If anyone follows my blog (stop laughing), they would know that unlike many other cinephiles, I’m not a big fan of Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu: his films strike me as disagreeably reactionary, implicitly yearning for a “return” to a Japanese society based on patriarchy and filial piety. However, I still watch his films to take in their unusual cinematic “grammar” — close-to-the-ground camera angles, characters speaking almost straight into the lens, abrupt cuts, unpeopled transition shots — and how it might change my positioning as a viewer. I also remain intrigued by the sense of the transcendental or ethereal in his black & white films, a sense harder to detect, as I said before, in his color movies.
I started
watching Ozu’s films again while reading the book Transcendental Style in
Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer by Paul Schrader. The
book discusses how Ozu (in Japan), Robert Bresson (in France), and Carl Theodor
Dreyer (primarily in Denmark) use a form of storytelling and imagery that
suggest a realm or state of mind where there are no distinctions between
humanity and nature: the Transcendent.
I won’t go into all of Schrader’s book here, because my focus is on Ozu,
but its argument, in looking at the Japanese director’s films in relation to a concept of something seen to stand outside culture — the Transcendent — also risks naturalizing his conservative way of looking at the world.
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| Yasujirô Ozu (1903-1963) |
Indeed,
the references to seasons and times of the day or year in so many of the
Japanese director’s (English) titles — Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Early Spring (1956), Tokyo Twilight (1957), Equinox Flower (1958), Good Morning (1959), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), and An Autumn
Afternoon (1962)
— not only sound almost comically repetitive, but by linking his characters to
the inevitable passage of time, Ozu seems to imply that the rightness and
desirability of traditional Japanese culture are equally inevitable.
Recently,
I watched, for the first time, Late Spring (晩春,
1949), the first of Ozu’s family dramas (shomingeki) to have a season/time-based
title, and my first impression of the film was that the narrative was in the
same conservative mold as the director-screenwriter’s other films: Noriko
(Setsuko Hara), a single woman in contemporary Japan, is recalcitrant to the
idea of getting married, which her extended family pressures her to do, but she
finally and reluctantly gives in after her widower father (Chishu Ryu) lies to
her, saying that he plans to get married (again) himself. Furthermore, the father’s speeches to
his daughter on the benefits of marriage sound like didactic lectures straight
out of an after-school special.
So, Noriko, whose single status calls the patriarchal social order into
question, capitulates to an arranged marriage after constant badgering and
being told a falsehood, consequently assuming her designated role in
society. And to me, the film seems to
portray her capitulation in a positive light. Not my kind of movie.
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| Setsuko Hara as Noriko in ‘Late Spring’ |
Noriko
and her father live alone together in the same house, with her performing the
domestic role usually undertaken by a wife, such as picking up her father’s
clothes as he drops them on the floor while changing into his yukata. Noriko is satisfied with her role in the house, and
when asked why she doesn’t get married, she says that her father would be
“lost” without her. When I heard
this line of dialogue, I said to myself, “That doesn’t sound like a reason;
that sounds like an excuse.” That
told me Noriko’s character hadn’t really been developed. Also, Noriko’s Western-marked and
sometimes obnoxious friend Aya (Yumeiji Tsukioka) married for love but later
got divorced, which seemed to me like a plug for traditional arranged marriages.
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| Chishu Ryu as Noriko’s father (wearing his yukata) |
I watched
Late Spring on
a DVD put out by the Criterion Collection, a company whose meticulous attention to
picture quality and supplemental materials of canonized classics makes it a cinephile’s best friend.
One of the supplemental materials on the disc was a commentary track by
Richard Peña, an associate professor in film studies at Columbia
University. After listening to his
remarks on the commentary track, I began to reconsider my first impression of
the film.
To begin
with, I didn’t take into account that Late Spring is contemporaneously set in the
immediate aftermath of World War II (four years afterwards). The fact that Noriko has assumed the
role of the mother within her father’s house (in which the two live alone) only
struck me as an example of filial piety.
A single woman past the ideal marital age (Noriko is 27) taking on a
wife’s capacity in her father’s house (outside the bedroom, of course) would
have struck a contemporary Japanese audience, according to Peña, as an odd
arrangement. (In recent decades, the
ideal age for a Japanese woman to get married has been no later than 25, so
young Japanese women of marriageable age are sometimes snidely called
“Christmas cakes”: after the 25th [of December/birthday], “no one
wants them,” or so the thinking goes.)
This
arrangement also (to more alert viewers) calls attention to the absence of both
the mother and any male siblings, which, given the context of 1949, might have
led Japanese viewers to infer that they died, directly or indirectly, because
of the war. And the absence of a larger
family structure makes Noriko’s reason for not wanting to leave her father’s
home more credible. Noriko’s
servitude — at least to her father — is not as positively portrayed as I first
thought.
And then
there is Ozu’s singular cinematic style: the camera angles of most shots
imitating the POV of someone seated on a tatami, full-frontal (as opposed to
angled) close-ups of the characters, shots without any people in them, somewhat
disorienting transition shots, etc.
This unusual approach to filmmaking is the reason why so many cineastes
(myself included) keep returning to Ozu, and his champions say that this
approach encourages the viewer not to take
the on-screen proceedings at face
value. After all, if Ozu wanted to
make a film merely propagandizing Noriko’s capitulation to marriage, wouldn’t
he want to use a film style as “invisible” to the audience as possible?
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| Noriko and her father at a Noh play |
I’m very aware of Ozu’s critical view of the Western influence on Japanese culture, and how it compares unfavorably to his seemingly more positive view of traditional Japanese culture. Late Spring early on associates the father with the accoutrements of traditional Japan: often clad in a yukata, often seated at a chabudai, enjoying a Noh play, etc. By contrast, even though we first see her at a traditional tea ceremony and dressed in a kimono (albeit, as Peña points out, clutching a Western purse rather than its traditional Japanese equivalent), Noriko is thereafter associated with Western things: she almost exclusively wears dresses, and her room has occidental décor.
In the
scene where the aunt (Haruko Sugimura) insistently has her first serious
conversation with Noriko about the younger woman’s prospects for marriage, and
the aunt refuses to let Noriko laugh off the idea (as she had previously), both
start out seated at a chabudai. When the
conversation turns serious, a stubborn Noriko gets up from the chabudai and petulantly plops herself down
on a Western-style chair. Because of these character markers, I get the idea
that Noriko’s recalcitrant attitude towards marriage is a Western
influence. (Japan was governed at
the time of Late Spring by the allied occupation, which imposed many Western ideas on
Japanese society.) Near the film’s
end, when we see Noriko dressed in traditional Japanese wedding garments and formally
thanking her father for his care, I’m left with the impression that this heretofore Western-styled woman has
capitulated not only to marriage but also to a traditional Japanese social
role.
To me, the film seems to say that
Noriko was wrong not to immediately accept her family’s
desire for her to get married: in other words, she was in the wrong from the
get-go. And along with other
telltale signs of criticism, I’m left with the message that
Western culture is a force that has vitiated a “purer,” more positive Japanese
culture.
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| Noriko’s father persuades her to get married |
But Peña
says that Late Spring is more complicated than that.
According to him, Ozu’s singular cinematic style is not the only element
to elicit a critical viewer; so does the story’s structure. After all, why begin the film with a
seemingly ideal mate for Noriko (her father’s younger assistant), only to take him out of the running early
on? Why leave gaps in the story
that the viewer must fill in? And
most intriguing of all, if Noriko’s capitulation to marriage is portrayed so
positively, how come the wedding itself is never shown? Furthermore, Peña regards the father’s
didactic-sounding speech on the positive aspects of marriage as something that
the man doesn’t entirely believe himself; the speech’s very didacticism, to
Peña, is so out of character that the commentator believes it to be a mere
piece of “theatre” between the family members. Ozu, to Peña and others, is too much of a modernist to be an
effective propagandist, so, it follows, propaganda must not be his goal.
To his
champions, Ozu’s films are too thematically rich merely to advocate nostalgia
for a Japan that may never have existed.
To them, Ozu does not naturalize Japanese culture or imply that his
characters’ social circumstances are unavoidable. What Ozu sees as inevitable — and this is reflected by his
films’ similar titles — is the passing of time, and the ephemera it takes with
it, which, of course, is indisputably inevitable. What concerns Ozu, then, is how his characters occupy their
time on Earth and the emotional consequences of the decisions they make. I see a dichotomy in Ozu’s films
between traditional Japan and the West.
But Ozu’s defenders say that the director’s portrayal of Japanese life
is too unusual and too complex to invoke a mere dichotomy.
Therefore,
what I’ve seen as positive portrayals of things traditionally Japanese, to
Ozu fans, aren’t straightforwardly positive; these are instead wistful,
non-prescriptive observations of how the characters inhabit their space, making
their pent-up emotions too intricate to be attributed to a single story-driving
cause (as is often the case in Hollywood cinema). For example, I see Noriko’s marriage as endorsed by Ozu, but
Peña says in his commentary that Ozu, without judgment, evokes the sense that
events in their lives may have very well turned out differently. Furthermore, the marriage, according to
Peña, is not the point of Late Spring because the film never shows us the wedding. Like Peña, Ozu’s defenders say that his films, instead, communicate the poignant evanescence of all life — the very Japanese notion of mono no aware.
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| Noriko in traditional Japanese bridal garments |
Late
Spring and Ozu’s
subsequent films were commercially successful in Japan, enabling the director
to make on average a film a year for the rest of his career, until his death at
age 60. I get the feeling that his
audience didn’t go to his films to have their sense of traditional Japan — a
sense of tradition impaired by the loss of the war and by the allied
occupation — challenged or questioned.
I think that they went to Ozu’s films to revel in specifically Japanese
subjects and to approve the traditional and conservative choices his characters
(usually) make. So, I can’t help
wondering if this audience viewed Ozu’s unusual film style as consciously
anti-Western, as an attempt to discover a traditionally Japanese discourse
within (to them) the implicitly Western medium of cinema.
In his
book A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1983, Robert B. Ray says that the most
successful American feature films have differing aspects to them that different
viewers can key into. A successful
film will have both conservative elements that conservative viewers can appreciate
and liberal elements that liberal viewers can enjoy. I get the idea that Ozu’s conservative-styled stories
entertained his tradition-minded audience, while his unorthodox cinema grammar
engaged his less tradition-minded audience.
But
Peña’s commentary about the modernist aspects of Late Spring made me realize how much of an oversimplifying dichotomy my liberal/conservative approach to Ozu’s films has been. Just because a movie portrays something
regarded as traditional or conservative without expressly criticizing it, that
doesn’t automatically denote the film’s approval. And even if Ozu’s intentions were thoroughly conservative
(as I understand his politics were), his unusual shooting and editing styles blatantly rupture the “invisibility” of Hollywood film
grammar and invite critical readings of his films’ conservative elements. Finally, the understated performances
that Ozu coaxes from his actors, portraying people with weighty feelings
they can barely express, endows those characters with emotions more complicated
than the usual story-driven Hollywood offerings. Yes, emotions are complex, and Ozu’s underplayed and
taciturn characters give us a better sense of that than most actorly monologues.
