The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday by Woojeong Joo

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday by Woojeong Joo Michael Raine The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday. By Woojeong Joo. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 288 pages. ISBN: 9780748696321 (hardcover, also available as softcover and e-book). Japanese cinema is not as central to film studies as it once was, but there is wide agreement among critics and filmmakers on the importance of Ozu Yasujirō. Highly acclaimed—with brief eclipses—in Japan over his thirty-five-year career, Ozu is now universally regarded as one of the great cinematic auteurs. In the 2012 version of the decennial Sight and Sound poll of world film directors, Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari; 1953) was ranked as the best film ever made, and in the parallel critics' poll Ozu was the only director with two films in the top twenty. He is celebrated especially for his postwar films that focus on quiet crises in the Japanese family, using a restricted style and exhibiting an immediately identifiable sensibility that has been termed "Ozuesque."1 Beyond that critical agreement, what is striking about Ozu studies is the diversity of approaches to the director's work and the variety of stances toward cinema as a medium ascribed to him. Initially regarded as a "new age film guy" (shin jidai no eigaman) in Japan, he was soon positioned on the leading edge of studio-based social realism, and then in the postwar years, for better or for worse, as Japan's "most Japanese" film director. After the early triumph of Tokyo Story, which won the first Sutherland Trophy for the best film shown at the National Film Theatre in London in 1958, Ozu's reputation abroad was established by major retrospectives in Berlin and [End Page 430] London in 1963 and in New York in 1964 and 1972. Paul Schrader published an extended account of Ozu's Zen-influenced "transcendental style" in 1972. This was followed in 1974 by the first monograph on Ozu in a Western language, written by Donald Richie, who had curated both New York retrospectives. Since then, Ozu has been the topos of various battles in film studies: Jonathan Rosenbaum's critique of Schrader and Richie, drawing on Noël Burch's formalist analysis of Ozu, was criticized for its insufficient rigor by David Bordwell, whose Wisconsin school appreciation of Ozu's modernism was attacked by writers at the journal Screen, and so on.2 Most scholarship in Japan has been more concerned with establishing Ozu's biography, filmography, and bibliography: Ozu's life, films, and much of his journalism have been catalogued by Tanaka Masasumi, Chiba Nobuo, and others.3 One text that stands out is Hasumi Shigehiko's Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō (Director Ozu Yasujirō), first published in 1983, which opened a portal between Japanese and Western Ozu studies when it was translated into French in 1998. Hasumi's influential brand of film criticism is based on the immediate encounter of an active critic with the materiality of the moving image, what Hasumi calls "dynamic visual acuity" (dōtai shiryoku). It is less an evaluation of the filmmaker—though being closely observed and insightful, it is that as well—than it is another chance to repudiate cinema as a medium of representation.4 In a similar manner, Gilles Deleuze has discussed Ozu's films to illustrate his philosophy of time.5 One of the pleasures of Joo's The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday is a kind of lowering of the stakes. It steps away from the formalist arguments that dominated much of the discussion in the 1980s and from the philosophical speculations that have proliferated more recently. While drawing on Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto to map the different discursive positions on Ozu's style (traditional or modern) and politics (reactionary or radical), Joo identifies his own interest as a sociohistorical study of Ozu's films as a medium for reflecting on what Tosaka Jun called "actuality" (p. 28). This approach echoes the "cultural turn" in film and area studies of more recent authors such as Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, drawing on urban theorists Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to specify the central concerns...