Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu (b. 12 December 1903–d. 12 December 1963) was a Japanese film director. Growing up as a film fan in the modernizing city of Tokyo, Ozu made his directorial debut at Shochiku Company’s Kamata Studio in 1927 with a silent jidai geki (period drama) film, Sword of Penitence (Zange no yaiba). After that Ozu became specialized in gendai geki (contemporary drama) and initiated a genre shoshimin geki (lower-middle-class salarymen films) with such films as Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no korasu, 1931) and I Was Born, But . . . (Otona no miru ehon: Umarete wa mita keredo, 1932). Many of his post–World War II films, including Late Spring (Banshun, 1949); Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953), the film that was voted the greatest film of all time in 2012 Sight and Sound Poll; and the last film An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, 1962), depicted everyday Japanese urban life, family matters (marriage, funeral, and dissolution), and relationships between generations. He directed fifty-three films by 1962. Ozu has been the object of critical attention by critics and scholars since the time when he was still working. In Japan, the status of Ozu as a foremost director of Japanese cinema was first established in the early 1930s. Early celebrations of Ozu emphasized his realism in faithfully depicting the reality of modern life in Japan. Critics regarded Ozu’s realism as a mode of social criticism. Later, especially after World War II, the primary focus of realism in Ozu criticism shifted to life’s vicissitudes and to a broader idea of humanism. This postwar critical tendency appeared to influence early scholarship on Ozu outside of Japan from the late 1950s the early 1970s, including the work by Donald Richie, which humanistically celebrated Ozu as an auteur. Then, it was Ozu’s unique film style, including the so-called pillow shots (spatially and temporally ambiguous shots that open scenes) and the use of 360-degree space that deviated from the narrational economy of Hollywood’s continuity editing, that made him a central figure during the period that saw the institutionalization of film studies in Euro-American academia in the late 1970s and 1980s. In the formation of the new academic discipline, emphasis was initially placed on formalism and Marxism. Thus, Ozu’s work served as a suitable example in demonstrating both the universal (“a humanist auteur”) and the particular (“a challenger to Hollywood”). Since then, a number of scholars and critics have studied the films of Ozu from various theoretical and historical standpoints.