OCTOBER 28-NOVEMBER 2

It may be hard to imagine now, with Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) long regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, and his 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story routinely cited as one of the best films ever made, but there was a time when Ozu’s quiet, contemplative, tranquil cinema was regarded as too provincial, “too Japanese,” to be appreciated by foreigners. Ozu himself apparently shared these sentiments, and his works were not seen abroad until very late in an illustrious directorial career that had begun in the 1920s. At the time of his death in 1963, with some 53 features to his credit, including six that had been named “best Japanese film of the year,” Ozu had yet to receive the wide international recognition and acclaim already conferred upon his compatriots Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ichikawa. In fact, Ozu wouldn’t be given his full due in the West until the 1970s.

The six films in our Late Ozu program are drawn from Ozu’s “Old Master,” post-Tokyo Story period, with the director, in the last decade of his life, at the peak of his artistic powers — and, interestingly, more concerned than ever with modern Japan’s younger generations. As these late masterworks reveal, Ozu’s mature films are delicate, subtle; Ozu authority Donald Richie once described them as “the precise opposite of Kurosawa’s.” Their deceptively simple subject matter is almost always the family, and the quotidian family crises invariably engendered by generational conflict, marriage, and death. Ozu’s is a cinema of character, dialogue, and observation, rather than plot or story. His preferred genre was the shomin-geki, or stories of the lower middle class. In the West, this has been the stuff of soap opera or lowbrow comedy; in Ozu’s supple hands, it was material for some of the most moving and magisterial cinema ever made. Indeed, it is often said of Ozu (as of Eric Rohmer) that he made extraordinary films about very ordinary people.

Ozu’s celebrated style is also deceptively simple: spare, economical, restrained — a restrained style to match his restrained subject matter. His magnificent late-period films “are probably the most restrained ever made” (Richie). He typically employed a fixed, static camera, set at the peculiarly low angle that became his stylistic signature: about three feet off the ground, roughly corresponding to the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat. He favoured long takes, unadorned editing, and was a pioneer in the use of off-screen space. (His 360-degree approach to filmic space radically broke with cinema's conventional use of 180-degree space only.) His work is carefully, rigorously composed, and often also conveys a very real sense of empty space; many describe this as corresponding to the Zen notion of mu, of emptiness, negation, silence — the Zen sense of still life in which the space between objects is an important and integral element of form. Noël Burch has called Ozu’s characteristic cutaways to still lifes or unpeopled landscapes “pillow shots,” with an “unmotivated absence of human beings” that operates in contrast to Western anthropocentric codes. Ozu’s, it is said, is “an art predicated on the Zen Buddhist reverence for the mystery of the everyday” (David Cook).

Ozu himself once observed, wryly, that “whenever Westerners don't understand something, they simply think it's Zen.” Perhaps so, but there is no denying that Ozu’s work treads the ineffable, the immanent, the invisible. He is “cinema’s consummate formalist” (Paul Schrader), and his deliberate, controlled, beautifully minimalist style has a metaphysical intensity that is often described, with the work of Bresson and Dreyer, as transcendental. It is a cinema of repose, of contemplation, a cinema that reveals the “the metaphysical realm of expectation, disillusionment and acceptance in the family situation” and “the full pathos of the human condition” (Audie Bock). It is a cinema that displays a deep, abiding, sympathetic, sad but serene resignation, an acceptance of life’s uncertainties and inevitabilities, of things as they are. It is this, finally, this sense of mono no aware, that makes Ozu's work so graceful, so gently melancholic, so intensely moving. In a word: sublime.