By Zach Campbell

Our brains have something like a hundred billion neurons, each of which has fifty or a hundred different kinds of connections with other neurons. That's what experience is. All those billions upon billions of different chemical baths overlapping and interacting. And that's what a great work of art stimulates. … We may remember plot or psychology or symbols, but it's those millions of electro-chemical flickers that we are experiencing, and that criticism must find a way of describing. We may understand backward, but we live forward, and we must find a way of making criticism responsive to our living, not just our understanding.
-- Ray Carney

Various cities throughout the world are this year celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu’s birth by holding retrospectives of his work.  What follows are some of my ideas on how Ozu’s cinema operates and the principles on which viewers can approach them. 

TO BE TAKEN OUT OF ONE MOMENT AND RELEASED INTO ANOTHER

Yasujiro Ozu is a supremely opaque filmmaker.  Thousands of brilliant words could be (and have been) written on him, and in the end we return to our starting point.  It’s not that Ozu possesses some mystical inscrutability—it’s that his films are such that critical scrutiny becomes a termitish (pace Manny Farber) process, leaving behind only “signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”  We end up where we begin, justified only by the richness of the journey.

When watching Ozu, I feel not that I’m seeing representations of situations and reproductions of emotional states: what Ozu does (what most of my favorite artists do) is challenge the viewer with an experience one cannot step inside and “figure out,” but rather an experience one must live beside (for a few minutes or hours), and study as they would a person or animal or object (which is to say that the films are not forbidding to the viewer).  We negotiate the rhythmic storytelling, so that the Ozu’s famous transition shots and unorthodox shooting techniques (he breaks the 180-degree rule!) acquire their own sense and form.  Ozu’s films are not “difficult”—how disappointing it has to be for someone to come to Ozu and realize he’s not the challenging Zen sage that many critics (particularly mainstream ones) insist that he is. 

THEY PLAY THEIR PARTS AS BEST THEY CAN

A few comments about Ozu and acting: for one thing, we should not forget that Ozu was a commercial filmmaker working with professional actors.  Since Paul Schrader’s book, film enthusiasts have often likened the acting in an Ozu film to that of Bresson’s models.  This is simply not a constructive comparison, however.  It is true that both directors fostered acting styles that appear ‘minimalist’ next to Western-Hollywood performances in commercial film and theater.  And both Ozu and Bresson would often force actors to rehearse extensively and to reshoot scenes to the point of exhaustion.  But based on the disparate results of their work, I could only say that their motivations for extreme repetition were different.  It seems Ozu was rehearsing for perfection, and Bresson was trying to physically wear down his models. 

It has been noted that Ozu’s films do not allow for psychological readings, but this is clearly not true and the evidence is on the screen.  Ozu’s psychology is different from conventional formations of character psychology, but it is very much existent.  And it exists largely because the professional actors in Ozu’s casts are performing impeccably.  Setsuko Hara’s laughing responses to questions of marriage early on in Late Spring represent a defense mechanism of hers that glosses over her character’s profound misgivings about leaving her father for a husband.  Shin Saburi’s resoluteness in Equinox Flower betrays a host of insecurities, regrets, and resignation about the balances in the ledgers of life.  Tatsuo Saito rubs the back of  his neck and smiles when he’s obsequious, and darts frightened glances at his wife when he is trying to assert his own authority to his rebellious children in I Was Born, But… .

ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART

Ozu’s films often document and culminate in supreme acts of love.  Frequently this involves the stereotypical Ozu plot of the father giving away the daughter in marriage.  The best example for this may be Late Spring, in which Chishu Ryu’s professor (and widower) Shukichi overcomes his fondness for life with his only daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) and nudges her into an arranged marriage.  Noriko, however, does not wish to marry, and would like to continue living life with her father.

Late Spring is a tragic film in that it forces the two protagonists to go against their will, using only the social institution of marriage as a makeshift comfort blanket.  The father accepts the custom first, and has a heartbreaking conversation with her about “making happiness.”  Noriko eventually accepts her father’s advice and enters, bravely, into the marriage and into a life without her father.  Ozu’s film is distinctly not about the marriage as a natural part of time’s progression—it is about social pressures and their effects in the intellectual-emotional states of his characters.  Even while Late Spring takes us into territory that lets us feel out the painful and restrictive mechanisms of forced monogamy and family life, I believe it is vital that we nonetheless read Shukichi’s appeals to Noriko as acts of genuine familial love.  Shukichi is unable to transcend his social position, pressured as he is to “give up” his daughter for her own good.  Enough of his person becomes convinced that  he is being selfish, which in turn prompts him to believe that the unhappiness of parting with his daughter is a sacrifice to pay for her later (socially-constructed by no less real) happiness as a wife and mother.  Therefore initially hurting his daughter and himself, believing that she will be happier in the long run (as she well might, because society will confer upon her acceptance in her womanly role).  Shukichi’s autumnal years, however, will be marked drastically by the loss of his daughter.

This is not to say that Late Spring is solely or primarily about Shukichi.  As Robin Wood has pointed out, the final shot of the film is of waves, an ambiguous but probable reminder of Noriko’s earlier happiness, at her seaside bicycle ride with her father’s engaged assitant Hattori.  Prior to this shot is the famous apple-peeling scene, but before Shukichi enters his home to sit down and peel the apple, Ozu shows him walking on the dirt road and into his front door, a shot earlier reserved a few times in the film for Noriko.  Her absence from his life, and her removal from her original sphere of contentment, is inscribed on the viewer’s mind in this final scene.  Even the hopeful future, even social happiness, is borne of sadness and transcience.

  Does she accept it?  Is she conditioned to accept it though her prior experience has prompted her to initially oppose it?  Does her father accept the natural status of marriage, or is he pushed into it?  In Ozu’s work, as in much art, language proves inadequate.  Art expresses what language cannot.  And Ozu’s cinema of multiple contemplative energies produces films that are irreducible, but instead revel in the innermost recesses of what we’re tempted to call the soul.