Shigehiko Hasumi: Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, Translated from the Japanese by Ryan Cook, Introduction by Aaron Gerow. Oakland: UC Press, 2024 [1983].
There happen to be a lot of interesting university press books coming out as of late. This film studies book, a translation of a landmark monograph from the 80s, was not only brilliant but kicked off a revisit in the work of the great director Yasujiro Ozu.
In a sense, the synonym for cinema is the name Ozu. That’s just the way it is. Everyone knows Akira Kurosawa was a great director, but Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi clear him as film artists — but just by a little!
Even now, running back through his work on Criterion’s stream platform while preparing this letter, his elegant pictures immediately please the eye like no other filmmaker’s.
Maybe what strikes the audience first is the style of these films, which have no edits like fades or wipes, only hard cuts; and the camera position is always low, as if sitting on the floor; a window usually reveals the wall of the neighboring house; a doorway gives to a kitchen wall — everything is planar, and these are the simple environments of Japanese petty-bourgeois families.
Even the narratives seem to be rigorous, a proliferation of marriage plots with minor variations, which the late scholar David Bordwell compared to Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths.
And as the author of this book points out, stairs don’t appear in these movies (with some key exceptions), so that the second floor of these homes functions like a “floating world,” typically a sanctuary for the young female characters.
Another point from Hasumi: it’s always sunny in Ozu’s world, something I never appreciated in my earlier viewings, but is actually at the core of this object that this critic identifies as the Ozuesque.
Out of the volumes of writing of Ozu’s cinema in the anglophone world, the three personalities that stand out are Donald Ritchie, Paul Schrader, and David Bordwell.
Hasumi’s book is intervening in this discourse, and it’s unabashedly polemical. He writes against a trend of packaging Ozu’s work in a certain kind of ‘Japaneseness,’ whether aesthetic, cultural, or religious. At the level of artistry, he writes against Ozu as the minimalist, as an auteur of refusal of cinematic devices and ornaments.
“We aim to approach Yasujiro Ozu not through litanies of negation but with gestures of affirmation, and not by dwelling on lack but by attending to the play of things in excess. [...] The freest of films are perhaps those that devote themselves to constraint and that in doing so are able to make the limits of cinema itself conspicuous. By this definition, Yasujiro Ozu must be considered among the freest of filmmakers.”
And watching these movies again, it’s true, they are playful in an effortless and non-forbidding way. A conversation in a restaurant will play out in the shot-reverse-shot ‘grammar’ we know, but the sight lines will be ‘opposite’ of what the so-called 180-degree rule says. Not that this gets in the way of taking in and understanding the scene. It just makes studying these faces within these great compositions more interesting.
Basically, given a rigorous structure, Ozu’s movies do the “opposite” choice at certain opportunities. In Late Spring (1949) when Setsuko Hara goes bike riding with her father’s assistant, their sight lines are opposed, even though they’re travelling in the same direction — the opposite of the matching sight lines that happen in dialogue scenes.
He is limitlessly dear to us because he made it possible, by means of the Ozuesque "film," to play intimately within cinema as an environment with the capacity to produce constant surprises. The late-period Ozu "film" is not a monument erected on a solid foundation. It is the perpetual present itself, transforming in the very process of holding itself aloft.
Hasumi thematizes a handful of key elements in Ozu’s work: eating, clothing (weddings and funerals), uniformity (of gaze, direction), and that everlasting late-summer weather (“It’s going to be another hot day”).
To go back to the “floating” second-floor bedrooms: Hasumi understands them as a narrative function: they void themselves of the characters (the women who marry) who temporarily lived there. This reading indeed thematizes nothingness — a big point of discussion in the lore on Ozu — but this nothingness is decidedly not a transcendental or religious concept.
"The late-period Ozuesque "film" is little more than a summation of gesture and thought expended for the purpose of hollowing out space adrift in midair. [...]
It is an architectural, physical image ingrained on the cinematic surface. The films that Ozu made in the late period are all narratives of the vivid present that progress toward the materialization of this tangible nothingness. They are experiences of the here and now having nothing whatsoever to do with the afterlife or the beyond. Everything is exposed on the surface, nothing hidden. We might provisionally call this a kind of realism, but a realism that cinema has not encountered anywhere outside of Ozu and may never encounter elsewhere. This is something that still does not seem to surprise people as much as it should.
Despite their concern with everydayness and “realistic” family melodrama on the surface, Hasumi reads Ozu’s work as pushing cinematic language almost to the point of failure state. Ozu's "exaggerated unnaturalness" brings him closer not to austere auteurs such as Dreyer or Bresson, but, in Hasumi's view, someone like Fellini!
Much as the director of 8½ (1963) seems unable to resist outrageous physical hyperbole when it comes to portraying women, Ozu suddenly abandons all naturalness when filming people walk, as if driven by a compulsion to exaggerate mechanical motion.
As for looks and sight lines — as I’ve already made so much of above — Hasumi has insights about this too. Ozu trains his camera on moments where people naturally gaze in a unified direction — as audiences do in a movie theater — most often in people waiting for the train, or riding the train for the morning commute. If they’re on the move, the composition will be in such a way that their figures remain in place while the world moves around them.
With these examples, Hasumi argues that Ozu was foregrounding the cinematic art form, while still making hit studio films. Talking about how Ozu effaces sexuality leads to a digression about how so much of mainstream cinema is preoccupied with making the unnatural look natural:
"...how much unnaturalness has been foisted onto cinema by those attempting to visualize the tremblings of desire and the unconscious disarray that people tend to associate with love, as well as his awareness of just how banal shot composition and sequencing has been rendered by cinematic techniques aimed at creating the illusion that such unnaturalness is, on the contrary, natural. Take, for example, the close-up. Ever since it was institutionalized as an indispensable element of the romantic film, this narrational technique for enlarging facial expressions and wordlessly conveying the swelling of emotion has brought about a banalization of cinematic sensitivity, as we are all aware. In manufacturing false emotional highs and lows, the close-up puts the look that should be focused on the screen pleasantly to rest, all the while coercing the viewer into a psychological acquiescence that erases from memory even the unnaturalness of having been coerced."
While Hasumi’s text will read as old fashioned to today’s academics, with its use of the legion “we” and its abstraction of Ozu’s work from society and politics, these aspects did not detract from the refreshing impact this monograph has. It cuts away at fetishizing reflections on a national cinema or national this or that.
Ozu selected ceaselessly to approach cinema and its limits rather than to immerse himself in that ambiguous adjective ‘Japanese.’ He chose to release people and things that were by custom unmistakably Japanese from the ambiguity of shadows and dampness and indistinct outline, and to place them instead under the radiating sunshine of a dry climate.