Ozu's Anti-Cinema

by Kiju Yoshida, Daisuke Miyao (Translator), Kyoko Hirano (Translator)

Yoshida starts his award-winning Ozu’s Anti-Cinema with a story about his trip to Ozu’s deathbed. Yoshida writes that a dying Ozu whispered to him twice, as if speaking to himself, “Cinema is drama, not accident.” These cryptic last words troubled Yoshida for decades, and throughout this book he examines Ozu’s films and tries to uncover what Ozu really meant.

Ozu’s Anti-Cinema concerns Ozu’s films, but it is also Yoshida’s manifesto on films and filmmaking. In other words, this book is Yoshida’s personal journey into Ozu’s thoughts on filmmaking and, simultaneously, into his own thoughts on the nature of cinema. Every page displays the sensibility of one artist discussing another―this is probably a book that only a filmmaker could write. Within Yoshida’s luminous prose lies a finely tuned, rigorous analysis of Ozu’s films, which have rarely been engaged as closely and personally as here.

Genres: Film, Japan

198 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[j · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transcendentally (lol) impassioned tribute to the paradox and chaos of art. Ozu's contradictory forms, in conversation with their observer, as Yoshida asserts Ozu's films are in antagonistic relation to their audience. So much of the nuance of what makes Ozu great is approached from different angles here -- rather than simple film criticism or analytical work this is a deeply probing, questioning, open and exploratory meditation that is a strong work of art on its own merit. And, of course, so much of this is so misunderstood or neglected by so many tedious filmmakers whose arrogance burns through the screen. The unconquerable chaos depicted herein can hardly be wrangled. Anyone who has attempted to build something like Babel, however small, should revel and even weep at the idea of Ozu creating Tokyo Story only to feel that he had failed.

[Tim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book essentially amounts to a work of psychological fan fiction - an imaginary intellectual biography of Ozu from childhood til death, with Yoshida pretending at each step of the director's life to have privileged access to his thought processes and motivations. His basic method is to make one totally unfounded assumption about Ozu's thoughts ("This world is not meaningful or meaningless; it simply stands there. When Ozu-san looked at this world through a movie camera for the first time, he must have felt that way.") and then use this assumption as the jumping off point for even more assumptions ("Therefore, Ozu-san began to present images seen not from the points of view of human beings, but from those of things."). Every other sentence is "Ozu must have thought" this or "Ozu was probably trying to show" that, or in one instance, "it is likely that Ozu-san secretly desired..." - you get the point. It reads like bad psychoanalysis.

And the end result is a precarious tower of empty speculations that have little resemblance to Ozu's temperament as expressed in his films. Quite bizarrely, Yoshida's image of Ozu is something like a Zen Brechtian - a director who "made fun of viewers" and "cleverly tried to bring viewers to the realization that they tend to believe whatever is projected on the screen" by making films in which "there is no difference between surface and interior". If there is an insight to be made here, Yoshida does not argue it well. He provides very few quotes from Ozu himself, and even when he does so, the director's own words are so far removed in both tone and content from Yoshida's that it only makes his assertions seem more strained.

Yoshida makes the same sorts of assumptions about the audience's psychology as well (the old "inclusive we" trick), telling us confidently that as spectators we feel anxious or "feel that we are being looked at from the other side of the screen" or "perceive that the world is a chaotic mess and filled with contradictions" during scenes when I personally experienced no such thing.

A last word on the writing style: it's always hard to tell whether one should take issue with the author or the translator when a work like this reads so awkwardly. The translator's note mentions trying to minimize Yoshida's repetitive style, a supposed homage to Ozu's focus on "repetitions and slight differences." Even in scaled-back form, that gimmick is incredibly irritating, so I can only imagine how it reads in the original Japanese. Anyway, in both the flimsiness of his theses and in sentence structure and style, the whole thing read like a bad high school book report.

[Matthew Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the weakest of the three books I've now read on Ozu (Ritchie's being best, Schrader following) which is not to say it's close to bad, but I do appreciate this more on the basis of its unique perspective. Yoshida's writing tends to lend itself to speculation, especially when discussing "how Ozu-san probably felt" (which usually serves as a bit of a contrast to both what's been said by Ritchie and the general feel of his movies) and is not always terribly easy to follow; but it's worth it to read a more rounded analytical approach to Ozu's movies and the filmmaking. He provides several interesting quotes from the man himself and there's the occasional peppering of biographical detail I'd never known before (some of the stuff in the war, details of the propaganda film he was supposed to make) and it's a short enough book to enjoy in a few sittings, even if the majority of the material is on the obvious Late Spring and Tokyo Story.

Scrapes a 4.

[Violet · Rating 3 out of 5]

source: trust me bro

[Kai Perrignon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ecstatic criticism as speculative poetry, offering as much insight into Yoshida's filmmaking process as Yasujiro Ozu's. In Yoshida's reading, Ozu's film's explore chaos in the natural world via a playful style that constantly draws attention to its own artificiality. I have generally not read Ozu's style as deconstructive, but Yoshida's argument is compelling as one potential philosophical perspective on the language of cinema. I was continually provoked, even when I was laughing at the audacity of his takes. He loves the word "probably", and there are funny sections where he quotes Ozu and says he's full of it. The book stems from Ozu's dying words to Yoshida, ''Cinema is drama, not accident.", which drove the younger filmmaker to a kind of madness that resulted in this book. It was a worthy, self-aware, and even egalitarian madness, as articulated in the closing pages:

"Here, I have to admit that my interpretation of Ozu-san's films is nothing but a fiction. I cannot provide an answer to the question of why Ozu-san sensed and acknowledged that the world was extremely chaotic. I have plied fiction after fiction about Ozu-san. I imagine that Ozu-san
felt profound despair when he looked at the world through a movie camera for the first time and discovered the chaos ofthe world. However, there is no prooffor such an opinion. Ifsomething had already happened to Ozu- san that taught him about the chaos and ambiguity ofthe world before he became a filmmaker, my hypothesis would easily collapse. My desire to come close to the origin of Ozu-san's films would literally turn into nothing but an illusion.

Even so, viewers can look at Ozu-san's films and interpret them in their own fictional ways, because Ozu-san wanted to be identified simply as a filmmaker and nothing else. Ozu-san tried to hide his personal life, as his barren resume indicates. In fact, viewers should not forget Ozu-san's words, which playfully drew a distinction between fictitious motion pictures
and actual human lives.

'My motto in life is to follow the trends when they are unimportant and to observe morals when it's something important. I stick to my own path when it comes to art.'

...

Ozu-san was deeply in love with cinema, but, at the same time, he openly insisted that motion pictures were limitlessly disorderly and artificial. On his deathbed he seemed pleased to confess that his films were not construed from accidents but turned into dramas only by being restrained and strictly organized through the motif of repetition and difference. Nevertheless, the true intention of his last words to me remains a mystery. I still do not know what he meant. Ozu-san attempted to present images that could have infinite meanings. His last words aimlessly drift like a mirage. They imply many meanings and invite viewers to the joys of watching his films. This kind of infinite dialogue proves that Ozu-san is still alive even after his death, and that his films are immortal to this very day."

[James Widdicombe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yoshida's book is an exercise in poetic reading of Ozu's films and his career through the lens of a New Waver. Fascinating as film criticism, even though it's certainly not film scholarship by any means. Even then, Yoshida's insights are certainly greater than most Ozu 'scholarship.' Surprising parallels with some of Bordwell's views on Ozu's artistic approach.

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best book I've read on Ozu, which is not saying much since I DONT like the Ritchie, Bordwell and Schrader books. Yoshida, however is a filmmaker and that makes a good deal of difference. Understands that Ozu is about perspective.