Two Early Films by Ozu, Part 2

There Was a Father (1942)

***^½

Country: Japan

Director: Yasujiro Ozu



After The Only Son, Ozu made one more film before being drafted into the Japanese Army. During World War Two he completed only two films, both made in the brief interval between his service in China and Singapore. The second of his wartime films, There Was a Father, is another story of a parent's sacrifices to get an education for a child and the consequences of that decision. In this film Ozu regular Chishu Ryu—this was the fourteenth of thirty-three films he made with Ozu—plays a provincial school teacher, Shuhei Horikawa. When two of his students are drowned in a boating accident during a field trip he is chaperoning, Horikawa is devastated, even though the accident happened through no fault of his own, and gives up teaching. "I don't want to be responsible for other people's children anymore," he tells a colleague. "It's too frightening." Horikawa, a widower, moves back to his provincial home in Uedo with his young son, Ryohei.



During the time they spend in Uedo, Horikawa and his son develop an especially close bond, conveyed in a series of scenes of shared moments—a visit to a nearby castle, the father helping the son with his math homework, a fly-fishing trip together. So when Horikawa sends Ryohei away to boarding school and later moves to Tokyo and gets a job in a textile factory so that he can continue to pay for his son's education, both feel the separation acutely, but especially Ryohei. The passage of the next thirteen years is succinctly limned in a series of brief scenes—Horikawa telling a colleague his son has graduated from high school, then from college, then become a teacher at a technical school. At the same time, Horikawa has progressed from a job on the factory floor to an executive post in the company's offices. About midway through, the film finally focuses on a reunion visit by the adult Ryohei to his father in Tokyo and the events surrounding this visit, which include a fly-fishing trip that mirrors the one in the early part of the picture.



During the visit Ryohei reveals that he wants to resign his teaching job and move to Tokyo to be near his father. "I can't stand living apart like this," he explains. Horikawa, though, is horrified by Ryohei's plan, telling him that the duty of every teacher is to be a good role model for students (perhaps amplifying his own reason for leaving the teaching profession, that he feels he failed to be a good role model for his students). "Our duty is to our jobs," he tells his son. "There is no room for personal relationships." This message of blind obedience to duty and paternal authority must have been a welcome one to the Japanese government and military during World War Two, when the obligation of every citizen was seen to be loyalty to the emperor's will. Ozu and leading man Chishu Ryu, however, manage to make Horikawa's actions seem less like wartime propaganda than observations about the attitudes of a certain type of character.



Ozu's postwar films—he didn't make another picture until 1947, five years after There Was a Father—tend to be remarkably consistent both in style and in subject. While neither The Only Son nor There Was a Father exactly establishes a template for Ozu's later work, elements found in both point ahead to the direction Ozu would take in his postwar films.



In their general outline, the plots of these films are quite alike: parent makes sacrifices for child's education, parent and child endure a painful separation, parent and child are reunited in the big city, parent and child come into conflict over the child's attitudes. This similarity is perhaps understandable, since the original script for There Was a Father was written only a year or so after the completion of The Only Son. Although the organization of There Was a Father in many ways parallels that of The Only Son, there are important differences between the two. The Only Son technically takes place over a period of twelve years, but the interval between these two times is covered in one cut between two scenes, and the emphasis is clearly on the later time. The first part of the film is quite brief, essentially an introductory passage used to set up the main part of the film, the visit of the mother to Tokyo, which is then presented as a simple linear narrative without subplots or narrative digressions.



In contrast, the early part of There Was a Father, when Ryohei is a boy, is developed in far greater detail than in The Only Son. This gives us a much stronger sense of the intimacy of the bond between parent and child, and of the child's feelings of loss when the two are separated. The middle part of the plot, which covers a period of thirteen years, is also given much more detail than the corresponding section of The Only Son, which is essentially an ellipsis. In There Was a Father, this bridge between the two main parts of the narrative seems particularly dense with Ozu's trademark pillow shots*, used as transitional devices between the several time periods covered. The final section of There Was a Father doesn't last as long as the equivalent section of The Only Son, which occupies nearly the entire running time of that film, yet it contains a far more intricate plot than the simple linear narrative of The Only Son.



Compared to The Only Son, There Was a Father shows a clear advance in Ozu's skill with integrating image and sound, in particular the way he uses dialogue to fashion a much more complex screenplay, succinctly using a single scene, or even a single line of dialogue, between two characters as a way for them to express their emotions to each other, or to describe important changes that occur over a number of years. But if Ozu used sound and dialogue to expand the scope of the narrative in There Was a Father, he didn't pursue this direction of narrative sprawl after the war. None of the later Ozu films I've seen covers such a long period of time as There Was a Father. Instead Ozu returned to the restricted focus on time and place of earlier films like The Only Son, using conversations between characters to fill in background events. Still, within this concentrated focus, he reproduced the surprisingly complicated narrative line of that last section of There Was a Father, with its compressed structure, frequently shifting point of view, and almost literary blend of plot and subplot.



One thing that sets both The Only Son and There Was a Father apart from Ozu's later films is the way he portrays the parent-child bond. In those two early films, he shows us stern but not unsympathetic parents and dutiful, compliant children. His postwar films present a much less idealized vision of the parent-child relationship. Just as Ozu's later films often touch on the cultural changes in postwar Japanese society, they also tend to dwell on the changing attitudes of parents and children—in particular, grown children—toward their traditional roles. Children may be too obedient and dependent for their own good and their parents troubled by their excessive devotion, as in Late Spring and its semi-remake Late Autumn. Or conversely, the children may be self-absorbed and aloof, as in Tokyo Story, or alienated and sullen like the illegitimate son in Floating Weeds. Time and again, young children are portrayed not as docile youngsters like Ryosuke in The Only Son and Ryohei in There Was a Father, but as ill-behaved brats. Parents too are often shown in an unflattering way, for example the erratic and irresponsible fathers of Floating Weeds and The End of Summer.



It is said of certain directors that their films are ones that an individual viewer will either like or dislike with great intensity. Because of the similarity of Ozu's postwar films to one another—what I called their consistency of subject and style—this seems particularly true of his pictures. Watching The Only Son and There Was a Father makes one realize that the addition of sound to his distinctively rhythmic visual style permitted Ozu to explore in ever more subtle variations his thematic preoccupation with the bond between parents and children and with the ways the changes in postwar Japanese culture affected how parents and children relate to each other. These two early sound films are essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand how Ozu arrived at the style of his great postwar films.





*Ozu created a unique visual style that he followed with little variation for his entire career. One of the defining features of his style and the visual device Ozu is best known for is his pillow shots. These are brief, lyrical montages of a few images that generally occur at transitional points. Sometimes they are used in a loosely narrative sense to indicate the passage of time or, rather like the establishing shots in Western films, a change of locale. At other times they are used in a more abstract way, to suggest a certain mood or tone that corresponds to the narrative, although not exactly in a literal sense. Certain images are often repeated from one set of pillow shots to another. These pillow shots are found in both The Only Son and There Was a Father, as they are in every Ozu movie I've seen. But There Was a Father has far more of these passages than I have seen in any other of Ozu's films, and I think the reason can be found in the intricacy of the film's plot, with its many narrative and tonal shifts. Below are two pillow shots, one from The Only Son (left) and one from There Was a Father (right).























I am a tireless proselytizer for the films of Ozu, and I think anyone with a serious interest in cinema, especially foreign cinema, should give him a try. If you've never seen a picture directed by Ozu, I suggest starting with Tokyo Story (1953), probably his most accessible film for those unacquainted with his work. You might also be interested in my post from a couple of years ago on Ozu's last three films. Click here to read it. To read Part 1 of this post, on Ozu's The Only Son (1936), click here.

Two Early Films by Ozu, Part 1

The Only Son (1936)

***^½

Country: Japan

Director: Yasujiro Ozu





The Only Son was the thirty-sixth of fifty-four films Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) directed in his lifetime and his first sound film. Originally conceived and partially shot as a silent, it was reconceived as a sound picture and the original footage reshot with sound. "Even though I was well aware that talkies were a totally different ballgame, I couldn't help slipping back into [the] style of silents," Ozu said of his experience making this film. Compared to Ozu's later movies, The Only Son does seem to have a stripped-down, simplified narrative, and the dialogue in the film does seem almost entirely functional, as though Ozu had not yet fully assimilated how to use dialogue to convey greater complexity of plot and exposition than was practical in the silent cinema. Yet the picture fits comfortably into Ozu's later filmography, showing his amazing mastery of the visual element of filmmaking and focusing on themes that Ozu would continue to explore for the rest of his career.



The Only Son opens with a quotation from the Japanese short story writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (he wrote the story that Kurosawa's Rashomon is based on): "Life's tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child." This statement could almost sum up not only the theme of this movie, but the theme of practically every movie of Ozu's I've ever seen, for the bond between parents and children is a subject he explored in film after film. Even though in his films it rarely results in tragedy, the perilous relationship between parent and child does often lead to anxiety, sadness, and disappointment, as it does in The Only Son. The film opens in 1923 in the home of Tsune Nonomiya, a widowed mother, and her young son, Ryosuke, in the countryside. The boy, who has just left elementary school, presses his mother to let him continue to middle school, and she tells him she can't afford to. After the boy's teacher unexpectedly visits Tsune and tells her that Ryosuke has already told his classmates he will be attending middle school, she is furious. Later she relents and does send him away to continue his education as a boarder even though it means great financial hardship for her.



After this brief introductory sequence, the film moves forward twelve years. Ryosuke is now a teacher living in Tokyo with his wife and infant son, and Tsune is making her first visit to Tokyo. The rest of the picture deals with the few days she spends there with her son. Her image of her son as a successful young urban professional is soon destroyed, however, as it quickly becomes clear that Ryosuke's job is one of little prestige and that he lives in a shabby neighborhood barely scraping by on his low salary. Just to feed his mother and keep her entertained during her visit, he must beg for advances on his salary and borrow money from colleagues.



The film builds slowly to two key scenes. As mother and son are out walking one day near the garbage incinerator for Tokyo, they sit down to rest. Both are mentally exhausted from the effort of keeping up appearances and pretending nothing is wrong, and they finally reveal to each other their true feelings about the situation. He confesses his disappointment in the way his life has turned out, his belief that he will advance no further in his career, and the guilt he feels about the effect his failure will have on his mother. She responds heatedly by denouncing his defeatist attitude and saying that all her sacrifices to put him through school—she has even sold their house and land and now lives in a tenement for employees of the textile factory where she works—were not worth it.



With relations between the two at their lowest, they prepare for one last sightseeing excursion before she returns home. Their day out is interrupted, however, when a neighbor's boy is kicked by a horse and seriously injured. Ryosuke intervenes, carrying the boy to the hospital in his arms and giving the money for the excursion to the boy's impoverished mother to help pay the medical bills. In typical Ozu fashion, the film ends not in a big emotional catharsis, but quietly, in a reflective moment of insight. After witnessing her son's altruistic behavior, Tsune realizes that the honorable values and the humanity of his inner nature are more important—and more worthy of admiration—than material success, and that in itself becomes for her a source of pride. Like so many of Ozu's movies, The Only Son reaches its climax in a moment of calm resignation and the realization that even a small satisfaction in life is something to be grateful for.



Next week I'll be writing about There Was a Father (1942), one of two films Ozu made during World War Two. It and The Only Son were recently released by Criterion as a box set.

Regret, Hope, and Acceptance: Ozu's Last Three Films

In the 1950s the glory of Japanese cinema was discovered by Westerners. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon received the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and the next year a special Oscar as the best foreign language film released in the US in 1951. Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu received the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953, and the next year his Sansho the Bailiff shared the Silver Lion with Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. Yet the great contemporary of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), who directed 54 movies, remained largely unknown outside of Japan until the 1970s.

Since then Ozu has developed an ardent following. But he is a curious director, one who typically inspires not love or hate, but rather either love or indifference. One reason for this is his totally unique style. D. W. Griffith, the man universally considered the progenitor of the ways of using the language of film to tell stories, was not studied in Japan as a model as he was elsewhere in the world. Thus Ozu developed his own personal ways of telling stories on film, ways that changed little in the 35 years he made movies. As Roger Ebert puts it: "Ozu fashioned his style by himself, and never changed it, and to see his films is to be inside a completely alternative cinematic language."

Ozu leaves many viewers indifferent because his movies can seem so similar to one another. Probably the main reason for this apparent similarity is his highly idiosyncratic and unvarying style. He rarely tried to push his own self-defined visual boundaries, seeking instead to polish his existing artistic vision with each new film. Another reason is that like many of the great directors, he acquired a repertory of actors, using the same favored performers over and over. And he confined himself to similar, quite limited situations and themes in film after film. In fact, he remade several of his early films later in his career.

"There is an easy joke that no one can tell one Ozu film from another," writes David Thomson, "but is that a failing or a virtue?" The answer to that question depends on the individual viewer's reaction to Ozu's style. What some viewers see as repetition, others see as unity and continuity. For admirers like myself (and I'm a latecomer to Ozu, having seen my first Ozu movie just a little over a year ago), it is a virtue: I love his movies, and to see another Ozu is for me like having another helping of a favorite delicacy. Watching one Ozu movie after another is a bit like reading the complete novels of Jane Austen or listening to a set of concerti grossi by Handel or Corelli. On the surface they may seem awfully similar, but look closer and beneath the surface you will find subtle variations that lend each iteration its own distinctive character.

Between 1960 and 1962 Ozu made his last three films, works that David Thomson calls "late masterpieces, still lifes of hope and yearning." Late Autumn (1960), a reworking of Ozu's 1949 film Late Spring, opens at a temple where a group of middle-aged men have gathered for the ritual observance of the anniversary of the death of their former classmate and work colleague. Also present are the widow and daughter. The gossipy and slightly tipsy men observe that the daughter is now of marriageable age and that the widow, who married young and still looks quite youthful, would seem a prime candidate for remarriage. (She is played by Setsuko Hara, who appeared in many of Ozu's films, including the one on which this one is based, and was especially memorable as the daughter-in-law in Tokyo Story.) The men soon devote themselves to matchmaking for the pair, choosing for the mother one of their own group, a widower. The problem with the scheme is that the daughter is strongly resistant to leaving her mother, and her headstrong attitude causes a great deal of conflict with her mother, who is constantly trying to persuade her daughter to find a suitable man and marry. In the end the men's scheme comes to nothing. The daughter ends up marrying a coworker after the mother indicates she will marry the widower friend of her late husband. At the last moment she changes her mind, preferring her independence and teaching career to remarriage.

Mother and daughter in Late Autumn

In The End of Summer (1961), which takes place during a heat wave, an elderly widower, the owner of a sake factory, lives with his daughter and her husband, who manages the factory. A younger daughter and the widow of his late son are unmarried, and finding them husbands occupies the minds of the other members of the family. The father is a stubborn rascal who insists on ruling the family and making all the decisions about the business. His son-in-law constantly tries to convince him that small family-run sake breweries are no longer profitable in postwar Japan and that he should sell out to a larger company, but his father-in-law refuses even to consider this. He has also begun secretly seeing his former mistress and her vapid teenaged daughter, whom he believes is his and whose main interest in him is to wheedle him into buying her a fur coat. (Others are skeptical of his paternity; apparently the mistress had quite a reputation for promiscuity.) The daughter with whom he lives, a shrewish control freak given to self-dramatization, is constantly criticizing her father and is outraged when she discovers he has resumed relations with his former mistress. The family gets a scare when the father has a heart attack, but he seems to recover, then suddenly dies of another heart attack after sneaking off to the dog races in the sweltering heat with his mistress. As the funeral procession crosses a footbridge on the way to the crematorium on a small island, two peasants gathering reeds on the bank of the river remark impassively that someone must have died, while smoke pours from the smokestack of the crematorium in the background.

The funeral procession crossing the footbridge

Ozu's final movie, An Autumn Afternoon (1962), again concerns a middle-aged father, Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu, who also appeared in several of Ozu's movies and was so memorable as the elderly father in Tokyo Story), a widower trying to marry off his grown daughter, who like the daughter in Late Autumn is devoted to her widowed parent and doesn't want to leave. When he and his two school chums arrange a reunion with their now-retired middle-school teacher, whom they have nicknamed The Gourd, they get a shock. The man is a depressed alcoholic who owns a shabby noodle shop in a run-down part of town with his middle-aged unmarried daughter. In one especially poignant sequence, Hirayama takes the drunken ex-teacher to his daughter in the shop, and leaves them sitting next to each other. The father nods off; the daughter glances at him for a moment, her face crumples, and she buries her face in her hands and quietly weeps. When the teacher confesses to Hirayama his regret for ruining his daughter's life and warns Hirayama not to do the same, Hirayama becomes determined to find his daughter a husband and persuade her to marry. In the end he succeeds. On the way home from the wedding he stops in a bar for a drink and another patron, seeing the expression on his face, jokingly asks, "Where have you come from? A funeral?" "Something like that," Hirayama answers.

Hirayama (right) and his school chums

Ozu's last three films deal with closely related and sometimes overlapping subjects and themes that seem to have preoccupied him for much of his career. All three deal with matchmaking as either the main plot or a major subplot, so much so that it sometimes seems as though one is watching the ruminations of a Japanese Jane Austen. Parents seem almost obsessive about marrying off their daughters, while the children, like modern young people in traditional cultures everywhere, resist arranged marriages, seeing the practice as an outmoded vestige of the days when young people had no life outside the family home. But as in Austen, this preoccupation with matchmaking is about more than just a suitable marriage. It is about the desire for stability and for securing one's place in life, and the hope of parents to assure these things for their children.

Like so much in Ozu's movies, this attitude of the older generation toward marriage suggests an underlying anxiety about the inevitability of change and the realization that life is always moving on. In the last three movies we are always aware of the difference between the old and the new, the traditional and the postwar modern, the past and the present. The middle-aged characters cling to the past and to their cultural traditions and resist change. Mothers wear traditional clothing and stay at home caring for the family, while their daughters wear Western clothing and makeup and work in offices. Fathers remain closely bonded to men they went to middle school with 40 years earlier, or try to resume romantic relationships that ended decades ago. Sons and daughters ignore their parents' desire that they selflessly conform to traditional values, following instead independent courses of action that for them signify modernity.

In his last film, An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu seems especially to dwell on the corrosive changes in postwar Japanese culture. The predominant color in the movie is gray. "People have become so cold since the war," The Gourd observes to Hirayama. The responsible and conservative Hirayama's married son is an immature, self-centered spendthrift who lives in a dreary modern concrete apartment block and whose greatest ambition is to own a set of expensive golf clubs. One of the most distinctive features of Ozu's style—what has been referred to as "pillow shots" or "curtain shots"—also reflects this postwar malaise.

Ozu's pillow shots are brief montages, usually of outdoor scenes, that signal transitions in place or time, but not necessarily in the conventional way of establishing a precise change of setting or the passage of a precise amount of time. They are instead an abstract series of images that indicate events or time progressing in a general rather than in a specific sense. These interludes are normally peaceful and sedate, with a haunting, self-contained beauty of their own. But in An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's pillow shots show postwar industrial Japan in all its blighted disfigurement: the skyline riven by stark power poles, snaking utility lines, and the smokestacks of factories spewing toxic smoke; the landscape littered with unsightly sheet metal fences, piles of rubble, barbed wire, and rusty barrels. These pillow shots are not without their own grim beauty, but it is the grimness that lingers, not the beauty.

A stark pillow shot in An Autumn Afternoon

In his last three films, Ozu takes his lifelong interest in the subject of generational conflict and by focusing more closely on the older generation makes the theme of the inevitability of aging and death that he explored so poignantly in his best-known work, Tokyo Story (1953), the central element of these movies. And he makes it clear that the proper response to this inevitability is not unseemly resistance or self-pity, but stoical acceptance of the situation. In Late Autumn, the middle-aged couple who decide in the end not to get married after all retain their dignity by taking the sensible course. In An Autumn Afternoon, Hirayama can finally face his old age with equanimity, knowing that he has chosen not to selfishly keep his daughter from pursuing her own happiness. By contrast, in The End of Summer, the defiant sake brewer makes a fool of himself and dies ignobly, while in An Autumn Afternoon, the alcoholic ex-teacher's morbidity and regret make him seem merely pathetic.

As in all of Ozu's films, the action in his last three movies takes place largely indoors—in the rooms and hallways of houses, in the corridors or offices of workplaces, in restaurants, noodle shops, or American-style bars. In film after film, we see what appear to be the same rooms in the same houses, the same offices, the same corridors. The overhead light fixtures, the wall coverings, the colors and furnishings may change, but the spaces seem the same in each movie. And they are photographed in the same style and lighted in the same way, the flat lighting with no obvious light source and few shadows giving these spaces a timeless and insular feel.

Because nearly all of the action takes place indoors, when the film does move outside, the effect is all the stronger. The sequence in Late Autumn where the mother and daughter take a last holiday together before the daughter's marriage and walk quietly beside a mountain lake, the funeral procession to the crematorium in The End of Summer, the opening shots of An Autumn Afternoon showing the factory in Yokohama that Hirayama manages—each of these sequences is rendered more forceful by its complete tonal contrast to the enclosed interior settings that dominate the rest of the film.

Each shot is meticulously composed. Right angles predominate: Ozu favors horizontal and vertical lines, squares and rectangles; he only occasionally uses diagonals, and hardly ever curves or circles. His compositions have a classic sense of order, balance, and symmetry, with great attention to form and pattern in the arrangement of people and objects within the frame. His actors are usually photographed facing the camera, facing away from the camera, or in profile. They are most often photographed seated. When they do move, they tend to move directly toward the camera or away from it, or across the frame. That Ozu prefers not to move the camera, to hold his shots so long, and to use flat cuts gives his compositions an especially painterly quality.

This painterly way of filming creates an overall air of stillness in Ozu's films. Yet the serenity of his surfaces masks currents of emotional turmoil just beneath the surface, and this is the source of conflict in his films. This is a turmoil not of agitation, but of controlled disturbance, for in Ozu's world there is no place for turbulent emotions. This is an outwardly placid world where grace and restraint are prized above all else, where even strong-willed people perceive the difference between strength of resolve and unseemly stubbornness and behave accordingly. If they don't, they become objects of gentle pity or derision. Ozu's films achieve their quietly moving emotional impact not through big dramatic moments, but through the cumulative effect of many small moments. His movies are canvases painted with small, delicate brushstrokes: a facial expression, a brief glance, a gesture, a boat or train passing in the background.

Ozu's cinema is one not of action, but of contemplation, and in his last three films his object of contemplation is the end of life. In these films Ozu suggests that ultimately we must let go of regrets for the past and of hopes for controlling the future and simply accept what the melancholic Gourd tells Hirayama in An Autumn Afternoon: "In the end we spend our lives alone . . . all alone."

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The website Ozu-san.com is devoted to the life and films of Yasujiro Ozu. All the images above come from this site.