Eclipse's second box set dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu provides another perspective on the beloved director.
Ozu himself gave the greatest distillation of watching his films -- they're like tofu. While his modesty might be interpreted as some inherent Japanese politesse, it's better to take Ozu's statement at face value. Over and over again within every Ozu film, one finds that soothing tofu-familiarity and repetition. If one were to watch every Ozu film successively at a retrospective, it would be hard at the end of the evening to parse apart the different conflicts, characterizations, and even the titles of the films (Late Spring, Early Spring, Late Autumn) -- they all blend together into the seamlessness of a single film, an endless experience of déjà vu. Like the simple tofu-maker he claimed to be, Ozu worked and re-worked the substance of his films with the slightest of modulations, never straying too far from his efficient and clean techniques. He often worked with the same troupe of actors -- Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Takeshi Sakamoto -- all of them becoming part of that indelible brand of Ozu's signature compositions. Particular events and gestures would boil and rise out of his oeuvre to become Ozu mainstays -- the nostalgia of uninterrupted folksongs, watching small-scale theater, twin children that gesture like Kabuki demons, etc. Again, as Ozu says, his films are like that familiar, old tofu -- unpretentious, elegantly bare, and easily digestible.
Then it is strange when so many western film scholars have championed Ozu as a modernist par excellence. These scholars tend to cite Ozu's lacuna of narrative exposition; that his stories hopscotch back-and-forth between plot points and create ever widening fissures of implicit information that can only be understood through shrewd detective work and a pause button. Modernist apologists will also finger Ozu's measured formalism as the mark of Ozu as some sort of Brechtian pleasure: "Look, he consistently breaks the 180-degree rule! That red teapot was there, and now it is here! His architectural deployment of still lives is the greatest celebration of form!" But Ozu is exemplary of modernism as much as Pee-Wee's Playhouse is typical of the early 20th century avant-garde -- it's merely a matter of over-estimation.
It is even more strange then that many Japanese film scholars tend to think of Ozu as the most traditional of all Japanese filmmakers, aligning him within the same breath as the Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata, a novelist whose work desperately clinged to effete, Japanese classicism. Then, how peculiar it is that for western eyes, Ozu becomes that stringent radical of film-form, and for his fellow countrymen, he suffers the banality of a tradition that is as old as rice.
Eclipse's reissuing of Ozu's silent comedies proves to be a wonderful source of levity that interrupts this woeful mismatching of modernism and Ozu. Enough of these claims towards modernism! In films like Passing Fancy, Tokyo Chorus, and I Was Born, But..., Ozu's uncomplicated sense of humor, his slick panache of surface and interchange, and provincial-minded drama creates a breathy fluidity within his small, Japanese universe. In these films, the easy flow of gestures and action is more about film pleasure than the hard disruption of forms devouring themselves. It's true that Ozu stages his films with the utmost design and care, but it is in order to affect a sense of effortlessness and continuity between his images. The western filmmaker that Ozu most highly regarded was that renowned eroticist Ernst Lubitsch, a director who could conduct the momentum of flirtation in the speed of a single frame. And it shows up deliberately within Ozu: the first scene in Passing Fancy shows a loose wallet bouncing around a number of audience members, a sight gag that multiplies its laughs as the film progresses to show us that everybody turns out to be a thief. Just a year before in 1932, Lubitsch would deploy that similar shtick in Trouble in Paradise, where mutual thievery becomes an occasion for romanticism.
Yet Lubitsch is merely the starting point in a long string of other western influences that worm themselves within the fabric of Ozu's films. It is hard to watch Ozu's comedies and not feel haunted by the presence of American-bred slapstick. In a film like Tokyo Chorus, Ozu pivots his drama around the basic situation of a man searching for a plate of food and re-enacts all those Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd skits that remind us that desperate hunger can also give way to riotous comedy, the genre of empty-stomach slapstick. Ozu even has a strong attraction to those early comedic Hal Roach serials, like The Little Rascals, with their garden variety selection of zany, singular child personalities. I Was Born, But... takes the same route with its ‘aw-shucks' charm of foolhardy children that are constantly scuffling about in dirt lots and tagging each other in schoolyard fights. And Ozu is relentlessly specific in his humor in the way he can fix a single detail into a walking punch-line: the smallest of the gang of children has a long swathe of paper stapled to his back, and a close-up reveals the laughable message, "Please don't feed me. I have a sensitive stomach."
And it is within Ozu's microscopic ability of being able to cut out the smallest of details that he really excels. In these comedies, Ozu reveals to us that he is not so much a filmmaker but more of a comic strip artist in the vein of Charles Schulz's Peanuts or Frank King's Gasoline Alley. Though it might seem ridiculous, the worlds of Ozu and Schulz convene within that confined space of homebound observation of daily life and routine. One needs only to open up the comics section of the newspaper to notice that the best serial comic artists are the ones who are able to locate the most exquisite and meaningful details of images in a broad swipe that translates immediately into the metonymy of a figure. Indeed, cartoonists make for the best documentarians. Even Ozu says, "I've never made up a character. In my films, I make copies of my friends." It is as if Ozu catches life unaware, segmenting and fixing the most intimate of observed moments for his films. A baby coos beneath a mosquito net, a man sharpens a pencil with the blade of a cooling fan, a mustache twitches beneath a nose. Ozu moves with a bounding grace over his images, creating a series of pictures that feels more like a comic strip than a film.
Yet contained within the small jokes of daily living, Ozu always manages to sneak in his Aristotelian sense of pathos. It turns out that all along, Ozu's silliness and boyish laughs were really an excuse to turn the larger gears of melodrama within his films. In Passing Fancy, a wayward and immature father learns to love his precocious son; in I Was Born, But..., two sons become disillusioned with their father when they learn how laughable he can be; and in Tokyo Chorus, a man loses his job and desperately looks for ways to keep his family afloat. Here, I must spoil these films for you and tell you that they all end happily. For with Ozu, as in all of his films, everything is always restored to a state of harmony, a circular sense of entirety and return. Like his images that prefer a mode of symmetry in that everything that moves fluctuates and is drawn by the gravity of his humor and drama into an immovable centeredness within his frames, the tensions within Ozu's films release, and life returns to as it was.
Ozu was never cut out for the hard business of modernism. His films are too soft and his themes too yielding. He was more like the television sitcom before television -- his problems were never large enough to leave the home front, almost scared of the world outside of the family, frightened of any space that proves too unfamiliar. There is hardly ever a shadow to his floodlit, iron-flat, depthless designs. The home, the family, and the familiarity of friends were enough for Ozu. For him, small problems prove seismic in there microscopic interest. Images like a frustrated child punching small holes within the rice paper walls, or a child's soil-black footprint leaving its residue upon the top of a wooden rice cooker have all the laconic puissance of the best comic strips (or the best documentaries), because it speaks to a depth of perception that approaches the most private of memories, like the words of a diary. But perhaps all of this writing is too much as well. One should not devote so much time to over-thinking tofu. It is simply delicious.