Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

A double Ozu retrospective

Through some mysterious serendipity, whilst I was in the midst of writing an entry about Ozu Yasujiro’s films a trackback from Kerim alerted me to the Ozu festival, a special event of the 2003 New York Film Festival, being held at the Lincoln Center. Oh to be in New York, because this is the real deal:

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu, the New York Film Festival will present a complete retrospective of Ozu’s extant works. Universally regarded as one the greatest film directors, Ozu’s work was discovered outside of Japan much later than that of Kenji Mizoguchi or Akira Kurosawa. Although the winner of more Kinema Junpo “Best Film” awards (the Japanese Oscar) than any other director, his work was never deemed suitable for export as it was assumed that audiences would consider it “too Japanese.”

The thirty-six films in the festival represent about two-thirds of the fifty-three feature films Ozu directed (he also made a documentary about the Kabuki theater in 1935). His first feature was Zange no yaiba (Sword of Penitence) in 1927; his last was Samma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon), completed in 1962. Ozu died the following year on his birthday, December 12.

[The photograph shows Ozu directing Oka Jōji and Tanaka Kinuyo in the 1935 melodrama Hijōsen no onna (Dragnet Girl).]

I’ve seen all the films Ozu made from 1941 on, plus a couple of earlier ones—about half of those being screened at the Lincoln Center. Had I learned about the festival a week or two ago, rather than in the last couple of days, I would have felt heartsick at being so far away since Ozu is, unequivocally, my favorite filmmaker. On each of my recent trips to Japan, I’ve inquired about whether any of Ozu’s films have been released on DVD and have invariably been disappointed.

But on Friday my prayers were answered: I was taking another look at Kurt Easterwood’s account of the Ozu 100-year Centennial Exhibition at the Kamakura Bungakukan earlier this year and noticed that Kurt points to a page of information about a series of Ozu DVDs scheduled for release by Shochiku, the studio for which Ozu made most of his films. (I have no idea how I missed this the first time I looked!)

A quick check at Amazon Japan revealed that the first box set was released on September 25, with another three to follow at the end of October, November, and December. I ordered the first box set immediately.

The 24 DVDs include all the surviving films Ozu directed for Shochiku, the production company for whom he made almost all of his films. According to the most comprehensive book in English on Ozu, David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, “no script, negative, or prints [are] known to exist” for two films made in 1929: Wasei kenka tomodachi (Fighting Friends—Japanese Style) and Tokkan kozō (A Straightforward Boy). Yet these are both on the fourth box set (although only A Straightforward Boy is being shown in New York). Evidently prints must have been discovered after Bordwell’s book was published in 1988.

None of the films on the DVDs appear to be subtitled in English (and they are not listed on Amazon’s US, British, or German sites); yet subtitled versions exist for all of those I’ve seen—whether silent or talkies. Perhaps Shochiku still regard Ozu as “too Japanese” for Western audiences to appreciate, though I think it’s more likely that the cost of subtitling the remaining films together with the added cost of producing multilingual DVDs were probably the main considerations. The alternative, to offer a mix of films with or without subtitles, would probably only give rise to complaints that all the films should have been subtitled.

The fact that the Criterion Collection offers only two Ozu films on DVD (Tokyo Story and Good Morning) and none by Mizoguchi or Naruse—compared to eight by Kurosawa—is the best evidence that it’s not just the Japanese who regard Kurosawa as far more accessible for Western audiences than Ozu and his contemporaries.

The Film Festival introduction to Ozu’s films correctly points out that “the director considered too Japanese for foreign audiences was in fact steeped in foreign, especially American, pop culture”, adding that Ozu’s work “has been cited as having a major influence on the films of artists as diverse as Jim Jarmusch (USA), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Aki Kaurismaki (Finland), and Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan). The latter assertion, although commonly made, needs to be taken with a grain of salt (Jim Jarmusch’s films, for instance, resemble Ozu’s to about the same degree as Woody Allen’s films are like Kurosawa’s).

Contemporary directors who claim to be influenced by Ozu always remind me of the period Ozu spent in Singapore during the war: coopted by the Imperial Army to make propaganda films, instead Ozu spent most of his time watching American films that the Japanese military officials had confiscated. According to Donald Richie’s study of the director, simply titled Ozu:

The film that most impressed Ozu was Welles’s Citizen Kane. “If you give Chaplin 62 points, this film gets about 85.” He looked at it again and again. It was apparently the technique of the film that most interested him, and according to Yoshimura [another director] he kept shaking his head in wonder over this effect or that. Thereafter, whenever asked about his favorite foreign film, he always said Citizen Kane, though it is impossible to imagine a picture more antithetical to his own.

For diehard Ozu fans, I’ve listed the contents of each of the box sets in the table below—some of the Japanese titles have links to reviews at Strictly Film School (to which Kurt Easterwood pointed).

DVD Box Set One
東京物語	Tokyo monogatari	Tokyo Story	1953
彼岸花	Higanbana	Equinox Flower	1958
お早う	Ohayō	Good Morning	1959
秋日和	Akibiyori	Late Autumn	1960
秋刀魚の味	Samma no aji	An Autumn Afternoon	1962
DVD Box Set Two
晩春	Banshun	Late Spring	1949
麦秋	Bakushū	Early Summer	1951
お茶漬けの味	Ochazuke no aji	The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice	1952
早春	Sōshun	Early Spring	1956
東京暮色	Tokyo boshoku	Tokyo Twilight	1957
DVD Box Set Three
出来ごごろ	Dekigokoro	Passing Fancy	1933
母を恋はずや	Haha o kawazuya	A Mother Should Be Loved	1934
浮草物語	Ukigusa monogatari	A Story of Floating Weeds	1934
東京の宿	Tokyo no yado	An Inn in Tokyo	1935
一人息子	Hitori musuko	The Only Son	1936
淑女は何を忘れたか	Shukujo wa nani o wasureta ka	What Did the Lady Forget?	1937
戸田家の兄弟	Toda-ke no kyōdai	The Brothers & Sisters of the Toda Family	1941
父ありき	Chichi ariki	There Was a Father	1942
長屋紳士録	Nagaya shinshi roku	Record of a Tenement Gentleman	1947
風の中の雌鳥	Kaze no naka no mendori	A Hen in the Wind	1948
DVD Box Set Four
若き日	Wakaki hi	Days of Youth	1929
和製喧嘩友達	Wasei kenka tomodachi	Fighting Friends — Japanese Style	1929
大学は出たけれど	Daigaku wa deta keredo	I Graduated, But…	1929
突貫小僧	Tokkan kozō	A Straightforward Boy	1929
朗らかに歩め	Hogaraka ni ayume	Walk Cheerfully	1930
落第はしたけれど	Rakudai wa shita keredo	I Flunked, But…	1930
その夜の妻	Sono yoru no tsuma	That Night’s Wife	1930
淑女と髯	Shukujo to hige	The Lady and the Beard	1931
東京の合唱	Tokyo no gasshō	Tokyo Chorus	1931
生まれてはみたけれど	Umarete wa mita keredo	I Was Born But…	1932
青春の夢いまいづか	Seishun no yume ima izuka	Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?	1932
東京の女	Tokyo no onna	Woman of Tokyo	1933
非常線の女	Hijōsen no onna	Dragnet Girl	1933
鏡獅子	Kagamishishi	Kagamishishi (Kabuki Documentary)	1935

Three films for which prints are available are not included in the box set edition because Ozu made them while on loan from Shochiku to other studios.

Films Made for Other Studios
宗方姉妹	Munekata shimai	The Munekata Sisters	Toho/ Shintoho	1950
浮草	Ukigusa	Floating Weeds	Daiei	1959
小早川家の秋	Kohayakawa-ke no aki	The End of Summer	Takarazuka/ Toho	1960

It’s frequently been a source of amusement amongst Ozu’s Western fans that so many of his later films have similar English titles: Late Spring, Early Summer, Early Spring, Late Autumn, The End of Summer, An Autumn Afternoon. Yet, of the six films I’ve listed, only two have English titles that match the original Japanese: Late Spring (Banshun) and Early Spring (Sōshun).

Of the other four (which I’ve highlighted in red), Akibiyori (Late Autumn) actually means “fine autumn weather”; Samma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon) means “the taste of Pacific saury” (a fish that is commonly served broiled in Japanese drinking places); Bakushū (Early Summer) means “wheat harvest”; and Kohayakawa-ke no aki (The End of Summer) means “the autumn of the Kohayakawa family”.

I imagine that whoever gave the films their English titles realized that “the taste of Pacific saury”—though immensely evocative to the Japanese—would be meaningless to a Western audience. However, it’s just as doubtful that “the flavor of green tea of rice” would conjure up for a non-Japanese Ozu’s intended sense of taking pleasure in simple, everyday things. Perhaps the goal was that the English titles convey the elegiac mood of Ozu’s later films.

Ozu’s career spanned the period in Japanese history that most interests me, the Thirties through the Fifties: the rise of Japanese militarism, the catastrophe of the Pacific War, and the post-war reconstruction. The first DVD box set should arrive within the next few days. Though seeing the sound films without subtitles will present a formidable challenge to my Japanese listening skills, I’m looking forward to immersing myself in Ozu’s world over the next few months.

(In his post on There Was a Father, which alerted me to the Ozu retrospective, Kerim admits to loving the film yet being “troubled by its moral ambiguity”:

In a very real sense the film’s power comes from its moral ambiguity. After the fact, such ambiguity itself in face of the horrors of Japanese wartime aggression (something which Japanese have yet to come to terms with) seems inappropriate, but it certainly makes for a powerful movie. Nor do I think anyone would compare Ozu to Leni Riefenstahl.

Though it’s been a few years since I saw There Was a Father, I don’t recall being struck by any sense of moral ambiguity. I do remember that not long after I saw the film I read—and could not disagree with—Donald Richie’s assessment that “this is one of Ozu’s most perfect films”. Needless to say, there’s lots I could write on the subject of Ozu and fascism, but I’d prefer to save those thoughts for another essay.)

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