How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language

MONO NO AWARE, a phrase that translates to “the pathos of things,” or something like “the beauty of transience,” has been a key aesthetic principle of Japanese art and philosophy for centuries. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the most famous of which are quiet domestic dramas set in Tokyo after World War II, that feeling is often manifested in what critics have come to call pillow shots: Every so often, the camera cuts away from the main action to a nearby object — a tree stirred by wind, a vase near a moonlit window, a passing train. It isn’t usually the case that a character in the movie is meant to be seeing that object at that moment, as another director might imply. Rather it’s the filmmaker who’s gently guiding our perspective away from the action, reminding us of the material world that persists outside of the story’s concerns. Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving “empty spaces” in his movies as a means of revealing “the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.”

It’s hard to think of another filmmaker who produced as vast and influential a body of work using as seemingly limited a box of tools. Between 1927 and 1962, Ozu, who died on his 60th birthday in 1963 from throat cancer, directed 54 films — nearly one for every year he was alive. Over the course of his career, he obsessively simplified his craft, homing in on a few preferred themes and techniques and refining them to such a point that he could be said, from around 1949 onward, to have been continuously remaking the same movie. When he was asked about this in an interview late in his life, Ozu replied, “I have always said that I only make tofu, because I am a tofu maker.”

Even his titles, often indicating the season over which a film unfolds, blend into one another: “Early Spring,” “Late Spring,” “Early Summer,” “The End of Summer,” “Late Autumn.” His narratives, too, are often interchangeable. There’s typically a middle-to-upper-middle-class Japanese family living in a traditional-style house in the commuter suburbs of Tokyo. The children of the family are grown, either married or of marrying age; the plot concerns when, whether and whom a young female character will wed. But plot in Ozu’s films always comes second to composition. This was another of his innovations — Ozu’s primary interest was in the meticulous establishment of an onscreen space in which to observe the behavior of characters as they interact in mostly mundane daily situations, up to and including the trimming of toenails.

Many critics have defined Ozu’s work in terms of the classic Western film techniques he rarely or never employed: flashbacks, dissolves, over-the-shoulder reverse shots. In fact, during the silent era, which in Japan lasted well into the 1930s, Ozu made ample use of all these tools — it was only in the postwar period that he began his radical experiment in winnowing down. He gave his actors precise instructions about the tilt of their heads and the direction of their gaze. He almost always placed the camera at a low angle in relation to the characters, showing them in a full floor-to-ceiling space that’s tidily crammed with domestic objects like bottles, teapots and vases. This unconventional angle turns the viewer into an unobtrusive witness, a guest in the home keeping a respectful distance.