Ozu the Craftsman

(Chieko Higashiama and Setsuko Hara in Tôkyô monogatari)

We should be aware that any movie made by Ozu, despite all his mundane images of Tokyo in the fifties, belongs to a universe that's radically different than ours. Not only because of the hieroglyphs (mixed as they are with American signs), neither of the kimonos (mixed as they are with European dresses). There are other differences, absolutely radical, expressed by subtle signals.

Before talking about them, let's make it clear: the movies of Ozu carry a meaning that surpasses any barriers among civilizations, as remote as they could be. In any language, in any culture, the tragedy of the generational gap within families speaks the same words. We find it in the Noriko Trilogy of the Japanese Yasujiro Ozu, in the Apu Trilogy of the Indian Satyajit Ray (that is at least on the same level as Ozu's movies), in Rembrandt's rendering of the Return of Prodigal Son. I saw the painting at Hermitage, years ago, and I have tears in my eyes always when I think at it. The old father, close to blindness, close to death, and his son, infamous, downtrodden, penitent. He suffered all cruelties of life, and now he is back, desperate and finding in the old father the pillar of support. And I'm thinking, what if everything is only the dream of the old father?

Ozu is universal while he is putting the universal in the Japanese frame.

Banshun (Late Spring) begins with some kimono wearing ladies who have gathered for the ritual of tea preparation. Actually it is a signal from Ozu: my movie is equivalent to a ceremony of tea preparation. At the middle of the movie, the Noh performance: Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is moving the muscles on her face the same the main actor is doing on the stage. She is unaware, of course: she is alarmed by what seems to be a change of regards between her father (Chishu Ryu) and the beautiful widow. Actually Ozu sends us another signal: my movie is equivalent to a Noh performance.

(video by 0wn0red)

So, coming back to an earlier question: is Ozu an artist or a craftsman? Think at the Byzantine icons, at the Japanese gardens: the formalism is strict, the canon is ruthless, the personality of the creator is severely arrested, only his mastership is allowed.

(Zen Garden)

The same as Noh artists, Ozu remains strictly in the canon, absolutely faithful to the formalism; his movies resemble each other because Ozu is an artisan who comes back again and again to craft his work towards perfection.

Let me make here a digression: Sōseki, in his Sixth Dream, is telling us about an artist from the thirteen century, Unkei, who is carving a huge statue (a Niō) from the trunk of a tree.

(Niō Guarding the Temple Gate)

In the story of Sōseki, Unkei, who lived hundreds of years ago, is emerging in Meiji era, and no one from the attendance notices this discrepancy: the moment one becomes a Master, time has no more meaning for him, past and future disappear.

But here's the point I'd like to emphasize: in the story Unkey does not carve the nose and eyebrows of the Niō; he finds them within the wood. He became part of the Universe of gods, that he had been carving for all his life.

The same with Ozu. He had been carving his movies for tens of years, till it was no more need for him to invent the situations of his stories: he was finding them in the Universe.

Is Ozu alive? On his tombstone, that unique hieroglyph, MU, tells us about void, about nothingness, heavy of the meanings of all his movies, loaded with all forces of Cosmos.

(Yasujiro Ozu and Setsuko Hara)