Director Yasujirō Ozu is buried at Engaku-ji, a beautiful, ancient Zen Buddhist temple complex in Kamakura, Japan, about an hour’s drive south of Tokyo. Often flanked by gifts of incense, sake and cigarettes left by loyal film fans, his grave is an imposing black marble slab etched with the Chinese character for mu.
Loosely translated, mu means “nothingness” but, in accordance with Zen philosophy, a nothing that infers everything. A person inhabiting mu displays a high attention to the comings and goings of life and its impermanence. Any viewer of Ozu’s vast filmography—a body of work that spans 54 films from 1927 to 1962, a year before his death—can instinctively understand why his work possesses the concept of mu. He was a monastically devoted filmmaker who proved a keen observer of postwar family life in Japan. He never married or had children. By his own admission, cinema was his life. Practically each of his films can be read as an incisive meditation on the Japanese family. Although some critics have found his films repetitive, such a complaint misses the finer point. As Ozu once put it, “Although it may seem the same to other people, each thing I produce is a new experience and I always make each work from a new interest. It’s like a painter who always paints the same rose.”
Over his 35-year career as a film director, Ozu rarely strayed from using a stationary camera mounted as low to the ground as possible with a 50mm lens. This lens duplicates a depth of field similar to that of human vision. Although Ozu never explicitly stated the reason for shooting the majority of his films this way, scholars generally agree that he sought to give the audience the presiding view in a traditional Japanese house—on a tatami mat directly on the floor. Through this authentic frame, watching Ozu’s films often feels like experiencing the goings-on of his characters as intimately as if we were sitting down to dinner with them.
If you know Ozu only from the melancholy atmosphere of his better-known dramas such as Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), it may come as a surprise to discover that he also had a penchant for comedy. Although often wrongly considered one of the director’s lesser late-period works, his color film Good Morning (1959) shows his deftness at using humor to explore the deep inner workings of the Japanese family—in this film’s case, the attempts across generations and household divides to find a stable bridge of communication at home and among neighbors.
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