"How American Intellectuals Learned to Love Ozu," by Mindy Aloff, April 1994, The New York Times

In this article, Mindy Aloff investigates how American audiences have responded to Ozu since the 1950s, when his works became available in the United States. Aloff asks what attracts Americans to Ozu's body of film, and discovers a number of possible reasons. While Ozu's films are not widespread in the U.S., a few New York City venues continue to present his surviving films at special screenings. These screenings draw a diverse viewership with a variety of reasons for liking Ozu's films. Some identify Ozu with the New York City art scene, especially when he became noticed alongside revolutionary directors like Godard and Antonioni. Others cite the surprisingly powerful emotional impact of his artfully understated films as the main reason for their fascination with his work. Still others are attracted to the Western aspect of his quiet, simple films, which admittedly were influenced greatly by Griffith and Harold Lloyd. The simplicity and familiarity of his films rendered them accessible and engaging to the Western audience. The moralistic themes and subtle humor of Ozu's films are also universally appealing regardless of the era in which they are viewed.

This article is significant to my study of Ozu through his film Passing Fancy primarily because it discusses the western association of his films. It reinforces the idea that Ozu was not a unitary, uninfluenced figure in filmmaking, but a simultaneously impressionable and original director who adapted what he learned from western films to direct and write his own. It also helps us better understand the source of the humor in Passing Fancy.  Comedies are said to typically not translate well across cultures--this is not the case with Ozu's comedies (Passing Fancy among them), which do not rely on the audience's prior understanding of Japanese culture of language to make their unsophisticated jokes and visual gags. It is in part the western association that so many have made with Ozu's work that renders it successful among foreign audiences.

 

I entered this project with very little knowledge of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu save the fact that he was known for often breaking the rules of classical Hollywood editing. Therefore, the question I intended to ask with my research was, "What does the style and narrative of Ozu's film Passing Fancy (1934) suggest about him as an early progressive, modernist Japanese director?" What I discovered in my viewing of the film and ensuing research was much more complicated. If I had to develop a thesis based on the research, I could not get away with the oversimplification that the question demanded. I discovered that Ozu was both a modernist and a fundamentalist filmmaker, a director very much informed by both Japanese sensibilities and Western filmmaking conventions. He developed a personal style that certainly marks him an auteur in his own right, but did so mainly out of a desire to present a clear and lucid narrative that typically focused on everyday Japanese life. This narrative and thematic focus accounts for much of the "Japanese" quality that scholars attribute to Ozu's work.

While this article refers to a movement that began shortly after Ozu released Passing Fancy (1934), it may be useful for understanding the “Japanese” quality that many attribute to Ozu's films. Passing Fancy might be considered a precursor to the “monumental film” movement that Davis describes. It practices a number of the stylistic innovations that the “monumental” films later employed, among them long takes and slow camera movements. More importantly, it contains a mostly premodern narrative focused on traditional Japanese living. In this sense, we might understand Ozu's sensibilities expressed in Passing Fancy as setting or helping to establish a trend in which Japanese filmmakers made special effort to embody a “Japanese” aura.

 

 

The Problem of Japaneseness in Ozu, by Daniel Hui, April 22, 2000

In this blog Daniel Hui challenges film critics who have called Ozu Japan's “most Japanese” director. This designation is problematic because it is based on a number of flawed presuppositions that are required to characterize Ozu's work as especially “Japanese.” First, it ascribes a distinct Japanese national identity to film, an originally western phenomenon. Because film form was developed in the west, Hui argues, it cannot be well defined in Japanese terms. Secondly, the classification of Ozu's work as particularly “Japanese” requires that this Japanese cinema be defined by older Japanese artistic forms (kabuki theater, Zen painting, etc.) that are only marginally applicable to film. Here we find another limitation: the “Japanese” qualities of these older arts could only be analyzed and defined in western terms, since it was exposure to the west that forced Japan to define its own culture. Finally, the “Japanese” designation mistakenly assumes that as an auteur, Ozu exercised unchanging control over the artistic expression of each of his films. Hui argues that Ozu was not so unimpressionable—his early films, for example, were strongly influenced by the sweeping changes to reflect Hollywood production that were occurring in Japanese film studios after the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Attempts to unify Ozu's body of films often oversimplify the director's range of work, ignoring the films that are clearly influenced by Hollywood films or inconveniently diverge from his typical style. Moreover, Ozu's tendency to establish norms within his films and then purposely undermine them renders such a “typical style” even harder to define. Ozu may have tried to construct a unified body of work, Hui states, “but this body is fractured, irregular, and impossible to read.” All critics seem to agree, however (Hui included), that Ozu's films attempt to represent “everyday life.” Hui contends that this focus on the everyday, not some abstract artistic construction, is ultimately what accounts for the “Japanese-ness” that so many claim to detect in his films. Because Japanese life changed over the course of Ozu's career, Hui concludes, so then did Ozu's films.

This article not only contradicts notions that Ozu was a fundamentalist/traditionalist director, but undermines my attempts to classify him at all. In suggesting that Ozu created a dynamic body of film with many influences rather than a repetitive, thematically and stylistically static one, Hui rejects the “consummate fundamentalist” description posited by other Ozu scholars. Hui goes to claim that a unifying theme characterizing all of Ozu's work is impossible to locate given Ozu's unclear assessment of his own films and his tendency to break from his own established patterns. Unfortunately, this approach was the aim of my research—I had hoped to use Passing Fancy as an indicator of Ozu's traditionalism or progressivism as a director. There may be hope for my project, however, in the one area that this article is consistent with others: its acknowledgment that all of Ozu's films represent everyday life. Hui notes that Ozu's films change to reflect the changing of everyday Japanese life. This is certainly a key idea in Passing Fancy, where a stubborn, uneducated father struggles to keep up with the changing world. In this sense, Ozu might be best described not simply as focusing on traditional aspects of Japanese life; rather, he focuses on contemporary life, and adapts his style to reflect its changes.

 

Ozu's Anti-Cinema, Chapter 3, by Yoshida Kiju, 1998

This chapter of Yoshida Kiju's book Ozu's Anti-Cinema deals with the amazing thematic consistency demonstrated throughout Ozu's expansive body of film. Yoshida remarks that this consistency is particularly surprising given the tumultuous era in which they were directed. Ozu was not isolated from the events and circumstances of the day either: he served in the military twice, once as a soldier at the beginning of Japan's invasion of China in 1937 and again as a director for the Information Department of the Japanese military in 1943. Somehow, however, he kept his wartime and postwar films strikingly unrelated to the social and political context of war and postwar Japan. For instance, in 1939 and 1942, times of intense war fever and militarism in Japan, Ozu directed quiet family dramas (There Was a Father) and urban comedies (The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice). Indeed, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice was deemed so inappropriate to the national wartime milieu and unconducive to the war effort that it was forced to stop production and was not released until 1952. In these sorts of family dramas and comedies, Ozu repeatedly made the same social observations, often about the unconscious acceptance of family roles, the meanings of family ritual, and the inherent disorder of the world. Yoshida maintains that Ozu's simple, consistent presentation of these themes was an attempt to make honest order of the chaotic world as he perceived it. He rejected hidden meanings and considered symbolic likening of images and ideas to be horribly banal and disingenuous.

This article is a significant study of Ozu's auteurism because it demonstrates how he was a simultaneously progressive and conservative director. Ozu was thematically quite conservative, choosing to deal with traditional ideas like social structure and family relationships rather than the more contemporary ones posed by Japan's expansionism and militarization. However, Yoshida suggests that Ozu could be considered a progressive because his films so blatantly ignore their socio-political context and focus so heavily on domestic relationships that they seem to be peaceful antiwar statements. This could explain why Passing Fancy, a film released in 1933 and coinciding with growing Japanese militarization and expansion, makes literally no reference to the events of the “outside world” and remains so squarely focused on the quiet domestic relationship of a father and son in an unnamed Japanese town.

"Against Modernism, in Favor of Tofu: Three Silent Comedies by Ozu" by Clifford Hilo, May 2008

In this essay, occasioned by the re-release of three Ozu silent comedies (Passing Fancy, Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But..) on DVD, Clifford Hilo reflects on what made Ozu such a unique director. He attempts to reconcile two contradictory perspectives on the director: the western notion that Ozu was the definitive Japanese modernist, versus the Japanese perspective that he was Japan's most traditional director. Hilo contends that Ozu was neither modernist nor strict traditionalist. Rather, his stylistic idiosyncrasies that many took for “modernism” were simply intended to preserve a fluidity throughout his simple, lighthearted films. The free-flowing, loose form of Ozu's films, he offers, is “more about film pleasure than the hard disruption of forms devouring themselves.” The beauty of Ozu's work is in the details. In this sense, Hilo considers Ozu akin to a comic strip writer such as Charles Schultz for his ability to capture the essence of an image in its minute details. He also notes the western influences that have found their way into Ozu's films, among them the skillfully-conveyed social humor of Ernst Lubitsch, the sight gags of Chaplin, and the charming child-based humor of Hal Roach's Little Rascals. Hilo concludes by remarking that although the drama of Ozu's films was always uncomplicated and close to home, Ozu drew deeply from his repertory of detailed images and simple jokes to drive “the larger gears of melodrama.”

This commentary helps us understand Passing Fancy, one of Ozu's later silent comedies, by noting the trends that run throughout his other dramatic family comedies. In particular, it refutes the notion that Ozu was Japan's consummate modernist filmmaker by explaining how his idiosyncrasies served the intended continuity and playful simplicity of his films, not a progressive artistic sensibility. Many of these are evident in Passing Fancy, among them the use of low-level, direct shots interspersed with quick inserts to draw attention to comedic details. As Hilo argues, each one of these techniques ultimately maintains a sense of uncomplicated narrative continuity.

 

 

"The Production of Modernity in Japanese Cinema: Shochiku Kamata Style in the 1920s and 1930s" by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, May 2000

In this chapter, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano discusses a Japanese film style known as katamacho and its implications for the Japanese conception of modern mass culture. First she stresses the need to draw a distinction between two Japanese words for modernism (“modanisumu” and “kindaishugi”), something that previous scholars have failed to do. “Modanisumu,” she explains, entails a sort of levity, cheerfulness, and novelty, while “kindaishugi” suggests “both positive and negative connotations created by European rationalism.” Our use of the word “modernism” for characterizing Japanese film is further complicated by the fact that most discourses on Japanese/western relations are dominated by Western perspectives. Marciano then describes how the plural meanings of “modernism” are equally deployed in Japanese katamacho film. The katamacho film Our Neighbor Ms. Yae, for example, uses the progressive, light conception of modernism (“modanisumu”) to subordinate certain other aspects of modernism (“kindaishugi”) that threaten the Japanese social order. Katamacho films often appear modern in their use of subjective gazes in the style of other forms of mass modern culture. Marciano contends that this is a result of a sort of inferiority complex among Japanese filmmakers who were attempting to break away from the stereotype that Japanese cinema was a poor imitation of western films and a “low form” of modern culture. Katamachi-style film in particular seemed to align itself European culture to improve the reputation of Japanese film.

This article is helpful to my research because it helps characterize the types of films that were being released simultaneously to Ozu's Passing Fancy and other silent comedies in the 1920s and 30s. Because Japanese films tend to express different attitudes towards the various facets of modernism, we should not expect Passing Fancy to exhibit a sort of distinctly progressive/modern attitude over a distinct conservative/traditionalistic one. Rather, we may interpret Passing Fancy as perhaps having multiple, perhaps even opposing attitudes towards modern ideas and the west. The film seems adopt this more complicated attitude: in one instance, for example, the main character's son falls very ill from overindulging in western sweets; he is only cured, however, by advances in modern medicine.

 

 

"Ozu, Sound, and Style" by Matt Hauske. date unavailable.

In this article Matt Hauske examines how Ozu's editing patterns changed over his period of directing. Specifically, it discusses the remarkably consistent shot length in his films, and explains that the stylistic choices accompanying this shot consistency remained even after Ozu adopted sound film. The introduction of sound film resulted in an almost universal doubling of average shot length in films. While Ozu's films experienced the same effect, the editing patterns and style of his silent films carried over to his sound ones. Ozu himself admitted that his sound films retained the style of his silent ones. Hauske suggests that Ozu's editing style resisted the changes that new technology seemed to insist upon because Ozu continued to work primarily in family dramas and comedies. To Ozu, who valued narrative clarity and simplicity above all else, these types of films required lengthy shots and heavy use of intertitles. Ozu's characteristic use of long takes and depiction of dialogue suggests that Ozu was in many respects ahead of his time, even though he adopted sound technology much later than other directors. Hauske also notes that Ozu often makes it clear in his silent films that he's aware of the potential for sound technology: scenes where characters react to off-screen sources of sound seem to be playful reminders of this awareness. Hauske concludes by speculating about the reasons for Ozu's remarkable editing consistency in his films. Perhaps Ozu's greatest reason for very consistent shot length and editing patterns, Hauske posits, is the opportunity it affords to play with audience expectations and subvert Hollywood editing norms.

Hauske does not deal with Passing Fancy specifically, but as one of Ozu's later silent comedies this article seems applicable to it. Particularly interesting is Hauske's suggestion that Ozu's silent films were quite advanced for their heavy use of dialogue and lengthy shots. In Passing Fancy Ozu demonstrates a proficient use of both to further the narrative. By Hauske's assessment, then, Ozu proves to be a progressive director for his innovative editing work in his silent comedies. Perhaps even more important, however, is the idea that Ozu used very consisting editing simply in in order to subvert it; in doing so, he would often undermine the audience's expectations and diverge from the classical western editing that he admired so much.