Yasujiro Ozu

1903 - 1963

Yasujirō Ozu (12 December 1903 – 12 December 1963) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He began his career during the era of silent films, and his last films were made in colour in the early 1960s. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. The most prominent themes of Ozu's work are marriage and family, especially the relationships between generations. His most widely beloved films include Late Spring (1949), Tokyo Story (1953), and An Autumn Afternoon(1962).

Widely regarded as one of the world's greatest and most influential filmmakers, Ozu's work has continued to receive acclaim since his death. In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, Ozu's Tokyo Story was voted the third-greatest film of all time by critics world-wide. In the same poll, Tokyo Story was voted the greatest film of all time by 358 directors and film-makers world-wide.[1]

Ozu was born in the Fukagawa, Tokyo, the second son of merchant Toranosuke Ozu and his wife Asae.[2] His family was a branch of the Ozu Yoemon merchant family from Ise, and Toranosuke was the 5th generation manager of the family's fertilizer business in Nihonbashi.[3] Asae came from the Nakajō merchant family.[2][3] Ozu had five brothers and sisters. When he was three, he developed meningitis, and was in a coma for a couple of days. Asae devoted herself to nursing him, and Ozu made a recovery.[2] He attended Meiji nursery school and primary school.[4] In March 1913, at the age of nine, he and his siblings were sent by his father to live in his father's home town of Matsusaka in Mie Prefecture, where he remained until 1924.[4][5] In March 1916, at the age of 12, he entered what is now Ujiyamada High School.[n 1] He was a boarder at the school and did judo.[4] He frequently skipped classes to watch films such as Quo Vadis or The Last Days of Pompeii. In 1917, he saw the film Civilization and decided that he wanted to be a film director.[6]

In 1920, at the age of 17, he was thrown out of the dormitory after being accused of writing a love letter to a good-looking boy in a lower class, and had to commute to school by train.[6]

In March 1921, Ozu graduated from the high school. He attempted the exam for entrance into what is now Kobe University's economics department,[n 2] but failed. In 1922, he took the exam for a teacher training college,[n 3] but failed it too. On 31 March 1922, he began working as a substitute teacher at a school in the Mie prefecture. He is said to have traveled the long journey from the school in the mountains to watch films on the weekend. In December 1922, his family, with the exception of Ozu and his sister, moved back to Tokyo to live with his father. In March 1923, when his sister graduated, he also returned to live in Tokyo.

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.[26] He did not conform to Hollywood conventions.[27] 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.[27] Throughout his career, Ozu used a 50mm lens, which is usually considered to be the lens closest to human vision.[28]

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.[29] Ozu moved the camera less and less as his career progressed, and ceased using tracking shots altogether in his colour films.[30] However, 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."[31]

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.[32] Actually, Ozu's 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. When Ozu made his move to color, he chose to shoot under the German color process Agfacolor, as he felt that it captured reds much better than any other color process.[33]

Ozu eschewed the traditional rules of movie storytelling, most notably eyelines. In his review of Floating Weeds, film critic Roger Ebert recounts:

[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!"[34]

Ozu was also an innovator in Japanese narrative structure through his use of ellipses, or the decision not to depict major events in the story.[35] In An Autumn Afternoon (1962), for example, a wedding is merely mentioned in one scene, and the next sequence references this wedding (which has already occurred); the wedding itself is never shown. This is typical of Ozu's films, which eschew melodrama by eliding moments that would often be used in Hollywood in attempts to stir an excessive emotional reaction from audiences.[35]

Ozu became recognized internationally when his films were shown abroad.[36] Influential monographs by Donald Richie,[11] Paul Schrader,[37] and David Bordwell[38] have ensured a wide appreciation of Ozu's style, aesthetics, and themes by the Anglophonic audience.