Written by Chuck Stephens
Translator: Qin Tian
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Film Comment (September/October 2005)
While Yasujiro Ozu was writing the script for his last film, The Taste of Saury, his mother died.
It was 1962.
The Taste of Saury
Ozu, 59, who is still unmarried, began his lifelong career in Shochiku in the late 1920s. Here he produced a series of modern comedies filled with girls, gangsters, and children who were used to greeting them with jazz steps, or children who refused to grow up (such as Tomoo Aoki, the star of Ozu's 1929 film The Sudden Monk, who was renamed Sudden Monk because of the film's fame), and his name "Sudden Monk" means "boy who bumped into you".
"The Little Monk"
Ozu spent so much time at Shochiku Film Studios that the achievements of these modern comedies just mentioned were overshadowed by the brilliance of his 50s indoor family dramas, which not only made Ozu's late works brilliant, but also presented the most everyday family affairs of parents, children, marriage, aging, death, in a sense of form unique to Ozu.
In a series of indoor family dramas shot by Ozu in the 1950s, we can feel a kind of ephemeral, inadvertent "material sorrow", and we can even feel that the characters in the film are subordinating to the immutable.
Ozu
These films also constantly remind us that Ozu is always an extraordinary director, busy determining the editing style based on the relative size of the bottles and factory chimneys in the continuous picture, while also avoiding the so-called narrative climax in the film, although in the eyes of many "extraordinary" directors, the narrative climax is essential. Even today, non-Japanese audiences will still be shocked by the contradiction between radicalism and conservatism in Ozu's later films.
However, since its inception, Japanese cinema has been conforming to traditional japanese aesthetic concepts and cultural encodings, including Ozu, although his refusal to shoot color films or match pictures with sound has long been the norm in the West (although his rejection of color, sound-to-picture matching, and other common techniques in Western films is notorious). Ozu's approach is both fashionable and childish, like the children in "I Was Born, But..." and "Good Morning" who swore to remain silent.
"Good Morning"
In many ways, Shochiku made Ozu, and Ozu made Shochiku. As a film company, Shochiku is first and foremost proud to be a studio that belongs to the director. Since the establishment of the Kamata Photography Institute and the Shochiku Actors School in 1920, Shochiku Film Company has been modeled on the vertically integrated system from Hollywood as the company's operating principle.
Shochiku Film Studios excelled at producing "folk dramas" that told the lives of the people at the bottom, and there was no doubt that this kind of film absorbed Stanislavsky's acting method, Chaplin's concept of tragicomedy, Griffith's multi-line narrative, and the expressionist style of "Dr. Carrigalry's Cabin".
Of course, the absorption of these foreign film elements by shumin dramas requires specific factors and policies to appear effective, and the responsibility for formulating this policy falls on the young studio head, Shiro Shiro, who has also become a supporter of Ozu's lifelong career.
Shiro Jodo's ambitious plan was to bring Shochiku's filming closer to the narrative structure advocated by American filmmakers to guide the viewer's point of view with the lens, and to firmly oppose the long-shot, sequential shooting method, although the former's narrative structure somehow undermined the fixed perspective and the action tradition of Japanese Kabuki and new school dramas on stage.
In addition, Shiro Jodo called for the establishment of a value system based on the content of the film: "We at Shochiku Studio prefer to look at life in a warm and hopeful way," and he appealed to Shochiku's audience and the young director team, including Gosho Hiranosuke and Jiro Shimazu. He further stipulated, "It is not permissible to cause despair in the audience, and our bottom line is that the background of the film must be the salvation of life."
Although "warmth and hope" remains Shiro's motto, even films about prostitutes and hooligans are recognized by Shochiku, as long as the debts to society are properly repaid in the film and the path of justice is finally revealed. Hiroshi Shimizu makes the most of this opportunity in his stunning Japanese Girl at the Port (1933), in which a Catholic schoolgirl shoots several bullets at another girl who seduces her boyfriend, who is serving her sentence in prison, and finally takes to the streets in a geisha costume and walks toward the end of the road.
The Japanese Girl at the Port
Following the values espoused by Jodo Shiro, Shimizu has captured such a happy ending, though he is clearly more interested in the moments before the shooting—Hiroshi Shimizu presents the shooting scene with a series of terrifying close-up shots and jumps, and the girl's excited face emerges from the darkness, reminiscent of the ghost that lives in the shadows in Midnight Bells.
Hiroshi Shimizu likes to have his camera follow the characters he wanders around in his films, and he also enjoys shooting on location. Even when Japan's wartime government began to exert propaganda pressure on Shochiku during World War II, Hiroshi Shimizu found ways to stay away from it, insisting that politics would kill art.
This can be illustrated by a detail in his 1941 work The Hairpin, in which Kasachi, who has returned from an injury on the battlefield and is limping, struggles to recover from a steady walk, but somehow Shimizu avoids filming him walking.
"Hairpin"
Surprisingly, during the filming period from Nichiho Film Company to Daiei Film Company, Mizoguchi Kenji liked to translate this insistence on tradition into uninterrupted long-shot shooting, and was able to adapt to Shiro Jodo's management. Later, Mizoguchi Kenji's insistence on long-shot shooting almost became a stubborn act, and he insisted as much as possible in the "Yuanlu Zhongchenzang First Chapter" (1941) and "Yuanlu Zhongchenzang Later Chapter" (1942), which were made in Shochiku and had a tendency to promote conscription by the government.
"Yuan Lu Zhongchen Zang, Part 1"
In this huge work that tells the story of a samurai, Kenji Mizoguchi is obsessed with these details that have been missed in history, and this is exactly what Ozu tries to avoid touching. When Mizoguchi decided to bring the most famous samurai of Japanese literature to the screen, he also seemed determined to ignore the eyes of the warlords of wartime.
Johto's portrayal of him as a war criminal by the postwar American occupation forces for producing a large number of military-themed films against his own judgment has always haunted him, and he suspects that this is jealousy from rival studios. Despite this, he began to remake the film. He ordered the makers of the 1945 craze song of destruction to present the first kissing scene in the history of Japanese cinema in twenty-year-old Youth (1946) the following year.
In the 1950s, Shochiku became increasingly un groundbreaking in its productions, focusing primarily on "women's films" that were further and further removed from the miserable spectacle of Kenji Mizoguchi's Daughter of the Night (1948) and turned to Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Homecoming (1951), Japan's first full-color feature film with a mild irony.
"Carmen Returns Home"
Shochiku's family drama flourished, and Ozu continued to shoot quiet and peaceful family films in Shochiku. However, the mark of Johto Shiro's dissatisfaction after the war remained: the U.S. military once considered Mt. Fuji to be "too feudal", so as soon as MacArthur's army left Japan, Jodo Shiro set out to create the shochiku factory logo - the image of Mt. Fuji was matched with light blue skies and snowy scenery, and it is still the symbol of Shochiku to this day.
With the advent of the 1960s, the box office fell one after another, and Shiro Jodo missed out on the wave of Sun Family films, which brought huge profits to Nihon and Daiyo — he decided to break the company's policy and promote a film director who was not yet 30 years old, fledgling, full of fresh ideas.
The risks of this decision seem small, and the potential market for young people seems to be large, but seemingly prescient choices will soon prove to be blind, so american film critic Donald Ritchie called Shochiku Pictures, once considered a dreamworks, under the management of Shiro Jodo, "the unlucky Shochiku."
The promoted director was Noneboraki Oshima, who made three films during the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s: "The Cruel Story of Youth," "The Graveyard of the Sun," and "Night and Fog in Japan"—so ideologically corrosive and politically inflammatory that just three days later, an angry Shiro Jodo removed "Night and Fog in Japan" from the theater.
The Cruel Tale of Youth
Nagisa Oshima soon resigned from Shochiku, and he was determined to change the shape of Japanese cinema forever. Shiro Jodo has a feeling of withdrawal from the films he has sponsored in the past, even postponing the release date of Ozu's "I Was Born, But..." at one point, and Ozu once worried that the results of the film would also be "unexpectedly dark".
Nagisa Oshima realizes that "Night and Fog in Japan" experiences more than just darkness, it will fall into the eternal quagmire.
Deliberately filled with overlapping flashbacks, lamentations about the stupidity of youth and the political failures of revolutionary street politics, the film is set against a Brecht-esque darkened stage and shot in moving, dramatic long shots. In stark contrast to the kind of youth films That Jodo had hoped for, "Night and Fog in Japan" is more of a frightening, high-quality art film about a crazy wedding in which guests constantly exchange toasts and climax: "I want to tear you all to pieces!"
"Night and Fog in Japan"
Critically, Johto's promotion of Oshima to directorship in 1959 was even more disastrous than his apathy and disgust at driving away Shimizu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse years earlier—when The emotionally blind Johto quipped, "We already have a Kozu." (Both Shohei Imamura and Kiyoshun Suzuki started as Shochiku's assistant director, though both left Shochiku before making their own films.) ）
In fact, one can only begin to imagine the chagrin of Shiro Jodo, the Ozu-loving executive, who failed to profit from Sun Clan films and monster films like Toho Pictures, and realized that he had inadvertently created a young Frankenstein who was on fire with the family drama that was the foundation of Shochiku Studios' aesthetics.
He also realizes that nagisa Oshima, an untamable director, has inadvertently promoted himself, and has vigorously torn through the scene of the warm family drama that Shochiku emphasizes. The director, who grew up in the black market of post-war Japan, became a representative of the rebellion against Ozu.
On the surface, the "tofu seller" director is not particularly worried about this resistance. Perhaps Ozu just managed to internalize all those omitted absences in his films, allowing any nuisance that the radical Oshima Nagisa might cause to disappear into the Zen space he had created. Still, the issue of presence/absence, which he has long emphasized in the film, continues.
Ten years ago, in Ozu's Late Spring (1949), at the end of his daughter's wedding, Kasa tosato sat alone at home silently cutting apples, a scene that was so artistic. In The Cruel Tale of Youth, A-Ching wouldn't just look thoughtfully at the apple in his hand, he would sweat profusely and swallow the apple erotically while thinking about his girlfriend Makoto's body—she was still asleep in the anesthetic of abortion.
Ozu may never have even seen Nagisa Oshima's films, though unlikely. Conversely, Nagisa Oshima is less likely to go to Ozu movies. As a director who has come from a film critic background, Nagisa Oshima knows exactly where he came from, and when he decides to rebel against the tradition of cinema, he knows exactly what he should do. Let's take another look at the moment in The Cruel Tale of Youth, when A-Ching, a "heroic" pimp, meets his girlfriend, who soon desecrates her innocence in a port full of driftwood.
At the beginning of the movie, A-ching rushes in front of Makoto, rescues her from the middle-aged man who gave her a ride, and knocks the middle-aged man to the ground, A-ching stands up and straightens his jacket, and when he turns around and asks Makoto what is going on, he playfully turns around — exactly the kind of carefully rehearsed action that every boy and rogue in Ozu's movie used to do. Is that the taste of burnt tofu? Ozu smelled it too.
After returning from his mother's funeral, he wrote in his diary: "Spring blooms under a clear sky, the cherry blossoms bloom brilliantly, and I feel only dazed when I am left alone. Remembering the smell of saury, the cherry blossoms are like rags, and the sake has the bitter taste of yellow lotus."
After some time, Nagisa Oshima continued to have studios release films that he had made independently. In 1999, he shot his last film in Shochiku, a highly subversive samurai film called Mifado.
Ozu's first film, Blade of Confession (1927), was also a samurai film, but it is now lost forever. Ozu finally left Shochiku in 1963 and got rid of the place where he had been for a lifetime. His tombstone is inscribed with a large "none" character, symbolizing nothingness.
Shiro Jodo (whose grandson was a lawyer with degrees from Harvard University and UCLA, and now runs Shochiku) persisted until his retirement in 1977. It was also in this year that Masahira Imamura, who had previously been Ozu's assistant director, returned to Shochiku Studios with a new project. Masahira Imamura once said that he was a farmer and Nagisa Oshima was a samurai.
What was going through Mura's mind when he decided to name the new movie Revenge on Me?