, the shot of the characters leaving the frame is followed by four additional shots that together last a little over thirty seconds.

In An Autumn Afternoon, without the appearance of the characters watching the wedding, we see five shots of the empty house in a montage that lasts nearly forty seconds; in this way, Ozu reaches a more radical refinement.

Contemporary minimalism appears to have been born in this sequence, where what matters is no longer the characters or the meanings—as Shiguéhiko Hasumi concluded—but the surfaces. Ozu had consistently placed shots of architecture or open spaces between scenes—as transitions or intervals—but the contrast between the Ozu of the past and the more recent one reveals his growing fascination with characterless cinema. It might seem, then, that the director merely repeated in his final films everything he had done in his younger years. That is not the case. Every remake he releases implies a distinction, and every difference reveals the opposing worlds hidden behind images that only appear to be identical. I must insist, minimalism is not defined by absence, but by the exaltation of movement, surrounded by layers of stillness. In proving it across his filmography, Ozu’s cinema reaches a colossal dimension: it is not only the story of his characters or the imagination behind them, but the story of cinema itself.

Translated by Michelle Olvera