The Spaces In-Between: The Cinema of Yasujiro Ozu
2004; Issue: 63 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoThe recent, international centenary celebration retrospective of the work of Yasujiro Ozu, during which has played every one of the director's thirty-six extant films (from the fifty-four he completed over the course of his career), has been the perfect opportunity to assess--or perhaps to re-assess--the nature of the unique cinematic style associated with this director. After seeing so many of Ozu's works in rapid succession, and indeed after teaching Ozu at screenings and deliberating with such esteemed minds as Steve Neale and Graham Healey, one thing that emerged quite pressingly was the actual development of his style. Only David Bordwell's Ozu and The Poetics of Cinema gives us anything close to a sense of just how the style that was crystallized in 1949 with Late Spring came to be; specifically how its central facets (the pillow shots, the 360 degree shooting space, the static camera, etc) were honed and refined from 1929, when his first extant work Days of Youth was made. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This, then, was broadly what I set out to (partially) rectify. I hope to have covered some new ground with this article, and perhaps to have corrected some long held misapprehensions surrounding Ozu's style. There have been surprisingly (and one must say distressingly) few new features on Ozu in the leading film journals in recent months. But the retrospective has produced an excellent collection of essays published by The Japan Foundation as a programme for last year's 27th Hong Kong International Film Festival (the first to play Ozu's complete body of extant work). And also a piece by Richard Combs in the recent issue of Film Comment, in which he tries to uncover the Ozu behind the historical author usually taken as read; that is, the Ozu behind the dominant perceptions of the filmmaker that have been held largely since Donald Richie established an implacable currency for them in 1974 with his book Ozu: His Life and Work. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is more or less within this context that my work was produced. Although the more overt pretensions to extending the scope of Ozu criticism (or scholarship), present particularly in Combs' interesting piece, are not to be found here, it is my hope that a better understanding of the foundations of thought on a director whose work remains vital, essential, can be at least pointed to with this feature. If it only heralds a step in this direction, I will take it has having been successful. I would like, at the outset, to express my sincere thanks and gratitude to Robin Wood, Steve Neale, Sheldon Hall and Graham Healey, with whom I have discussed Ozu at length and who all read and offered insightful and useful comments on this piece at various stages of its development. Thanks also to Richard Lippe and Florence Jacobowitz, whose suggestions made the work fuller and invariably better. If one looks back even perfunctorily over the history of the reception of Japanese cinema in the West, indeed even at the indigenous reception accorded the acknowledged giants of Japanese film, one is, I think, presented with a not insubstantial number of dichotomies. In the main, at least until the mid 1970s, the overriding opposition that fuelled such intense critical and even industrial discourse seemed to boil down repeatedly to whether certain films or filmmakers were, in essence (that is: style, subject matter, treatment, etc.), Japanese or Western. Indeed, where the three grand masters (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa) were concerned, a simple line was conceived wherein the most Japanese and the least Japanese occupied either extreme whilst the most harmonious, or 'balanced' figure took his place at the centre. It should require no elucidation from me to grasp that Kurosawa and Ozu were the directors at each end of the scale, whilst Mizoguchi (somewhat simplistically) sat in the centre. The result of this strain of thought, from Japan more than anywhere else, was that: following Kurosawa's great success with Rashomon in 1951, winning the Venice Golden Lion and the best foreign film Academy Award, only lavish and/or exotic Jidai-Geki (period films) garnered international distribution. …
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