MONO NO AWARE, a phrase that translates to “the pathos of things,” or something like “the beauty of transience,” has been a key aesthetic principle of Japanese art and philosophy for centuries. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the most famous of which are quiet domestic dramas set in Tokyo after World War II, that feeling is often manifested in what critics have come to call pillow shots: Every so often, the camera cuts away from the main action to a nearby object — a tree stirred by wind, a vase near a moonlit window, a passing train. It isn’t usually the case that a character in the movie is meant to be seeing that object at that moment, as another director might imply. Rather it’s the filmmaker who’s gently guiding our perspective away from the action, reminding us of the material world that persists outside of the story’s concerns. Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving “empty spaces” in his movies as a means of revealing “the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.”
It’s hard to think of another filmmaker who produced as vast and influential a body of work using as seemingly limited a box of tools. Between 1927 and 1962, Ozu, who died on his 60th birthday in 1963 from throat cancer, directed 54 films — nearly one for every year he was alive. Over the course of his career, he obsessively simplified his craft, homing in on a few preferred themes and techniques and refining them to such a point that he could be said, from around 1949 onward, to have been continuously remaking the same movie. When he was asked about this in an interview late in his life, Ozu replied, “I have always said that I only make tofu, because I am a tofu maker.”
Even his titles, often indicating the season over which a film unfolds, blend into one another: “Early Spring,” “Late Spring,” “Early Summer,” “The End of Summer,” “Late Autumn.” His narratives, too, are often interchangeable. There’s typically a middle-to-upper-middle-class Japanese family living in a traditional-style house in the commuter suburbs of Tokyo. The children of the family are grown, either married or of marrying age; the plot concerns when, whether and whom a young female character will wed. But plot in Ozu’s films always comes second to composition. This was another of his innovations — Ozu’s primary interest was in the meticulous establishment of an onscreen space in which to observe the behavior of characters as they interact in mostly mundane daily situations, up to and including the trimming of toenails.
Many critics have defined Ozu’s work in terms of the classic Western film techniques he rarely or never employed: flashbacks, dissolves, over-the-shoulder reverse shots. In fact, during the silent era, which in Japan lasted well into the 1930s, Ozu made ample use of all these tools — it was only in the postwar period that he began his radical experiment in winnowing down. He gave his actors precise instructions about the tilt of their heads and the direction of their gaze. He almost always placed the camera at a low angle in relation to the characters, showing them in a full floor-to-ceiling space that’s tidily crammed with domestic objects like bottles, teapots and vases. This unconventional angle turns the viewer into an unobtrusive witness, a guest in the home keeping a respectful distance.
From this new perspective, Ozu asks us to reconsider how movies might represent everyday life — routinely eliding major story points in favor of the small gesture, or cutting straight from the preparations for a big event to its aftermath. Films that revolve around a marriage plot often include no scenes of courtship or weddings. In 1949’s “Late Spring,” a movie about whether or not the heroine (played by Ozu’s favorite actress, Setsuko Hara) will agree to leave home and marry, we never get even a glimpse of the man whose proposal she finally accepts.
OZU’S PRINCIPAL RECURRING theme, an unusual one for a popular filmmaker of his time, was loneliness. His most famous film, “Tokyo Story” (1953), follows an older couple, Tomi and Shukichi — played by Chieko Higashiyama and Ozu’s favorite leading man, Chishu Ryu — who take the train from the small coastal town where they live to visit their adult offspring in the city, only to realize that they no longer have a place in their children’s busy modern lives. Hara plays Noriko, the widow of the couple’s son who died in World War II and one of the only characters of her generation who isn’t selfish. The second half of the film chronicles Tomi’s sudden illness and death upon returning home, a story told through telegrams and phone calls as the children rush to gather at her bedside in time to say goodbye. “Isn’t life disappointing?” the youngest daughter asks Noriko after all the other siblings have quickly scattered following the funeral. “Yes, it is,” the war widow responds with the saddest of smiles. “Tokyo Story” ends on the paired sounds of a chugging boat engine (like a ticking clock) and a stoic sigh, as the newly bereft Shukichi sits silently while the river flows by outside.
Loneliness appears to have been a theme in Ozu’s enigmatic personal life as well. Born into a well-off mercantile family — his father inherited a successful fertilizer business — he was a lackluster student whose education never went past high school. According to an anecdote confirmed by several of his friends from the time in the documentary “I Lived, But …” (1983), he was kicked out of his boarding-school dormitory after writing a love letter to a younger boy. His closest friendship was with Kogo Noda, his co-screenwriter, with whom he would retreat to a remote location between films and spend a few months conceiving and writing the next movie’s script, all while downing heroic quantities of sake. (The composition of “Tokyo Story,” Noda wrote in his diary, required 103 days and 43 bottles.) Ozu never married and, excepting three compulsory stints in the military, lived almost his whole life with his mother, who died the year before him. Tellingly, his movies return again and again to the scene of an adult on the painful threshold of leaving their childhood home.
Even in an industry in which most commercial hits are far too busy and action packed to be remotely Ozu-like, his influence can be seen in the work of nearly every auteur whose movies explore the intricacy of human relationships, including Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Aki Kaurismaki, Mike Leigh, Kelly Reichardt, Wim Wenders and Kogonada, the South Korean-born American filmmaker whose pseudonym is a variation on the name of Ozu’s longtime writing partner.
In 2012, “Tokyo Story” was voted the greatest movie of all time in the British Film Institute’s poll of 358 directors worldwide. But in the early 1980s, classic Japanese cinema was still hard to come by in American video rental stores. The independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch remembers bringing back suitcases of VHS tapes from Tokyo and watching them without subtitles, studying the camera height and the unvarying focal length of Ozu’s lens. In a conversation with me in February, Jarmusch called the director “the master of the observational camera” and spoke eloquently about the technical details of his craft. Yet when asked how Ozu’s work, so exacting in its sense of place, still feels as timeless and universal as any movies ever made, he found himself laughing at his own inability to articulate an answer. “The accumulation of tiny things that constitute the heart of his films — what are you supposed to do, describe it? He’s already described it so beautifully,” Jarmusch said. “He uses his own dialect of the language of cinema.”
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