Yasujiro Ozu

Yeah, you know the conversation's over when one party says, "this movie's better than the ones you mentioned" and leaves it at that. Reddit did a lot of good for me.

It’s strange it’s always American classics he seems to single out, rather than compare it to any other classic film from Japan, which would have probably been more appropriate.
Just an observation I’ve noticed.

The surprises in the Ozu films I've seen don't come so much from the literal narrative elements, but rather from how they are shown. And to go a step further, how moments of focus or silence feel right. Those are the surprises. In a moment of heartbreak, we focus on the pattern on a teakettle. The surprise is in how he shows you the lives of other people, and yet it feels like he's saying something about your life.

I mean, I've been very upfront about the fact that one of my primary lenses in watching movies is the narrative component, but I think it's very inaccurate to say that what he's doing is "flowering up" everyday story with just the use of pretty angles. The narrative is in the emotions of the characters and how they ebb and flow. I don't need the character in An Autumn Afternoon discovering she has a long-lost secret sibling or whatever. I just need to watch her face as she's asked if she'd be willing to attend a match-making session.

For what it’s worth, Ozu is probably a top 5 director for me. Likely up there with Bergman and Kubrick.
And I’ve only seen a small handful of his films yet. So I’m sure, as I move more into his filmography this coming year, I’ll probably have a better grip on his stature.

The only way we can consider Ozu films as being predictable, is if we reduce the film to nothing but the most basic of plot points.


"I knew that character would die by the end"


"Of course they fell in love"


But that's not really their point. His films are about how, through the small gestures that his characters make, or the words they use to disguise what they are really feeling, we slowly begin to understand their internal lives and how what is happening to them shapes them as people. They qualify as some of the most personal and observant cinema about what it means to be human ever made. The stories themselves may be simple, but the people in them are not. And it's about the people. And the people in his films are enormously complex. This is what he wants us to study. He almost considers anything else a distraction from what a movie should do. His is a completely revolutionary approach to film, and in this way, I think possibly more interesting than Kurosawa (whose greatness is much easier to recognize, but who for the most part makes fairly traditional films that clearly satisfy those basic needs for dramatic beats and surprising revelations)



And there is absolutely no 'flowering' up of his images. The dude was about as minimalistic a filmmaker as you can get. He basically clears the entire canvas of everything but the buried emotions of his characters. He is the complete and polar opposite of flowery.

Exactly

While that's fine, it still feels like trying to compensate for the lack therein. You can have an engaging story and still have time for expressions, hence Sergio Leone.

This reminds me of one of my favorite moments from Late Spring, when Shukichu and Noriko attend the show where her father's prospect performs, and you can see how gradually Noriko's expression goes from happiness and joy to jealousy and heartbreak.



It's really an emotionally powerful moment and one that serves as a bridge from the first half to the second half of the film. I love it.

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Yes. We could spend pages dissecting the body language and posture and way the characters in an Ozu film speak. This is where the stories are being told. He was clever enough of a filmmaker to realize not all storytelling needs to be telegraphed into easily processed morsels. Some times less is more. Sometimes less is all you need.



He's exactly the kind of narrative based filmmakers that has my approval, since he found ways to do so in purely cinematic ways. Not the incredibly boring ways so many lesser directors rely upon.

Compensate for a lack of what?


Is cutting to the pattern on a tea pot considered compensation? To me this feels like a man completely confident that he is giving us as much as he needs to. What he removes from his films is the point of his films. To see humans and how they behave more clearly.



And what exactly isn't he doing that he is supposed to be doing? And how does he do this mysterious extra thing without completely blowing up the style that people have been loving him for, for nearly a hundred years?

Here's my ranking of what I've seen from him:

1. Late Spring
2. Early Summer
3. Tokyo Story
4. Floating Weeds
5. I Was Born, But...
6. An Autumn Afternoon
7. Good Morning
8. The End of Summer
9. The Only Son

I wouldn't say I'm ready to call him a favorite yet, but he does have a handful of very good films and a couple great ones (I should also revisit Tokyo Story someday), so I'd still call myself a fan.

As for predictability, if you think that story is the most important part of the film, then I guess you could come away with that. But if you pay close attention to the facial expressions, mannerisms, the nuanced dialogue, and the cutaways, you'll find where the surprises come from. Ozu zeroing in on what his characters communicate throughout the narrative beats is what makes his films more human than most films ever made. I find something so special about a director who, in spite of using fairly simple story beats, is able to communicate so much from his characters. That's where the complexity lies.

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KeyserCorleone sounds like he'd love to see Ozu direct a gangster movie. Well, he's lucky because Ozu made three of them.

Walk Cheerfully (1930)
That Night’s Wife (1930)
Dragnet Girl (1933)

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

I admired Autumn Afternoon, but would not consider it in the same league as The Godfather or Citizen Kane. Do you not like The Godfather or Citizen Kane or just think Ozu is that good?

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If everyone behaves that way, then you don't need to be a movie analyst to see it. And I said, his stories should at least encompass more of real life than this movie did. I couldn't compare this simple story to the realistic life-oriented stories like Bicycle Thieves, Panther Panchai, Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day, etc. etc., which mingles real life situations with complexity and nails it. And the same thing can be done with romance, and I don't think Late Spring, for all it's strengths, achieved that. These movies tackled a plethora of related real life situations from multiple angles, and Late Spring was practically one angle for one character.

Have you seen Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind? It deals with a wife who’s husband who hasn’t returned from the war and struggles to survive. This leads to an arc of forgiveness, but I have to say Ozu is really great at mingling real life situations with complexity,

In Late Spring, there is a scene where Setsuko Hara stares at her father with a sense of jealousy after he had just flirted with another girl. There is no dialogue between them. Just the camera focusing on her expression. And that’s all we needed. That scene alone conveyed to me the complexity of the films characters.

I loved Late Spring and had it in my Top 10 MoFo movie profile (recently changed to all noirs) but it will be in my profile.

If this movie does a better job when I see it, I'll certainly acknowledge it. Of course, any feelings I have for Ozu are admitted based on Late Spring only, as its the only one I've seen, and all of my comments on Ozu have been directed at that one film. So I'm hoping for something much greater for his other movies.

My guess is that you won't find any of Ozu's movies that you would consider greater than Late Spring...as I believe most of his films have that flow and narrative style to them.

I don't think that anything is lacking in his films. As Crumbsroom said, the complexity is within the characters.

I think that to look at an Ozu film and think "He's framed this shot meticulously because the story isn't interesting enough" is a fundamental misreading of what he is trying to do (and succeeding, in my opinion) with the stories he's telling and how he is telling them.

This is going to sound pejorative, and it's really not meant to be, but I think that if you can't invest in stories about people who are simply handling the daily ups and downs of life, you might reflect on that as an area of growth for you as a viewer as opposed to a flaw in those stories. Or, for a less aggressive sounding variation: it is possible that you are uninterested in "little moment" dramas and Ozu is great at telling those stories, and thus you might just be fundamentally mismatched as artist and viewer.

Watching more of his films can definitely help, but not necessarily. Many of Ozus films are very similar to eachother, in both in style as well as thematically. They are frequently variations on a theme, that theme being the interpersonal dynamics in families. Part of the power of Ozu's family centered films, and their similarity with eachother, is how much variation he can find within a limited template. I wasn't particularly impressed after I saw my first of his films either, but by watching a bunch, and then beginning to understand how subtle his style is, and how much of a whallop he can make with little more than a whisper, I became a fan.


But I think one has to first at least acknowledge what he's attempting to do, or show the vaguest interest in a filmmaker who employs the techniques that have already been mentioned here half a dozen times. If one doesn't want to acknowledge dramas built upon gestures and polite smiles as having any substance, yeah, his movies may not seem to have much value.


And since at no point is Setsuko Hara ever going to don a steely glint in her eye, and chew the stub of a cigar as she considers who to shoot next, some people are obviously going to have his greatness pass them by.