Film · Around the world

Yasujirō Ozu

1903–1963 · Japanese

Shochiku studio; the shomin-geki, or lower-middle-class domestic drama

Yasujirō Ozu made fifty-four films, almost all of them quiet domestic dramas about parents, marriageable daughters and the slow dissolution of the Japanese family. He worked in a style so rigidly his own that it has its own vocabulary: the camera placed about a metre from the floor, rarely moving, actors addressing it almost head-on, and "pillow shots" of rooftops, corridors and washing lines between scenes. Long dismissed abroad as too Japanese to export, he is now routinely placed among the greatest directors who ever lived.

How to spot them

▸The 'tatami shot' — a static camera roughly a metre off the floor, at the eye level of someone kneeling
▸No fades, wipes or dissolves in the late films; almost no camera movement; cuts that break the 180-degree rule
▸'Pillow shots': empty corridors, chimneys, laundry and passing trains inserted between scenes
▸Setsuko Hara as the smiling daughter, Chishū Ryū as the ageing father; scripts co-written with Kōgo Noda over sake
▸Titles built from the seasons — spring, summer, autumn — and endings in which nothing is resolved

Key films

An elderly couple travel from the provinces to the capital, where their grown children have no time for them; only their widowed daughter-in-law does (1953)

Tokyo Story — topped the directors' section of the Sight and Sound greatest-films poll in 2012.

A daughter will not marry because it would leave her widowed father alone, so he invents a remarriage of his own to force her hand, then peels a pear in an empty house (1949)

Late Spring — the first of his films with Setsuko Hara, and the template for the rest of his career.

Three generations under one roof are broken up when the daughter announces, over lunch, that she has chosen her own husband (1951)

Early Summer — the middle panel of the so-called Noriko trilogy.

Two small boys go on a vow of silence against their parents because they will not buy a television set (1959)

Good Morning — a colour comedy of consumerism and fart jokes, reworking his own silent I Was Born, But…

A travelling kabuki troupe's ageing leader returns to a seaside town and to the son who does not know whose son he is; his mistress quarrels with him across a street in the rain (1959)

Floating Weeds — a colour remake of his own 1934 silent A Story of Floating Weeds, shot by Kazuo Miyagawa.

A widowed father drinks with old schoolfriends, is made to listen to a naval march, marries off his daughter and is left alone in the kitchen (1962)

An Autumn Afternoon — his last film, made the year before he died.

A silent comedy in which two boys go on hunger strike after seeing their father clown for his boss on a home movie (1932)

I Was Born, But… — the best known of his silents; won the Kinema Junpo best film prize.

Quick-fire facts

•He worked for the Shochiku studio for his whole career and died of throat cancer on 12 December 1963 — his sixtieth birthday, the same date as his birth
•He is buried at Engaku-ji in Kita-Kamakura beneath a gravestone bearing a single character, 無 (mu, 'nothingness')
•His low, static camera position is known as the 'tatami shot'; he shot almost exclusively on a 50mm lens
•He never married and lived with his mother until her death in 1962; asked why his films were all alike he said he only made tofu
•Setsuko Hara played a character called Noriko in Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story — the 'Noriko trilogy' — though they are not the same woman
•Chishū Ryū appeared in nearly every Ozu film from the late 1920s on, usually as the father
•He co-wrote his later scripts with Kōgo Noda at an inn in Chigasaki, reportedly measuring progress in bottles of sake
•Tokyo Story won the Sutherland Trophy in London in 1958, five years after its Japanese release
•Wim Wenders's documentary Tokyo-Ga (1985) is a pilgrimage to Ozu's surviving collaborators and locations
•He served in the Japanese army in China and was later held as a prisoner of war in Singapore

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Sources

British Film Institute — Where to begin with Yasujiro Ozu
Senses of Cinema — Ozu, Yasujiro — Great Directors