Th e main reason why American fi lm can cross borders and be accepted by people in every country is because of its “brightness” [ akarusa ]. . . . Th e person who brought that “brightness” to Japanese cinema is Ozu Yasujiro, a new Kamata fi lmmaker. 17
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David Bordwell and Noel Burch have emphasized Ozu’s apprenticeship in Hollywood cinema. 18 Rather than questioning that claim, I would like to push it further: the project of emulating Hollywood was not specifi c to Ozu; but the intensity of his imitations—
in the modes of homage, parody, and learning—made him stand out among his peers.
From Japanese scholars such as Yamamoto Kikuo, Chiba Nobuo, Tanaka Masasumi, and Iwamoto Kenji we have a portrait of Ozu at Shochiku, learning his craft from ana- lyzing mostly Hollywood fi lms under the tutelage of Japanese directors such as Ushihara Kiyohiko. 19 Hollywood decoupage became the basis of Ozu’s “piecemeal” style, some- thing Ozu recognized in published interviews as well as in his work. He was constantly testing the “powers of the medium”—what cinema could do in its given conjunction—
sometimes on the model of American fi lm and sometimes going beyond it by going through it. 20
For a long time in the US there have been many fi lms, like Chaplin’s and Lloyd’s, full of brightness and cheerfulness, gags and nonsense, broad satire and irony. I’ve never seen anything like that in Japan. 21
Even in his earliest surviving fi lm, Days of Youth ( Wakaki hi, 1929), we can see Ozu experimenting with the subtlety that he found in the fi lms of Lubitsch, Chaplin, and others. Th e fi lm takes off from Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928), extending a “wet paint”
gag from the formal play of dots and lines into a narratively signifi cant play with objects, shapes, and textures. Th e comedy of embarrassment that is shrugged off by Lloyd’s buoyant “Boy” persona during the young couple’s visit to Coney Island is not so easily surmounted in Japan. Chieko (Matsui Junko) is knitting a pair of wool socks for Yamamoto (Saito Tatsuo), but she is coerced into giving them to his best friend, Watanabe. Yamamoto leans against a freshly painted pole while Chieko buys more wool, and is forced to hide his paint-stained hand as he walks with her, a secret that risks exposure when a stranger fi nds a dropped glove and, spotting Yamamoto’s light and dark hands, attempts to “return” it. Hiding his hand and then, when they go to a café, his smudged coff ee cup from Chieko, Yamamoto is fi nally exposed when the intimacy of winding wool with his would-be girlfriend makes him moon over her, and leave a painted hand-shaped impression on his cheek. Th e scene ends with a humiliation that, unlike the American, Yamamoto cannot laugh off . Taking Lloyd’s already abstract run- ning gag, Ozu cycles through a series of formal juxtapositions, linking the repeated texture of wool socks and gloves to the physical act of winding that both entices and betrays Yamamoto. But the goal is not simply formal play: for an audience that knows both Lloyd and Ozu, the sequence parodies the impossible heterosexual romance that Hollywood advertised around the world, leading to an ironic recognition: the buoy- ancy of the American “Boy” is not possible in the more constrained lives of his Japanese audience.
David Bordwell has noted the play on the Japanese title of Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven in the joke about the pawn shop in Days of Youth, but I think the references go further than the Dai shichi tengoku / shichiya pun and the imitation by Watanabe (Yuki Ichiro) of Chico’s gestures. Th e poster we see, like all the posters in Ozu’s fi lms before
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Passing Fancy ( Dekigokoro, 1933), is a foreign poster of a foreign fi lm, and Ozu doesn’t just incorporate Borzage’s title into his intertitles, but also the most famous lines of dialogue from the fi lm (“I’m a very remarkable fellow” and “keep your chin up” in their Japanese translations). But isn’t this more than homage? Ozu has converted one of the most impas- sioned romances in fi lm history into the “love story” of two college buddies, a bathetic modulation repeated at a formal level by converting Borzage’s famous seven-fl oor crane shot mapping the young lovers’ attic “heaven” onto eye-line matches of a rented room just ten feet off the ground. Th is citation reads at the level of structural principle, not just gesture, as a comic and cinephilic awareness of the “geopolitical incline” between Japanese and US cinema, if not Japan and the United States. Th e stairway is a place of hesitation between the ground-fl oor space of the boys’ humiliation (the school and the streetcar) and the hetero-social paradise of the upper fl oor with its absurd dreams of romance (Yuki rents his own room, and has to move out, just for the chance to talk with a girl). Within that structure, skiing is not just a trendy topic (it was that, too) but a sensory image of the sliding from romantic high to low that is the basic emotional tone of the fi lm. Th is, I think, is what Ozu means by the “subtlety” and “sophistication” that allowed
figure 5.2 All sound version: advertisement for Story of Floating Weeds (Ukikusa monogatari, director: Ozu Yasujiro, 1934), printed in Nihon eiga terebi purodyu-sa-kyokai, Puroguramu eigashi, taisho kara senshu made (Tokyo: Nihon hoso shuppan kyokai, 1978), p. 252.
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the Hollywood fi lms he admired to show without telling, to say more with less, and what led one critic to recognize him as “the fi lm director who is most like an artist.” 22
Even Ozu’s late silent fi lms, made during the “crisis time” when artists and intellec- tuals were encouraged to “return to Japan,” continue this play with foreign referents. 23 An advertisement for Story of Floating Weeds ( Ukikusa monogatari, 1934) presents the fi lm as modern and international—one that “won’t disappoint fans of foreign fi lms”—
and calls Ozu “a talented director who should be compared to Chaplin”! Th e advertising blurb mentions stereotypical Japanese concepts such as ephemerality ( hakanasa ), but it still positions Ozu as a cosmopolitan fi lmmaker, and contemporary reviews recog- nized the fi lm’s connection to Th e Barker (director George Fitzmaurice, 1928), which had been a big success in Japan, and its even more recent remake, Hoop-la (Frank Lloyd, 1933). 24 Th e Barker was a transitional sound fi lm, a part talkie, though it played silent with a benshi in Japan. Th e advertisement for Story of Floating Weeds also labels the fi lm
“all sound”—a fi lm with recorded music (including a theme song) but no dialogue, one of the “sound version” fi lms that Shochiku made before the move to the Ofuna studio in 1936 that made it possible to release a full slate of talking pictures. 25 Kido Shiro had seen the Warners Vitaphone system in New York in 1928 or 1929 and realized that American and European sound fi lms would soon be arriving in Japan. On his return he set up the research group that eventually employed the Tsuchihashi brothers to develop the puta- tively “pure Japanese sound system” that was used to record Th e Neighbor’s Wife and Mine ( Madamu to nyobo, 1931). 26 Even before those domestic sound fi lms could be pro- duced, Kido had wired for sound the major Shochiku cinemas showing Western fi lms, displacing the musicians from some cinemas by replacing them with records chosen by specialists in Western and Japanese music, and responded to the benshi strikes against those developments that started in the spring of 1932 by releasing increasing numbers of
“sound versions” with recorded music and some sound eff ects, occasionally a commen- tary recorded by a benshi, or partial dialogue. 27 Whatever the associations of the subject matter, as a text and as a technological object, Ozu’s fi lm was positioned as a modern and cosmopolitan alternative to western cinema, like the studio that produced it.
Ozu’s adaptation of the “subtlety” of Hollywood fi lm, combined with Kido’s incom- plete “adaptation” of the new technology of the sound-image, makes Story of Floating Weeds not only an adaptation of Th e Barker but a refl ection on that process itself. Critics such as Itagaki Takao complained about the “cheapness” of inserting a steam-train sound at the beginning of the fi lm (itself a prominent sound eff ect in Th e Barker ), to jus- tify the transfer of audible dialogue onto the visual track as intertitles. 28 But as with the set design and staging of Days of Youth, Ozu’s aesthetic sensitivity points toward a diff er- ent way of reading the fi lm, one that highlights the transfer of sound onto the image track in order to register the “geopolitical incline” between Japan and the United States, at the level of sound technology. Given the condition of Japanese cinema and Ozu’s sensitivity to technical details of the medium (his fi rst question at a public Q&A when Josef von Sternberg visited Japan: Why are your dissolves so extended?), it seems likely that Ozu, some members of his circle, and some discerning cinephiles also recognized this wry commentary on international cinematic fi liations as one of the pleasures of the fi lm. 29
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