Those brought up on the energetic diet of American cinema may find it
hard to appreciate the quietist art of the great Japanese director
Yasujiro Ozu. He has been called the poet of family life, capable of
taking the seemingly trivial and making great drama of it. Nothing was
too small to be significant.
Ozu steadfastly peers into the
hearts and minds of his characters until we feel we know them
intimately. And the loyalty of those who love his work is as absolute as
his own conviction. The number of film-makers who have made pilgrimages
to his grave (marked simply by the Japanese word for nothing) runs into
dozens.
Ozu started making films in 1927 and was one of the
last to forsake the silent cinema. Much of this early work has been lost
or destroyed. But we know from examples that he wasn't always as calmly
contemplative as he was in his late work, which reached the west only
in the 60s. He could make boisterous comedies and earthy chronicles of
family life, containing outrageous sight gags. In the last stretch of
his life, however, he had refined his art so much that it hardly seemed
like art at all.
His most famous film, and certainly one of his
masterpieces, is Tokyo Story. In it an elderly couple are taken to visit
their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain them, the
children pack them off to a noisy resort. Returning to Tokyo, the old
woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the
old man gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realise they
are a burden, and simply try to smooth things over as best they can.
By now the children have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when
their mother is taken ill and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after
attending the funeral. A simple proverb expresses their failure: "Be
kind to your parents while they are alive. Filial piety cannot reach
beyond the grave." The last sequence is of the old man alone in his
seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops of the town
and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.
The film
condemns no one and its sense of inevitability carries with it only a
certain resigned sadness. "Isn't life disappointing," someone says at
one point. Yet the simple observations are so acute that you feel that
no other film could express its subject matter much better.
Ozu
shoots his story with as little movement of the camera as possible. We
view scenes almost always from the floor, lower than the eye level of a
seated character. He insisted that no actor was to dominate a scene.
The balance of every scene had to be perfect. Chishu Ryu, who often
played the father in Ozu's films about family life, once had to complete
two dozen devoted to raising a tea cup.
Tokyo Story was
followed by eight other films, all of them as masterful, and a group
named after the seasons, including Early Spring and An Autumn Afternoon.
Each was about the problems of ordinary family life. While their
conservative nature made younger more polemical Japanese directors, such
as Imamura and Oshima, impatient, their universality has come to be
recognised the world over. Ozu was the most Japanese of film-makers, but
his work can still cross most cultural barriers.
Derek Malcolm
The Guardian,
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