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Quadruple Feature

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Shin Sabure and Michiyo Kogura in Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

I had not done such a thing since my early film freak days. Then it was not unusual to sit through five John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, or Budd Boetticher films projected one after the other in a screening room. Yesterday I did the same sort of thing as I watched four Yasujiro Ozu postwar films from Shochiku Studio screened between 5 pm and 12:30 am by Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I could have made it five pictures, but I had to miss Tokyo Twilight (1957) because I was beginning to fade by the time that midnight rolled around.

The films I saw were:

  • Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) about a small child lost in the ruins of a bombed-out Tokyo
  • A Hen in the Wind (1948) about a young wife sells her body to pay her son’s medical bills
  • The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) about a middle-aged couple that begins to separate over various issues, but comes together again in the end
  • Early Spring (1956) about the travails of salary-men in Tokyo

All four films were brilliant, and all featured interpersonal problems which ended in some form of reconciliation. In the divided West, such reconciliation would be replaced by buying a gun, wearing camouflage clothing, and committing a hate crime. We seem to prefer the irreconcilable in our own entertainment.

I am enthralled by TCM’s Ozu festival. So far this month, I have seen nine Ozu films; and there are four more screening next Tuesday, plus two more that I missed but could see using TCM’s WATCH NOW feature.

Why do I love Ozu’s films so much? For one thing, they are jewel-like in their perfection—even the silent films Ozu made before 1937. Also, they make me feel good without being saccharine in any way: His films, psychologically, are true to life. (In two of the films, there are depressed little boys with a bed-wetting problem.) Finally, Ozu’s films have a Buddhist sense of Mono no aware, which can be translated as “the pathos of things” or “the bittersweet awareness of impermanence.”

Yes, his films are all bittersweet. But they all end in sweetness.

Ars Est Celare Artem

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Japanese Film Director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)

It was Horace in his “Ars Poetica” who wrote ars est celare artem, meaning that true art conceals the means by which it is achieved.

The film medium has an unusually rich variety of tools that can be used in movies, including zooms in and out, pans, wipes, tracking and dolly shots, tilts, and crane shots. And these do not include the complex technically-assisted tools such as are involved in computer generated imagery (CGI).

In Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock created a stunning visual effect by combining zooming out with tracking in. Some directors like Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, Jean-Luc Godard, and Andrey Tarkovsky have used the language of film in new and exciting ways.

Just as there are writers like Ernest Hemingway who employ a simple style. There are others, such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Georges Perec who used all the bells and whistles of literature to achieve their aims.

If there is an equivalent to the Hemingway style in film, I would have to say it is in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. In the dozen or so films I have seen, I remember only one camera movement, a slight pan in his Tokyo Story (1953), in which we follow an elderly couple as they walk alongside a wall at a seaside resort. With Ozu, there is, for the most part, only a succession of simple shots, most frequently at the level of a Japanese person seated on a tatami mat.

Intercut with these shots are others that are almost like stills. In the sound pictures, the music wells up, and the audience is meant to absorb what has just happened. This is referred to in Japanese as mono no aware. literally: the pathos of things. There is, for instance, this recurring shot in Floating Weeds (1959):

As one American writer put it in The Other Journal:

When I reflect on Japanese cinema, I find that one of the things that continually draws me back to it is a sort of gentle melancholy and pensive longing. Granted, this isn’t true of all Japanese films — I don’t know if you’d find it much in violent yakuza films or over-the-top kaiju films — but the ones that have stuck with me over the years are typified by this emotion and seem to contain it in large amounts.

There’s a Japanese phrase that sums up this feeling I’m describing: “mono no aware.” Roughly translated into English, it means “the sadness of things”. It’s not sadness in the sense of depression or angst, but rather, it refers to an awareness of the fragility of existence, of the transient and bittersweet nature of life, which, I’ve found, can make for incredibly beautiful and poignant cinema.

That feeling is present in all the Ozu films I have seen, which is why I regard him as one of the greatest of all film artists and perhaps the preeminent artist in the Japanese cinema.