"Silent Ozu" by Catharine Russel, Cineaste Vol. 33 No. 4 (Fall 2008)

In this essay Catherine Russel focuses on Ozu's silent comedies and identifies a number of thematic trends that run throughout them. Ozu continued to work in silent film well after sound film had become prominent in Japan in 1931, so that by the time he adopted sound he had developed many of his own visual conventions, particularly the frequent use of use of low camera angles and detailed inserts. With these uniquely styled early silent films, Ozu helped to establish the Japanese shomin-geki genre, which dealt with ordinary middle class people. Many of these films offer various representations of fatherhood, using the economic background of the Great Depression, the tumultuous political situation of the time, and the encroaching modern world as context for challenging the lost, working class protagonist fathers trying to support their families. Each father must do so while caught up in the various hierarchies and obligations of Japanese society. In I Was Born, But..., for example, a father tries desperately to please his boss but loses the respect of his young sons in doing so. While Ozu's films typically contain well developed male characters (mostly fathers and sons), Russel criticizes the early films for a simultaneous trend of inexpressive female roles. Finally, she notes the repetition of suburban locales in Ozu's silent comedies, largely composed of cramped alleyways and undeveloped, telephone-pole-lined lots. She views these semi-developed areas as a sign of the steadily-approaching modern world about to collide with traditional Japanese sensibilities. Ozu's repeated focus on the everyday aspects of these suburban locations allow his films to affect the feel of familiarity that they are so well known for.

A number of Russel's points distinguish her essay from other commentaries and prove relevant to Ozu's Passing Fancy and through this, assist our understanding of Ozu himself. First, that Ozu was late in adopting sound film—he still used intertitles in Passing Fancy in 1933--certainly suggests his comfortability with the older form of filmmaking, if not his artistic conservatism. Second, Russel situates Passing Fancy in context of Ozu's other silent comedies, and then describes how the narratives and themes of these comedies reflect Japan's historical circumstances. Russel's focus on the various fatherhood-related themes that carry through Ozu's comedies is particularly useful in understanding the tenuous relationship between the main characters of Passing Fancy, a poor laborer and his son. Understanding the film's background in the Great Depression and Japan's modernization, we better recognize that Passing Fancy's sympathetically-portrayed father, who is so ill-equipped to confront the changing times, is intended provoke the audience to lament modernization and with it the end of Japanese simplicity that Ozu embraced in his films. This also suggests an old fashioned sensibility on Ozu's part.