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Reorienting Ozu
ii
Reorienting Ozu
A Master and His Influence
1
iv
1
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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Jinhee Choi
Bibliography 285
Index (Compiled by Kosuke Fujiki) 299
[ vi ] Contents
FIGURES
Mark Betz is Reader in film studies at King’s College London, UK. He is the
author of Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (2009), as well
as several articles and book chapters on postwar art cinema and film culture,
the reception of foreign films in North America, the history of film studies,
and contemporary manifestations of art film aesthetics with an emphasis on
Asia. His work has been published in Screen, Cinema Journal, The Moving Image,
and Camera Obscura, and in the collections Defining Cult Movies, Inventing Film
Studies, and Global Art Cinema, among others.
Adam Bingham is Lecturer in film and television at Nottingham Trent
University and the author of Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi (2015). He writes
regularly for Cineaste and has contributed to recent books on female filmmak-
ers, neo-noir in Hong Kong cinema, and on representations of prostitution.
David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written several books on film his-
tory and aesthetics, including Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988; 1994),
Poetics of Cinema (2007), and Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of
Entertainment (2000; 2nd ed., 2011). With Kristin Thompson he has written
Film Art: An Introduction (2013) and Film History: An Introduction (McGraw-
Hill, 2009). They write about cinema at www.davidbordwell.net/blog.
William Brown is Senior Lecturer in film at the University of Roehampton,
London. He is the author of Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the
Multitude (forthcoming), Supercinema: Film- Philosophy for the Digital Age
(2013), and Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New
Europe (with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, 2010). He also the coedi-
tor of Deleuze and Film (with David Martin-Jones, 2012). He has published
numerous essays in journals and edited collections, and has directed various
films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Circle/Line (2016), Letters to
Ariadne (2016), and The Benefit of Doubt (2017).
x
Jinhee Choi is Reader in film studies at King’s College London, UK. She is
the author of The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers Global
Provocateurs (2010) and has coedited three volumes, Cine-Ethics: Ethical
Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship (2014), Horror to the
Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (2009), and Philosophy of Film
and Motion Pictures (Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
Darrell W. Davis is a recognized expert on East Asian cinema, with books
and articles on Japanese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and pan-Asian film and
media industries. His latest project is an analysis, evaluation, and prognosis
of Chinese connected viewing, conducted with UC Santa Barbara and Warner
Bros. He lives and teaches in Hong Kong.
David Deamer is the author of Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom
Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility (2014) and Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three
Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (2016); he has also published a few
journal articles and book chapters here and there. Deamer’s interests lie
at the intersection of cinema and culture with history, politics, and the
philosophy of Deleuze and Nietzsche. Deamer is a semi- independent
scholar affiliated with the English, Art, and Philosophy departments of
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK; he blogs online at www.david-
deamer.com.
Albert Elduque is postdoctoral researcher in the University of Reading (UK),
where he is part of the project “Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian
Cinema: Exploring Intermediality as a Historiographic Method” (‘IntermIdia’).
His PhD thesis (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 2014) dealt with the
notions of hunger, consumption, and vomit in the cinema of the ’60s and
’70s, taking into account European and Brazilian filmmakers such as Pier
Paolo Pasolini, Marco Ferreri, and Glauber Rocha. His main research interests
are Brazilian cinema (particularly its relation with music traditions), Latin
American cinema overall, and the aesthetics of political film. He is the coedi-
tor of the film journal Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, published by Universitat
Pompeu Fabra.
Manuel Garin is Senior Lecturer in film studies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Barcelona. He has been a visiting scholar at the Tokyo University of The Arts
and the University of Southern California, where he developed the compara-
tive media project Gameplaygag. Between Silent Film and New Media. He is the
author of El gag visual. De Buster Keaton a Super Mario (2014) and has published
in peer-reviewed journals such as Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of
Cultural Studies, L’Atalante, and Communication & Society. Trained as a musician,
he holds an MA in Film Scoring from ESMUC Music School.
List of Contributors [ xi ]
xii
J apanese director Ozu Yasujiro has become a cultural icon, whose far-reach-
ing influence is evident both in and beyond the medium of film. Directors
such as Wim Wenders, Claire Denis, and Hou Hsiao-hsien have paid homage
to Ozu through their work, while Abbas Kiarostami dedicated his film Five
(Panj, 2003) to Ozu. The serialized comic Mystery of Ozu Yasujiro (Ozu Yasujiro
no nazo, 1998–1999) features an American director named Stan, who tries to
locate the meaning of mu, a kanji character inscribed on Ozu’s gravestone.1
Concierge Renée, one of the two principal characters of the French novel The
Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’élégance du hérrison, Muriel Barbery, 2006), watches
Ozu’s The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyodai, 1950) during her spare time. To
her great delight, she finds out that a new resident of her building has the
same last name as the great director.2 With an increasing presence as a major
figure in cinema as well as appearing in other cultural milieus, Ozu needs to be
revisited in a broader context—including moving beyond Japan.
Western scholarship on Ozu has primarily focused on his film style, with
various attempts to identify the origin(s) of his aesthetic—including to what
extent Ozu’s distinctive and unique film style may reside in his “Japaneseness.”
From culturalists such as Donald Richie and Paul Schrader, to Marxist Noël
Burch, to neoformalists David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, and historians
such as Daisuke Miyao and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, the diverse methodolo-
gies employed in characterizing Ozu’s films not only indicate Ozu’s enigmatic
aesthetic but further, as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto insightfully points out, reflect
the changing position of Ozu in the establishment and development of film
studies as an academic discipline.3 Ozu still figures in contemporary critical
discourses on directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kitano Takeshi, and Kore-eda
2
Hirokazu and on a global canon of contemporary slow cinema. Why does Ozu
still matter in contemporary global film scenes and scholarship? This volume
aims to consider the formation of Ozu’s aesthetic within the various cultural
and historical contexts and examines Ozu’s influence on both Japanese direc-
tors and those from all around the globe, revisiting the limits and benefits in
considering their relationship under the notion of influence.
Ozu’s poignant film style is now widely known among film aesthetes and schol-
ars: his oblique, sparse storytelling, the pictorial quality of shots and carefully
arranged props, spatiotemporally ambiguous inserts (pillow shots), his use
of 360-degree space and low-height camera, repeated visual motifs (trains,
smokestacks, beer bottles, clothes lines), and tonal stillness/stasis, to list just
a few. Noël Burch has characterized Ozu’s film style as “systematics”—“an
association of inter-related but semi-autonomous systems,”4 while Bordwell
explores it under the rubric of a “parametric” style that consists of identifia-
ble formal parameters governed by a system of its own logic.5 Japanese film
scholar Hasumi Shigehiko and Japanese New Waver-turned-critic Yoshida
Kiju also identify an “Ozuesque” (and “Ozu-like”) character in the master’s
signature style, despite the contrasting values attributed to it. Ozu’s aes-
thetic, nonetheless, neither emerged nor exists in a vacuum; his aesthetic is
very much embedded in the sociopolitical, cultural, and industrial context of
Japan, interweaving through the various planes of Japanese everyday life.
For many scholars and viewers, everydayness is the principal subject of
Ozu’s work. Yoshida definitively claims,
[Ozu] decided to depict only incidents from everyday life . . . . He was not allured by
the optimistic idea that art is grand and eternal. Limiting his cinematic expression,
Ozu-san allowed his viewers to use their own imagination limitlessly. Consequently,
his films, apparently plain and simple, become mysterious and constantly invoke new
meanings.6
The everydayness in Ozu’s films also constitutes what Richie calls the “texture
of life.”7 Richie states, “[O]ne object of Ozu’s criticism throughout his career,
beginning with such early pictures as The Life of an Office Worker and Tokyo Chorus
(Tokyo no korasu, 1931), has been the texture of Japanese urban life, traditional
in that it has been unthinkingly passed on from generation to generation for
over a century.”8 For Schrader, the relationship between human being and its
“unfeeling environment” is the key to creating a disparity between the two, which
is then to be transcended.9 Seemingly insignificant everyday objects are seen to
Introduction [3]
4
arrangement of props in Ozu’s films. In the first two days, her daily routines
are established with an immaculate visual ordering of the domestic space. By
the third day, the film slowly sets into a “disaster mode,”14 in which we see
domestic objects begin to be dropped, misplaced, and forgotten, signaling the
deleterious disruption of Jeanne’s daily routines.
The minimal aesthetic, broadly construed, of Ozu, and that of Akerman,
belong to different traditions of filmmaking. If Ozu’s oeuvre constituted a
major strand of home drama in the Japanese film industry during the stu-
dio era, Akerman’s films were influenced by American minimalist artists’ film-
making such as Andy Warhol’s and French leftist filmmaking such as Jean-Luc
Godard’s.15 Yet the two share a similar aesthetic sensibility—formal density.
In their films, the human being comprises part of the everyday texture rather
than vice versa. For both filmmakers, their way of constructing “dramatic”
human actions through a rigid play with on-and off-screen space could result
in the subversion of a usual hierarchy between character and environment.
Noriko’s unseen wedding in Late Spring, for instance, is less important than
Shukichi’s peeling of an apple in the empty home upon his return from the
wedding. The murder taking place toward the end of Jeanne Dielman can be
read, as Ivone Margulies suggests, as an equivalent to Jeanne’s peeling of
potatoes or preparing veal for a meal, “one more element in the unending ser-
ies of ‘and, and, and.’ ”16 What links Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman, to Ozu’s
aesthetic sensibility, despite their unbridgeable formal differences, is the
density of film’s surface texture to the effect that human beings and events
become part of “the transfiguration of the everyday.”17 In Ozu, Gilles Deleuze
claims, “everything is ordinary or banal, even the death and the dead who are
the object of a natural forgetting.”18
The still life and contemplative outlook of Ozu’s films further attract the
attention of the proponents and advocates of “slow” cinema. Compared to con-
temporary filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
and Béla Tarr, who are often associated with excessively long duration of shot
(and film) and slowly paced narrative, Ozu is not that “slow,” as Jonathan
Rosenbaum observes.19 Nonetheless, one is often tempted to compare
the tone and stillness of Ozu’s films with that of slow cinema and further
intrigued by Studio Shochiku’s invitation of a long-take director such as Hou
to pay homage to the Japanese master.20 For those who make recourse to
the philosophy of Deleuze and pay a particular attention to the temporality
of slow cinema, Ozu can occupy a special place. According to Deleuze, in the
time-image, time is not subservient to the construction of the movement-
image that provides an illusion of the continuity of an action. It becomes the
subject of cinema itself. Deleuze identifies Ozu as “the first to develop pure
optical and sound situations.”21 In the shot of a vase in Ozu’s Late Spring,
inserted between two shots of Noriko with two different facial expressions,
from a smile to sadness, Deleuze finds an instance of direct representation
Introduction [5]
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
pues la primera vitoria
de mí la tengo alcanzada;
que aunque la pena contina
mi juicio desconcierte,
es de suerte
que estimo por medicina
lo que me causa la muerte.
En tan rabioso combate
bien se verá á lo que vengo,
pues por vencimiento tengo
ser vencido y sin rescate;
porque, pastora, quedé
en lugar donde bonanza
no se alcanza,
que en los brazos de la fe
se desmaya la esperanza.
El que más se guarda y
mira,
más en vano se defiende,
pues vuestra terneza prende
y ejecuta vuesta ira,
y pasa tan adelante,
que entiendo en el daño fiero
de que muero,
que sois hecha de diamante
ó pensáis que sois de acero.
Trayo comigo guardado
licor para mi herida,
un sufrimiento á medida
de vuestro rigor cortado,
que aunque en el alma me
daña,
prestando á vuestra aspereza
fortaleza,
crecer puede vuestra saña,
mas no mengnar mi firmeza.
El suave son de la lira, la dulzura
de la voz, la harmonía de los
versos fué tal, que echó el sello á
todo lo passado, y habiendo
Filida hecho traer de sus
cabañas una curiosa caxa de
ébano fino, allí en presencia de
todos la abrió, y sacando della
ricas cucharas de marfil, cuchillos
de Damasco, peines de box y
medallas de limpio cristal, con
gran amor lo repartió de su mano,
y los pastores, con gran alegría
recibieron sus dones, salvo
Filardo que no había cosa que le
pudiesse alegrar, y assí él solo
triste y todos los demás
contentos, salieron á la ribera con
la hermosa Filida, y por la orilla
del cristalino Tajo se anduvieron
recreando. ¡Oh, quién supiera
decir lo que aquellos árboles
oyeron! porque Siralvo y Florela
gran rato estuvieron solos; Finea
y Alfelio lo mismo; Pradelio y
Filena, por el consiguiente. Pues
Sasio y Arsiano, Campiano y
Mandronio, bien tuvieron que
hacer en consolar á Filardo, y la
sin par Filida, como señora de
todo, todo lo miraba y todo lo
regía; hasta que el sol traspuesto
forzó á todos á hacer otro tanto. Á
Filida acompañaron los dos
maestros del ganado y sus
pastoras, Celia y Florela, y á
Filena los demás, porque assí
Filida lo ordenó; sólo Filardo,
viendo cuán poco allí granjeaba,
por diferente parte tomó el camino
de su cabaña; y sólo yo, fatigado
deste cuento, un rato determino
descansar, y si hay otro que
también lo esté, podrá hacer lo
mismo.
QUINTA PARTE
DEL PASTOR DE FILIDA
SIRALVO
Filida ilustre, más que el sol
hermosa,
sol de mi alma, sin razón
ausente
destos húmidos ojos
anublados,
¿cuándo veré la cristalina
fuente?
¿Cuándo el jazmín? ¿Cuándo
el color de rosa
con los dos claros ojos
eclipsados?
¿Cuándo piensas romper
estos nublados
y mostrarnos el día,
Filida, dulce mía?
Si en algún tiempo á los
desconsolados
mancilla hubiste, tenla de mi
pena;
cesse tan triste ausencia,
que en tu presencia la fatiga
es buena.
ARSIANO
Si sabéis poco de amores,
corazón,
agoras veréis quién son.
Esta empresa á que os
pusistes,
confiado en no sé qué,
es la que os hará á la fe
saber para qué nacistes;
no os espanten nuevas tristes,
corazón,
pues vos les dais ocasión.
Llevaréis la hermosura,
que os ofende, por amparo,
pues este solo reparo
os promete y asegura
que no os faltará ventura,
corazón,
aunque os falte galardón.