The Career of Yasujiro Ozu

January 5, 2008

The work of an artist fortunate enough to have his/her career spread over a few decades organizes itself into periods. The very best output of an artist will often fall within a single discrete period. The work that we read today by William Wordsworth falls within a remarkably short period of time (like 7 years) when considered from the perspective of a very long career as a poet. Plenty of writers and musicians follow a similar trajectory: great creative success that flattens out into uneven work as the years pass. A few artists manage a series of creative plateaus. Philip Roth would be remembered for Portnoy's Complaint, but his output in old age has pushed him to another level.

If we graph the creative peaks of Yasujiro Ozu we find an odd pattern. His well-known works fall overwhelmingly within the late period of his career. His surviving films range from 1929 to 1962, but the ones easily available in the US are from the period 1949-1961. Criterion recently crowned these years with their five DVD box of "Late Ozu". It would seem that the consensus is that his best work is his very late work.

I am curious why this is the case.. and it now looks as if I will be able to explore some earlier Ozu with a friend who owns many of the Hong Kong releases of his work. Our first foray was The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941). This was one of only two films made between 1937 and 1947.. on account of the disturbance of World War II. The film follows the treatment of an aging mother who, when her husband dies, is mistreated by her older children. The theme of parents getting passed off impatiently by children will reappear in Tokyo Story (1953). The Toda Family works this theme effectively, but having seen Tokyo Story I thought it came off as something of a rough draft. Ozu has his themes.. and anyone who appreciates Ozu will find much to admire in the film.. but no one is going to nominate this as one of the great films of all time—which is the case with Tokyo Story.

It would seem that there was a crystallization of sorts that came to Ozu in the late 1940s and then continued pretty much to the end of his career. Part of this might be a result of a maturing national cinema. Any person who works in a studio system is going to be at least partially buoyed or sunk by the system itself. But discounting the possible gains in craftsmanship, I wonder if we could also point to Ozu's best work as a product of post-war Japan. That is, the emotional cruxes of his work took on a new point in the midst of the immense social changes that occurred after the war. The hauntings of lost spouses and children add something ethereal to his later period. The war is always there, unspoken mostly, but the cause of losses that drive the characters.

This is obviously a hypothesis that I need to test.. and I may well decide that there is something in his earlier work that is powerful in its own right. But for now I am working with this war-change theory and thinking that the focus somehow came together for his work after the war. This would account for his oddly shaped career: relatively little of importance in his early years and then a spectacular flowering for the last third.