Ozu setting up one of his standard low-angle shots while directing The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice

Yasujiro Ozu

Director. b. Dec. 12, 1903, Tokyo. d. 1963. At age ten he was sent by his father, a fertilizer merchant, to a remote school at the family’s ancestral hometown. He was raised by his devoted, pampering mother and until he was 20 rarely saw his stern father. Some critics would later find traces of this unusual childhood in many of Ozu’s films. He was an undisciplined youth, with little patience for formal schooling but a growing passion for Hollywood movies. After finishing middle school, he worked for a year as an assistant teach at a village school. Back in Tokyo at 20, he landed, through an uncle’s connections, a dream-come-true job as an assistant cameraman at the Shochiku film company. Despite a one-year hiatus for compulsory military service, he made rapid headway and by the end of 1926 had become an assistant director. A year later, he made his first film. Ozu’s early work was raw and unfocused and reputedly influenced by his long exposure to Hollywood films. But gradually he developed his own disciplined style and thematic concerns. By the early 30s he was among Japan’s most popular and highly regarded directors. In 1945 he was interned for six months in a British POW camp.

Before his death of cancer at 60 he had made 54 films, all remarkably consistent in their milieu, theme, and style. His films almost invariably deal with the lives and domestic problems of the Japanese middle-class family. His style is exquisite in its simplicity. Technically, it is characterized by stationary-camera shots usually taken from a low angle, about three feet above the ground, which corresponds with the eye-level of a Japanese adult crouching on a cushion, a position customarily taken by his tradition-bound characters. For this reason, his sets were constructed with ceilings long before Welles and Citizen Kane. He seldom varied his camera angle and almost never resorted to such devices as fades, dissolves, pans, or tracking shots. He also ignored the traditional rule of consistent camera direction through 180-degree space for the purpose of matching action on the screen for greater clarity of the narrative. Ozu shot his scenes in a circular 360-degree space, achieving dramatic visual effect, often at the expense of narrative logic. Yet despite this laconic use of some of the basic "phrases" and punctuation marks in the language of the cinema, and the resultant static long scenes, he turned out films of great beauty and magnetic power. In Japan, where he was considered the most Japanese of all the national directors, his films won frequent awards. Since the mid-50s his work has been increasing appreciated outside of Japan.

From Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition (New York: HarperResource, 2001).

Ozu’s most important characteristic is his way of watching the world. While that attitude is modest and unassertive, it is also the source of great tenderness for people. It is as if Ozu’s one personal admission was the faith that the basis of decency and sympathy can only be sustained by the semi-religious effort to observe the world in his style; in other words, contemplation calms anxious activity. As with Mizoguchi, one comes away from Ozu heartened by his humane intelligence and by the gravity we have learned.

The intensive viewing of Ozu—and such stylistic rigor encourages nothing less—makes questions of Japaneseness irrelevant. There have been attempts to explain Ozu by reference to his native culture, and it is easy to pin his mysticism to facile notions of the East. Even Ozu himself believed that his subject matter was too provincial to travel outside Japan. Some critics have tried to illuminate his films by reference to Buddhism, Japanese pottery, domestic ritual, and haiku.

All of those are worth considering. But the most useful point to make is that Ozu uses a minimal but concentrated camera style: static, a little lower than waist height, with few camera movements, dissolves, or fades. The intentness of the image, and its emotional resonance, is not only as relevant to the West as to Japan; it is a return to fundamental cinema, such as we can see in Dreyer, Bresson, Lang, and even Warhol, whose characters sit as habitually as Ozu’s. Nor is there anything limitingly Oriental in Ozu’s ability to create deep anguish or joy in the cross-cutting of faces. There are similar moments in Hitchcock or Lang, when we are made to apprehend the unverbalized feelings that rush between people, and which are only defined by the constructive power of editing.

From David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).