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Ozu Yasujiro. ‘The Extraordinary in the Ordinary’. Very Short Biography. Ozu Yasujiro - b. in Tokyo 12 December, 1903 - d. in Tokyo, 12 December, 1963 Born as a son of the head clerk of a wealthy merchant. Brought up in Matsuzaka, where his father comes from.
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Ozu Yasujiro ‘The Extraordinary in the Ordinary’
Very Short Biography • Ozu Yasujiro - b. in Tokyo 12 December, 1903 - d. in Tokyo, 12 December, 1963 • Born as a son of the head clerk of a wealthy merchant. • Brought up in Matsuzaka, where his father comes from. • Wild childhood and love of cinema.
Very Short Biography • Failed exams for university but managed to secure employment in a small local primary school. • Through his family connection, he entered Shochiku Studios as an assistant cameraman in 1923.
Very Short Biography • Since The Sword of Penitence (1927) to An Autumn Afternoon (1962), Ozu made 54 films (only 36 survived). • No films during WWII. • After the war (1947), he made one film a year.
Ozu’s Films • Ozu survived transformations of cinema - silent talkie colour • Two phases divided by WWII. • Prewar phase - comedies, farces, genre films (sho-shimin geki = ‘common people’s drama’), even detective films.
Ozu’s films • His distinctive theme and style began to emerge around 1936. Ozu returned to Japan in 1946 after spending war years in Singapore, and his theme and style were fixed ever since.
Ozu’s Mature Films • The Only Son (1936) • A widowed mother raises her son, who has turned out to be very bright but found his family too poor for him pursuing further study in higher schools. His mother sacrifice everything for her education. Many years later she visits him in Tokyo to find that to her disappointment he is a mere night school teacher. (一人息子）
Ozu’s Mature Films • There Was a Father (父ありき, 1942) • During a school trip, a widowed high-school teacher let one of his students die in a rowing boat accident. He gives up his profession but finds it difficult to earn enough to educate his son. He goes to Tokyo leaving behind his son in order to find a better paid job. His son completes his education and becomes a local high-school teacher while his father continues to work in Tokyo.
Ozu’s Mature Films • The Late Spring (晩春1949) - Story about the relationship between a widowed professor and his only daughter who is reluctant to get married because she would rather stay with her father looking after him. The professor successfully devises a ruse to entice his daughter to get married, though this inevitably means a separation.
Ozu’s Mature Films • Early Summer (麦秋1951) - Story about Noriko who is twenty-eight years old and generally considered that she has passed her prime time for marriage. Her family and family friends try to introduce some men for her husband, but to everybody’s surprise she suddenly announces that she will marry a widower with children.
Ozu’s Mature Films • Tokyo Story (東京物語1953)- It is about an elderly couple from the province who visit their children in Tokyo but are rather unkindly treated by them. Only their daughter-in-law (war widow) provides them with genuine care and spiritual relief. On their way back home, Tomi is taken ill and dies without recovering her consciousness.
Ozu’s Mature Films • Equinox Flower (彼岸花1958) - a successful middle-age businessman has two daughters. He proposes an idea of arranging for his elder daughter a marriage with a man from a politically influential family. The younger daughter declares that she only marries out of love. Despite of his progressive statement about relationship, their father refuses his consent to the marriage of her elder daughter to a man that he does not know.
Ozu’s Mature Films • An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味1962) - a widowed father lives with his only daughter who has reached a marriageable age. His colleague approaches him with a prospective match but he delays mentioning it to her. His chance meeting with his former high-school teacher and his daughter who remains unmarried in order to take care of her father makes him determine to spare his own daughter from falling into the same miserable fate.
Ozu’s Themes and Motifs • Plot is almost completely eliminated; his narrative centres on domestic relationships, universal events in a family - birth, growing up, falling in love, marriage, aging and death-, and character studies. (Plot = a narrative devise to render a strong emotional or artistic effect.) • Similar people - middle-class, lower middle-class parents or (widowed) parent, children in their late twenties or thirties, who are ready for marrying.
Ozu’s Themes and Motifs • Hirayama (father’s sir name) - An Autumn Afternoon, Equinox Flower, Tokyo Story, • Noriko (daughter’s first name) - Early Autumn, Tokyo Story, Early Summer, Late Spring • Akiko (daughter’s first name) - An Autumn Afternoon, The End of Summer, • Koichi (son’s first name) - An Autumn Afternoon, Tokyo Story
Ozu’s Themes and Motifs • Similar situation - a household in which parents and children live together. Children are ready to marry. Parents and children face the problems of separation and aging. Their settings are Tokyo or its suburbs (Kamakura)
Ozu’s Themes and Motifs • Ozu’s mature films - a record of slow, gradual metamorphosis of the Japanese society and family. - the slow disintegration of family - the gradual decline of identity • Mild criticism and regret against social, economic and cultural progress, and western influence. • Subtle nostalgia - from distanced and dispassionate positions his films depict what Japan has lost or is losing.
Ozu’s Themes and Motifs • His films examine the struggles in the cycles of birth, growth, aging and death so essential to human beings; • Pains in the transition from childhood to adulthood; • The slight conflicts between the young and the old; • The tension between tradition and progression • Universality of Ozu’s themes and motifs • Ozu’s films very Japanese yet very universal.
Ozu as Auteur • Complete grip on filmmaking in every stage • Mr. Ozu looked happiest when he was engaged in writing a scenario with Mr. Kogo Noda, at the latter’s cottage on the tableland of Nagano Prefecture. By the time he finished writing a script, after about four months’ effort, he had already made up every image in every shot, so that he never changed the scenario after we went on the set. The words were so polished up that he would not allow us even a single mistake.
Ozu as Auteur • The same crew - Ozu gumi (Ozu team) • Noda Kogo (scriptwriter) • Atsuta Yuharu (photographer)
Ozu as Auteur • Hara Setsuko (1920 - ) Ozu’s favourite actress • Ryu Chishu (1904 - 1993) - Appears in most of Ozu’s films from The Only Son to An Autumn Afternoon
