Late Spring
Encyclopedia
is a critically acclaimed black-and-white Japanese film
drama
, directed by Yasujirō Ozu
(1903 - 1963), first released in Japan in September 1949
. Based on the novel Father and Daughter (Chichi to musume) by Kazuo Hirotsu
, the story concerns a young woman who lives happily in Kamakura
with her kindly professor father, a widower. He decides that she must find a husband and, despite initial resistance, she accepts the inevitability of their separation and marries, leaving the father alone. The film was written and shot during the Allied Powers'
Occupation of Japan and was subject to the Occupation's official censorship requirements.
The work belongs to the type of Japanese film known as shomingeki, a genre that deals with the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people of modern times. (The jidaigeki
genre customarily focuses on heroic, or at least out-of-the-ordinary, figures of Japan's historic past.) The film stars Chishu Ryu
, a performer featured in most of the director’s movies, and Setsuko Hara
, making her first of six appearances in Ozu’s cinema. It is the first installment of Ozu’s so-called “Noriko trilogy” — the others are Early Summer
(Bakushu, 1951) and Tokyo Story
(Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) — in each of which Hara portrays a young woman named Noriko, though the three Norikos are completely distinct and unrelated characters, linked primarily by their status as single women in postwar Japan.The surnames of the three Norikos in Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story are, respectively, Somiya, Mamiya and Hirayama. See Bordwell (1988), pp. 307, 316, 328.
Late Spring is frequently regarded as the initial film of the director’s final creative period, which is characterized by, among other traits, the use of extremely simple plots, an exclusive focus on stories about families during Japan's immediate postwar era, and a generally static camera. Late Spring is also sometimes seen as either a forerunner, or one of the first major examples, of Japanese cinema's so-called “Golden Age,” a period of exceptional cinematic quality, widely regarded as having begun at the turn of the 1950s, about the time this movie was first shown.
The film was very well received on its initial release, and its reputation has not diminished over the years. In 1950, it was awarded the prestigious Kinema Jumpo
critics' award as the best Japanese production released in 1949. Late Spring has been called "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema." Both as an individual film and as a representative work of the last period of Ozu's oeuvre, it has generated an enormous amount of critical praise, commentary and controversy.
The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, in the latest (January 2011) edition of its annual “1000 Greatest Films” compilation, places Late Spring in the 195th position among all movies ever made, which makes it, on that list, the eighth highest-ranking Japanese-language
film of all time.
, and they go to a restaurant together. Noriko knows that Onodera, also a widower, has remarried, and she tells him that she finds the very idea of his remarriage distasteful, even filthy. Onodera, and later her father, tease her for having such thoughts.
Shukichi's sister, Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimura
), convinces him that it is high time his daughter got married. Noriko is friendly with her father’s assistant, Hattori (Jun Usami), and Aunt Masa suggests to her brother that he ask Noriko if she might be interested in Hattori. When he does bring up the subject, however, Noriko laughs: Hattori already has been engaged to another girl for quite some time.
Undaunted, Masa tries to serve as her niece’s matchmaker. She pressures Noriko to meet with a marriageable young man, a Tokyo University graduate named Satake who, Masa believes, bears a strong resemblance to Gary Cooper
. Noriko declines, explaining that she doesn’t wish to marry anyone, because to do so would leave her father alone and helpless. Masa surprises Noriko by claiming that she is also trying to arrange a match between her brother and Mrs. Miwa (Kuniko Miyake), an attractive young widow known to Noriko. If Masa succeeds, it would mean Shukichi would have someone other than Noriko to care for him.
At a Noh
performance attended by Noriko and her father, the latter nods to Mrs. Miwa, which triggers Noriko's jealousy. When her father later tries to talk her into going to meet Satake, he tells her that he intends to marry Mrs. Miwa. Devastated, Noriko reluctantly decides to meet the young man and, to her surprise, gains a very favorable impression of him. Shaken by thoughts of her father taking a second wife, Noriko gives in and consents to the arranged marriage with Satake.
The Somiyas go on one last trip before the wedding to Kyoto, where they meet Onodera and his family. Noriko changes her opinion of Onodera's remarriage when she discovers that his new wife is a nice person. While packing their luggage for the trip home, Noriko asks her father why they can't simply stay as they are now, even if he does remarry – she is very happy living with him and marriage certainly wouldn’t make her any happier. Shukichi admonishes her, saying that she must embrace the new life she will build with Satake, one in which he, Shukichi, will have no part, because "that’s the order of human life and history." Noriko asks her father’s forgiveness for her "selfishness" and agrees to go ahead with the marriage.
Noriko’s wedding day arrives. At home just before the ceremony, both Shukichi and Masa admire Noriko, who is dressed in a traditional wedding costume. Noriko thanks her father for the care he has taken of her throughout her life and then leaves in the car for the wedding. Afterwards, Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka), a divorced friend of Noriko’s, goes with Shukichi to a bar, where he confesses to her that his claim that he was going to marry Mrs. Miwa was a ruse all along; he had said so only to help persuade Noriko to get married herself. Aya, touched by his sacrifice, promises to visit him often. Shukichi returns home and faces the quiet night all alone.
Kamata film studios. He transformed the Japanese film industry by developing what was later to be called the shomingeki genre (also known as the “home drama”) of movies about contemporary life. According to film scholar David Bordwell
, “Mixing laughter and tears, the ‘Kamata-flavor’ film was aimed at an urban female audience. Kido wanted films that, in his words, ‘looked at the reality of human nature through the everyday activities of society.’ The films might be socially critical, but their criticism was based on the hope that human nature was basically good. People struggle to better their lot, Kido believed, and this aspiration should be treated in ‘a positive, warm-hearted, approving way.’” The pioneer Shochiku director Yasujiro Shimazu
made the early film Sunday (Nichiyobi, 1924), which helped establish the typical “Kamata flavor” movie and he personally trained other notable directors, including Heinosuke Gosho
, Shiro Toyoda
and Keisuke Kinoshita
, who all helped make the shomingeki type of film into Shochiku’s “house style.”
and engaging in a very brief career as a teacher, was hired by Shochiku, through family connections, as an assistant cameraman in 1923. He became an assistant director in 1926 and a full director in 1927. (He would remain with the company for the rest of his life.) His breakthrough film in the shomingeki genre was the 1931 silent filmFor various complex reasons, including the institutionalized power of the katsuben (silent film narrators), better known as benshi
, the Japanese industry was much slower than Hollywood in embracing sound technology. According to J.L. Anderson, even as late as 1937, "two years after talkies became the dominant form of domestic production, one-fifth of all new Japanese films were still silent." They only ceased completely in 1941, when the military government banned silents for both ideological and pragmatic reasons. See Anderson, J.L., "Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or, Talking to Pictures," in Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History (eds. Arthur Nolletti, Jr. and David Desser), 1992, p. 292. Tokyo Chorus
(Tokyo no Gassho) about a young office worker with a family and a house in the suburbs who stands up for an unjustly fired office colleague and promptly gets fired himself. As the Great Depression
had hit Japan severely by this time, the hero’s predicament is no minor problem (one intertitle
reads "Tokyo: Town of Unemployment"). In its movement from broad office comedy to the grim drama of (temporary) poverty, Ozu achieved in this depiction of the lives of ordinary people the synthesis of humor and pathos that Kido was urging his directors to strive for. (It has been said that the influence of the screenwriter Kogo Noda
, ten years Ozu’s senior, was instrumental in this change towards a tone darker than the director’s more lighthearted early works.)
This film became only the second by the director to win a place (third prize) in the most prestigious of Japanese film awards: the “Best Ten” critics’ prizes offered by Kinema Junpo
magazineSeparate awards have intermittently been, and still are, given by Kinema Junpo to non-Japanese productions, including Hollywood films. See http://www.imdb.com/event/ev0001001/overview. However, in the following three years, Ozu accomplished the (in the opinion of one scholar) “astonishing” feat of winning the “Best Film” award in the Kinema Junpo poll three times in a row, for I Was Born, But...
(Umarete wa Mita Keredo, 1932), Passing Fancy
(Dekigokoro, 1933) and A Story of Floating Weeds
(Ukigusa Monogatari, 1934), respectively. Other films Ozu directed during the 1930s also won awards: Until the Day We Meet Again, now considered lost (Mata Au Hi Made, 1932, #7 in the Kinema Junpo poll); An Inn in Tokyo
(Tokyo no Yado, 1935, #9); his first talkie, The Only Son
(Hitori Musuko, 1936, #4); and What Did the Lady Forget?
(Shukujo wa Nani o Wasuretaka, 1937, #8). One critic, Hideo Tsumura, wrote in 1938 that Japan had produced thus far only two great filmmakers: Ozu and Sadao Yamanaka
, a director of jidaigeki films who was Ozu’s close friend… despite the fact that such notable figures as Kenji Mizoguchi
, Heinosuke Gosho and Mikio Naruse
were all active during this period.
(1937–1941) and then the Pacific War
(1941–1945), owing partly to several long stints serving in the Japanese militaryOzu during this period served in the Japanese Army from September 1937 to August 1939 and again from 1943 to his release from a British POW camp in February 1946. See High, pp. 180-183 and Richie, pp. 231-232. and partly due to the fact that a number of scripts he worked on during this time were never filmed, Ozu directed only two movies. Nevertheless, these two works — Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
(Toda-ke no Kyodai, 1941) and There Was a Father
(Chichi Ariki, 1942) — became his most popular up to that time. It has been surmised that the public embraced them because the family themes Ozu had always favored suddenly were in full accord with official government ideology. In his book about the Japanese film industry during wartime, Peter B. High writes that though There Was a Father was "made in strict accordance to the ideological requirements of the Pacific War era, [the movie] is one of the few such films to be recognized as an artistic masterwork today."
For virtually all Japanese film professionals, but particularly for the older generation, to which Ozu belonged, the first years after the end of the Pacific War were a difficult and disorienting period. Not only did they have to cope, like other Japanese, with the humiliation of defeat and the widespread physical and economic devastation of their homeland, but they were forced to confront a new kind of film censorship from the victorious Americans,Although officially all the Allied nations were involved in the governing of occupied Japan, in practice the American government generally acted alone, and this included the censorship. See Sappin, Edward J., Military Governance During The US Occupation Of Japan And The Role Of Civil Affairs Troops, Strategic Studies Research Seminar, John Hopkins SAIS (2004), pp. 2, 12 and 13. Downloadable at http://btg.typepad.com/SAIS_papers/G.pdf. one that seemed with its alien values, in the words of Audie Bock
, "to be trying to change the very fabric of Japanese daily life, from which they drew their subject matter." Perhaps the greatest challenge was comprehending the brand-new concept of democracy. As Bock notes, the director Shohei Imamura
, in a film
made several decades later, would poke fun at all the fuss over democracy by equating it with group sex
, "but in the late 1940s it was very serious, if confusing business."
During this period, Ozu directed two movies, widely regarded as among his least typical: Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya no Shinshiroku, 1947) which portrays the plight of homeless children, and A Hen in the Wind
(Kaze no Naka no Mendori, 1948) which deals with the problems of repatriated soldiers. The two works are thought to display a "civic" character remote both from his previous films — even the socially conscious ones — and his subsequent pictures. For example, Record of a Tenement Gentleman ends with the heroine giving a didactic speech against society’s selfishness and resolving to adopt an orphan, a scene that one critic claims "almost ruins" the film and which several have called "un-Japanese." Critics have described A Hen in the Wind as "awkwardly sordid" and "uncharacteristically bleak and violent." These two works received, in Japan, much less popular and critical acceptance than his two wartime films.
Many critics have tried to account for the apparent major change in Ozu's approach to filmmaking from 1949 on. Bordwell provides one explanation when he writes: "According to [critic Tadao] Sato
, Ozu [after finishing A Hen in the Wind] was thereafter told by friends that he had reached the limits of his formal powers. He set out to find a stable subject through which he could refine his technique, and the life of the middle-class family was his choice."
The synopsis explained that the trip to Kyoto by father and daughter, just prior to Noriko’s marriage, occurs so she can visit her dead mother’s grave. This motivation is absent from the finished film, possibly because the censors would have interpreted such a visit as “ancestor worship,” a practice they frowned upon.
Any reference in the script to the devastation caused by the Allied bombings was removed. In the script, Shukichi remarks to Onodera’s wife in Kyoto that her city is a very nice place, unlike Tokyo, with all its ruins. The censors deleted the reference to ruins (as an implied critique of the Allies) and, in the finished film, the word “hokorippoi” (“dusty”) was substituted as a description of Tokyo.
The censors at first automatically deleted a reference in the script to the movie star Gary Cooper, but then reinstated it when they realized that the comparison was to Noriko’s suitor Satake, who is described as attractive, and was thus flattering to the actor.
Sometimes, the censors’ demands seemed irrational. A line about Noriko’s health having been negatively affected by "her work after being conscripted by the [Japanese] Navy during the war" was changed to "the forced work during the war," as if even the very mention of the Japanese Navy was somehow suspect.
At the script phase of the censorship process, the censors demanded that the character of Aunt Masa, who at one point finds a lost change purse on the ground and keeps it as a kind of good-luck charm, should instead hand over the purse to the police. Ozu responded by turning the situation, in the finished film, into a kind of running gag in which Shukichi repeatedly (and futilely) urges his sister to turn the purse in to the police. This change has been called "a mocking kind of partial compliance with the censorship."
Sorensen uses as an example the scene early in the film in which Noriko and her father's assistant Hattori are bicycling towards the beach. They pass a diamond-shaped Coca-Cola sign and another sign, in English, warning that the weight capacity of a bridge over which they are riding is 30 tons: quite irrelevant information for this young couple, but perfectly appropriate for American military vehicles that might pass along that road. (Neither the Coke sign nor the road warning are referred to in the script approved by the censors.) Sorensen argues that these objects are "obvious reference(s) to the presence of the occupying army."
On the other hand, Late Spring, more than any other film Ozu ever made, is suffused with the symbols of Japanese tradition: the tea ceremony that opens the film, the temples at Kamakura, the Noh performance that Noriko and Shukichi witness, and the landscape and Zen gardens of Kyoto. Sorensen argues that these images of historical landmarks "were intended to inspire awe and respect for the treasures of ancient Japan in contrast to the impurity of the present." Sorensen also claims that, to Ozu’s audience, "the exaltation of Japanese tradition and cultural and religious heritage must have brought remembrances of the good old days when Japan was still winning her battles abroad and nationalism reached its peak." To scholars such as Bordwell who assert that Ozu was promoting with this film an ideology that could be called liberal, Sorensen argues that contemporary reviews of the film "show that Ozu (the director and his personal convictions) was considered inseparable from his films, and that he was considered a conservative purist."
Sorensen concludes that such censorship may not necessarily be a bad thing. "One of the positive side effects of being prohibited from airing one's views openly and directly is that it forces artists to be creative and subtle in their ways of expression."
(Zange no Yaiba), the director's first and only movie in the jidaigeki genre. Noda had subsequently worked with Ozu (while also writing scripts for other directors) on many of his best silent pictures, including the groundbreaking Tokyo Chorus, as noted above. Yet by 1949, the director hadn't worked with his old friend for fourteen years. However, their reunion on Late Spring was so harmonious and successful that Ozu wrote exclusively with Noda for the rest of his career.
Ozu once said of Noda: "When a director works with a scriptwriter they must have some characteristics and habits in common; otherwise, they won't get along. My daily life — what time I get up, how much sake I drink and so on — is in almost complete agreement with that of [Noda]. When I work with Noda, we collaborate even on short bits of dialogue. Although we never discuss the details of the sets or costumes, his mental image of these things is always in accord with mine; our ideas never criss cross or go awry. We even agree on whether a dialogue should end with wa or yo."Yet, in the very same interview, Ozu immediately, and very typically, contradicts himself: "Of course sometimes we have a difference of opinion. And we don't compromise easily since we're both stubborn." From Late Spring on, partly due to Noda's influence, all Ozu’s characters would be safely middle class and, unlike the characters in, for example, Record of a Tenement Gentleman or A Hen in the Wind, beyond immediate physical want and necessity.
, Kanagawa prefecture
on June 17, 1920. Barely in her teens, she was signed in 1935, under her new stage name, to an acting contract with Nikkatsu
, Japan's oldest major film studio. It is said that her brother-in-law, the director Hisatora Kumagai, was instrumental in this decision. Decades later, she would claim that she had had no personal ambition to appear in films and, in fact, did not enjoy acting; she had worked, she said, only to help support her large family. Her tall frame and strong facial features — including very large eyes and a prominent nose — were unusual among Japanese actresses at the time; it has been rumored, but not verified, that she had a German grandparent.
Two years after her debut, she was cast as the female lead in the first German-Japanese co-production, The New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, 1937), which was shown in the West as Die Tochter des Samurai (Daughter of the Samurai). The film broke box office records in several Japanese theatres, despite very poor reviews. She maintained her popularity throughout the war years, when she appeared in many films made primarily for propaganda purposes by the military government, becoming "the perfect war-movie heroine." After the defeat of Japan, she was more popular than ever, so that by the time Ozu worked with her for the first time on Late Spring, she had already become "one of Japan's best-loved actresses."
Ozu had a very high regard for Hara's work. He once said, "Every Japanese actor can play the role of a soldier and every Japanese actress can play the role of a prostitute to some extent. However, it is rare to find an actress who can play the role of a daughter from a good family." Speaking of her performance in Early Summer, he was quoted as saying, "Setsuko Hara is a really good actress. I wish I had four or five more like her."
In addition to the three "Noriko" films, Ozu directed her in three other roles: as an unhappily married wife in Tokyo Twilight
(Tokyo Boshoku 1957), as the mother of a marriageable daughter in Late Autumn
(Akibiyori, 1960, which is sometimes said to be a "remake" of Late Spring, with Hara's character substituting for Chishu Ryu's father figure from the earlier film), and the daughter-in-law of a sake plant owner in the director's penultimate film, The End of Summer
(Kohayagawa-ke no Aki, 1961). Bordwell summed up the critical consensus of Hara's significance to the late work of Ozu when he wrote, "After 1948, Setsuko Hara becomes the archetypal Ozu woman, either the bride-to-be or the widow of middle years."
He points out that the opening scene of Late Spring "begins at the railroad station, where the characters aren’t. A later scene will do exactly the same thing, showing the train station before showing [the characters] already hurtling towards Tokyo… In Tokyo, [Professor] Onodera and Noriko discuss going to an art exhibit; cut to a sign for the exhibit, then to the steps of the art gallery; cut to the two in a bar, after they’ve gone to the exhibit."
do not 'impose their will' on Ozu’s plots; they are his plots. By paying attention to what has been left out and to what is repeated, one arrives at Ozu’s essential story."
As an example, Geist cites the scene in which Noriko and Hattori bicycle together to the beach and have a conversation there, an incident that appears to imply a budding romantic relationship between them. When Noriko slightly later reveals to her father that Hattori, before that bicycle trip, had already been engaged to another woman, "we wonder," writes Geist, "why Ozu has wasted so much time on the 'wrong man' [for Noriko]." However, the key to the beach scene’s importance to the plot, according to Geist, is the dialogue between Hattori and Noriko, in which the latter tells him that she is "the jealous type." This seemingly unlikely claim, given her affable nature, is later confirmed when she becomes bitterly jealous at her father’s apparent plan to remarry. "Her jealousy goads her into her own marriage and is thus the pivot on which the plot turns."
Geist sums up her analysis of several major Ozu films of the postwar period by asserting that "the narratives unfold with an astounding precision in which no shot and certainly no scene is wasted and all is overlayered with an intricate web of interlocking meaning."
An interesting aspect of the film involves the absence of any preoccupation in it with the traditional Japanese family system, or ie
. As Sumiko Iwao, a psychology professor based in Tokyo, describes it, during the Meiji era (and for a considerable time before that), "the basic unit of society was the ie, or household. The head of the household, who was as a rule male, exercised unchallengeable authority over the lives of all family members. Women (wives) were seen primarily in terms of their role as bearers of male offspring who would carry on the family line and assume the responsibilities of family head. Women exercised no authority over marriage, divorce, or inheritance. The ie as part of the legal system was abolished in 1947." Although by 1949, the legal concept of the ie had, thanks to the American occupation, disappeared, the system remained informally in place in numerous Japanese households (and still exists today in parts of Japan). But in Late Spring, Noriko's father never orders her to marry; even when he pleads with her to agree to the miai to meet Satake, he "assures her that she is free to decline [marriage with him]." And when he tries to persuade her to accept Satake after she meets him, he never uses as a rationale that she must bear offspring, though his direct line would die out if she remained childless. He "emphasizes marrying for love and happiness not for perpetuation of the ie. (There is no emphasis on having children to maintain the family)." Peña claims that, for Ozu, marriage is not about procreation, but about one’s place in society.
Marriage in this film, as well as many of Ozu’s late films, is strongly associated with death. Prof. Onodera's daughter, for example, refers to marriage as “life’s graveyard.” Says Geist: "Ozu connects marriage and death in obvious and subtle ways in most of his late films… The comparison between weddings and funerals is not merely a clever device on Ozu’s part, but is so fundamental a concept in Japanese culture that these ceremonies as well as those surrounding births have built-in similarities… The elegiac melancholy Ozu evokes at the end of Late Spring, Late Autumn, and An Autumn Afternoon arises only partly because the parents have been left alone… The sadness arises because the marriage of the younger generation inevitably reflects on the mortality of the older generation." Robin Wood stresses the marriage-death connection in commenting on the scene that takes place in the Somiya home just before the wedding ceremony. "After everyone has left the room… [Ozu] ends the sequence with a shot of the empty mirror. Noriko is no longer even a reflection, she has disappeared from the narrative, she is no longer ‘Noriko’ but ‘wife.’ The effect is that of a death."
' — that populates Japanese fiction, and really the Japanese imagination, beginning in the 1920s onward." Throughout most of the film, Noriko wears Western clothing rather than a kimono, and outwardly behaves in up-to-date ways. However, Bordwell asserts that "Noriko is more old-fashioned than her father, insisting that he could not get along without her and resenting the idea that a widower might remarry… she clings to an outmoded notion of propriety."
The other two important female characters in the film are also defined in terms of their relation to tradition. Noriko’s Aunt Masa appears in scenes in which she is associated with traditional Japan, such as the tea ceremony in the ancient temples of Kamakura. Noriko’s friend Aya, on the other hand, seems to reject tradition entirely. Under the new constitution of the prior year (1948), Japanese women had just been granted the right to divorce their husbands. Thus, Aya is presented as a new, Westernized phenomenon: the divorcee. She "takes English tea with milk from teacups with handles, [and] also bakes shortcake (shaato keeki)," a very un-Japanese type of food.
Prof. Somiya’s assistant, Hattori, Noriko’s friend, is also associated with symbols of modernity: the previously mentioned Coca-Cola sign, the "Balboa" coffee shop (the shop’s sign is in English) where he and Noriko briefly meet and the concert of Western classical music that Hattori, but not Noriko, attends.
Like Noriko, her father has an ambiguous relation with modernity. Shukichi is first seen in the film checking the correct spelling of the name of the German-American economist Friedrich List
– an important figure during Japan’s Meiji era
, as List’s theories helped the economic modernization of the country. Prof. Somiya treats Aya, the divorcee, with unfailing courtesy and respect – though one critic suspects that such a person in the real-life Japan of that period might have been considerably less tolerant.
On the other hand, he, like Aunt Masa, is also associated with the traditions of old Japan, such as the city of Kyoto with its ancient temples and Zen rock gardens, and the Noh play that he so clearly enjoys. Most importantly, he pressures Noriko to go through with the miai meeting with Satake, though, as noted above, he makes clear to her that she can reject her suitor without negative consequences.
Sorensen has summed up the ambiguous position of both father and daughter in relation to tradition as follows: "Noriko and [Professor] Somiya interpolate between the two extremes, between shortcake and Nara-pickles, between ritually prepared green tea and tea with milk, between love marriage/divorce and arranged marriage, between Tokyo and Nara. And this interpolation is what makes them complex characters, wonderfully human in all their internal inconsistencies, very Ozu-like and likable indeed."
Sato considers Late Spring "the next major development in the home drama genre," because it "initiated a series of Ozu films with the theme: there is no society, only the home. While family members had their own places of activity — office, school, family business — there was no tension between the outside world and the home. As a consequence, the home itself lost its source of moral strength." Yet despite the fact that these home dramas by Ozu "tend to lack social relevance," they "came to occupy the mainstream of the genre and can be considered perfect expressions of 'my home-ism,' whereby one’s family is cherished to the exclusion of everything else."
However, there may be another meaning to Ozu's title derived from ancient Japanese culture. When Noriko and Shukichi attend the Noh play, the work performed is called Kakitsubata or "The Water Iris." (The water iris in Japan is a plant which blooms, usually in marshland, in late spring/early summer.) In this play, a traveling monk arrives at a place called Yatsuhashi
, famous for its water irises, when a woman appears. She alludes to a famous poem by the waka
poet of the Heian period
, Ariwara no Narihira
, in which each of the five lines begins with one syllable that, spoken together, spell out the word for "water iris" ("ka-ki-tsu-ba-ta"). The monk stays the night at the humble hut of the woman, who then appears in an elaborate kimono
and headdress and reveals herself to be the spirit of the water iris. She praises Narihira, dances, and at dawn receives enlightenment
from the Buddha
and disappears.Although there has been some dispute over the identity of the Noh play shown in the film, a French translation of Ozu and Noda's original script explicitly identifies the play as Kakitsubata, "nom d'une fleur" ("the name of a flower"). See Ozu and Noda, La fin du printemps, translated by Takenori Noumi [no date], p. 23, downloadable at http://www.01.246.ne.jp/~tnoumi/noumi1/books/lafinduprin.pdf.
As Norman Holland explains in an essay on the film, "the iris is associated with late spring, the movie’s title" and the play contains a great deal of sexual and religious symbolism. The iris' leaves and flower are traditionally seen as representing the male and female genitalia, respectively. The play itself is traditionally seen, according to Holland, as "a tribute to the union of man and woman leading to enlightenment." Noriko calmly accepts this sexual content when couched in the "archaic" form of Noh drama, but when she sees her father nod politely to the attractive widow, Mrs. Miwa, who is also in the audience, "that strikes Noriko as outrageous and outraging. Had this woman and her father arranged to meet at this play about sexuality? Is this remarriage 'filthy' like [Onodera's] remarriage? She feels both angry and despairing. She is so mad at her father that, quite uncharacteristically, she angrily walks away from him after they leave the theater." Holland thus sees one of the movie's main themes as "the pushing of traditional and inhibited Noriko into marriage."
, which in this context signifies the strong emotional dependence of a child on its parent, which can persist into adulthood. Thus, the rupturing of the father-adult daughter relationship in Late Spring has been interpreted as Ozu’s view of the inevitability — and necessity — of the termination of the amae relationship, although Ozu never glosses over the pain of such a rupture.
There has been considerable difference of opinion amongst commentators regarding the complicated personality of Noriko. She has been variously described as like a wife to her father, or as like a mother to him; as resembling a petulant child; or as being an enigma, particularly as to the issue of whether or not she freely chooses to marry. Even the common belief of film scholars that she is an upholder of conservative values (expressed primarily by her opposition to her father’s alleged remarriage plans) has been challenged. Robin Wood, writing about the three Norikos as one collective character, stated that "Noriko" "has managed to retain and develop the finest humane values which the modern capitalist world… tramples underfoot — consideration, emotional generosity, the ability to care and empathize, and above all, awareness."
" (or sarariman, to use the Japanese term), or poor working-class laborers, who sometimes lost the respect of their rebellious children. Bordwell has noted that "what is remarkable about Ozu's work of the 1920s and 1930s is how seldom the patriarchal norm is reestablished at the close [of each film]."
The character of Prof. Somiya represents, according to this interpretation, a further evolution of the “non-patriarchal” patriarch. Although Shukichi wields considerable moral influence over his daughter through their close relationship, that relationship is "strikingly nonoppressive." One commentator calls Shukichi and his friend, Professor Onodera, men who are "very much at peace, very much aware of themselves and their place in the world," and are markedly different from stereotypes of fierce Japanese males promulgated by American films during and after the World War.
It has been claimed that, after Noriko accepts Satake’s marriage proposal, the film ceases to be about her, and that Prof. Somiya at that point becomes the main protagonist, with the focus of the film shifting to his increasing loneliness and grief. In this regard, a plot change that the filmmakers made from the original source material is significant. In the novel by Kazuo Hirotsu, the father’s announcement to his daughter that he wishes to marry a widow is only initially a ruse; eventually, he actually does get married again. Ozu and his co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda, deliberately rejected this "witty" ending, in order to show Prof. Somiya as alone and inconsolable at the end.
] looks up on Noriko's face, rejecting Aya's point of view. We are thus prevented from identifying with Aya and are forced into an inhuman point of view on Noriko."
Ozu's decision to use the camera this way puzzled not only critics, but his filmmaking colleagues as well, and he was always evasive as to why he did so. (One story goes that one night, at the home of director Daisuke Ito
, Ozu set a sake bottle on a rock in Ito's garden; crouching down to observe the rock and the bottle, Ozu declared himself pleased: "That stone - that is my position, Ito, and you know it!") Bordwell suggests that his motive for using it was primarily visual, to create distinctive compositions within the frame and "make every image sharp, stable and striking." Richie believed that one of the reasons he used this technique was as a way of "exploiting the theatrical aspect of the Japanese dwelling." However, other critics believe that the ultimate effect of the low camera position was to elevate and "ennoble" the ordinary people in his films, such as Noriko and her father.
, tracking shots
or crane shots
— employed by most film directors. (As he himself would sometimes remark, "I'm not a dynamic director, like Akira Kurosawa
.") Bordwell notes that, of all the common technical practices that Ozu refused to emulate, he was "most absolute" in refusing to reframe (for example, by panning slightly) the moving human figure in order to keep it in view; this critic claims that there is not a single reframing in all of Ozu's films from 1930 on. In the late films (that is, those from Late Spring on), the director "will use walls, screens, or doors to block off the sides of the frame so that people walk into a central depth," thus maintaining focus on the human figure without any motion of the camera.
The filmmaker would paradoxically retain his static compositions even when a character is in constant movement (e.g., walking) by moving the camera with a dolly
at the precise speed at which the actor or actors move. He would drive his devoted cameraman, Yuharu Atsuta, to tears by insisting that actors and technicians count their steps precisely during a tracking shot so that the movements of actors and camera could be synchronized. An example in this film is the tracking shot of Noriko walking away from her father immediately after they have both attended the Noh performance: since Shukichi is walking behind her as he watches her go, the viewer might well assume that the view of Noriko walking is from the father's point-of-view, "were it not for the grotesquely low position of the moving camera." Thus, the speed of the camera, maintaining the moving character (Noriko) fixed within the composition, is not determined by Shukichi's viewpoint, but is rather an arbitrary choice of the director.
or the fade.
Those who hold this interpretation argue that this aspect of Ozu's work gives it its universality, and helps it transcend the specifically Japanese cultural context in which the films were created. Bock writes: "The subject matter of the Ozu film is what faces all of us born of man and woman and going on to produce offspring of our own: the family… [The terms "shomingeki" or "home drama"] may be applied to Ozu’s works and create an illusion of peculiar Japaneseness, but in fact behind the words are the problems we all face in a life cycle. They are the struggles of self-definition, of individual freedom, of disappointed expectations, of the impossibility of communication, of separation and loss brought about by the inevitable passages of marriage and death." Bock suggests that Ozu’s wish to portray the life cycle affected his decisions on technical matters, such as the construction and use of the sets of his films. "In employing the set like a curtainless stage Ozu allows for implication of transitoriness in the human condition. Allied with the other aspects of ritual in Ozu's techniques, it reinforces the feeling that we are watching a representative life cycle."
According to Geist, Ozu wished to convey the concept of sabi
, which she defines as “an awareness of the ephemeral”: "Much of what is ephemeral is also cyclical; thus, sabi includes an awareness of the cyclical, which is evinced both formally and thematically in Ozu’s films. Often, they revolve around passages in the human life cycle, usually the marriage of a child or the death of a parent." She points out scenes that are carefully duplicated in Late Spring, evoking this cyclical theme: "Noriko and her father’s friend [Onodera] sit in a bar and talk about [Onodera’s] remarriage, which Noriko condemns. In the film’s penultimate sequence, the father and Noriko’s friend Aya sit in a bar after Noriko’s wedding. The scene is shot from exactly the same angles as was the first bar scene, and again the subject is remarriage."
The "life cycle" interpretation, for some critics, implies a certain interchangeability of characters and situations within the Noriko trilogy and the late-period works in general. (Perhaps the most extreme expression of this perceived sameness in Ozu's work was written by film historian David Shipman: "It is not too much to say that virtually the only difference between Late Spring and Early Summer (1951) is that the latter is thirty minutes longer and Mr. Ryu plays Setsuko Hara’s brother instead of her father.") For example, Geist implies that Ozu's conception of the life cycle ensured that the three Norikos in the trilogy are all approximately the same age. "In Ozu's cosmology, Noriko [in Tokyo Story] is a candidate for remarriage only because she is still young and childless. Her niche in the life cycle is akin to that of the unmarried but slightly 'old' (late twenties) daughters in Late Spring and Bakushu (Early Summer). Ozu did not permit those who had passed this rung of the ladder to remarry with grace."
explains, "Late Spring began a cycle of Ozu films about families... Did he make the same film again and again? Not at all. Late Spring and Early Summer are startlingly different. In the second, Noriko takes advantage of a conversational opening [about marriage] to overturn the entire plot... she accepts a man [as husband] she has known for a long time — a widower with a child." In contrast, "what happens [in Late Spring] at deeper levels is angry, passionate and — wrong, we feel, because the father and the daughter are forced to do something neither one of them wants to do, and the result will be resentment and unhappiness." Ebert goes on, "It is universally believed, just as in a Jane Austen
novel, that a woman of a certain age is in want of a husband. Late Spring is a film about two people who desperately do not believe this, and about how they are undone by their tact, their concern for each other, and their need to make others comfortable by seeming to agree with them." The film "tells a story that becomes sadder the more you think about it."
The degree to which Ozu accepted marriage as a universal or inevitable part of the life cycle has also been questioned. Michael Grost, in his essay about the film, claiming that Ozu "seems to [have been] a gay man, although nobody wants to say so,"Speculation that Ozu may have been homosexual is, in fact, quite common. However, it should be noted that the only support that has ever been offered for the claim is the fact that he never married — which proves nothing one way or the other — and his alleged expulsion, in 1920, from the dormitory of his school for having written a letter to a younger (male) student that was "as indiscreet as it was sentimental." (See Richie (1974), pp. 195-196.) Furthermore, Richie elsewhere claims that "there is no evidence that he [wrote the letter] and some evidence that it was someone else who did," but does not offer such evidence. (See Richie's essay in the Criterion DVD release of An Autumn Afternoon, available at http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/668-an-autumn-afternoon-ozus-diaries.) asserts that, although "no one in the film speaks out against marriage as an institution... the film never makes any transcendental moral argument in favor of marriage. It shows that it is socially demanded, but it never shows it benefiting anyone, or hurting anyone by its absence... It is merely unthinkingly accepted by everyone as the natural order of things, a universal obligation of nature. Ozu's films are not ambiguous on this point: they do not make the slightest case for marriage as a moral obligation... I have been unable to find any claim in Ozu's films that the experiences of his characters, in particular their problems with marriage, represent a 'universal' experience of all human beings."
Wood's interpretation contains similarities to those of both Ebert and Grost. Late Spring, in Wood's view, "is about the sacrifice of Noriko’s happiness in the interest of maintaining and continuing 'tradition,' [which sacrifice] takes the form of her marriage, and everyone in the film — including the father and finally the defeated Noriko herself — is complicit in it." He asserts that, in contradiction to the view of many critics, the film "is not about a young woman trying nobly to sacrifice herself and her own happiness in order dutifully to serve her widowed father in his lonely old age," because her life as a single young woman is one she clearly prefers: "With her father, Noriko has a freedom that she will never again regain." He points out that there is an unusual (for Ozu) degree of camera movement in the first half of the film, as opposed to the "stasis" of the second half, and that this corresponds to Noriko’s freedom in the first half and the "trap" of her impending marriage in the second. He also claims that Ozu was able to empathize with Noriko's plight in part due to the fact that he "was able to remain in touch with his innate bisexuality." Rather than perceiving the Noriko trilogy as a cycle, Wood asserts that the three films are "unified by its underlying progressive movement, a progression from the unqualified tragedy of Late Spring through the ambiguous 'happy ending' of Early Summer to the authentic and fully earned note of bleak and tentative hope at the end of Tokyo Story."
, Wim Wenders
' Ozu tribute, audio commentary by Richard Peña
, and essays by Michael Atkinson and Donald Richie
.
In June 2010, the BFI
released the film on Region B-locked Blu-ray
. The release includes a 24-page illustrated booklet as well as Ozu's earlier film The Only Son
, also in HD, and a DVD copy of both films.
Cinema of Japan
The has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world – as of 2009 the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. Movies have been produced in Japan since 1897, when the first foreign cameramen arrived...
drama
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...
, directed by Yasujirō Ozu
Yasujiro Ozu
was a prominent Japanese film director and script writer. He is known for his distinctive technical style, developed during the silent era. Marriage and family, especially the relationships between the generations, are among the most persistent themes in his body of work...
(1903 - 1963), first released in Japan in September 1949
1949 in film
The year 1949 in film involved some significant events.-Top grossing films :- Awards :Academy Awards:*Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello...
. Based on the novel Father and Daughter (Chichi to musume) by Kazuo Hirotsu
Hirotsu Kazuo
was a novelist and literary critic active in the Shōwa period Japan.-Early life:Hirotsu was born in Tokyo as the second son of the novelist Hirotsu Ryurō. He had problems completing middle school due to his complete incompetence in mathematics...
, the story concerns a young woman who lives happily in Kamakura
Kamakura, Kanagawa
is a city located in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, about south-south-west of Tokyo. It used to be also called .Although Kamakura proper is today rather small, it is often described in history books as a former de facto capital of Japan as the seat of the Shogunate and of the Regency during the...
with her kindly professor father, a widower. He decides that she must find a husband and, despite initial resistance, she accepts the inevitability of their separation and marries, leaving the father alone. The film was written and shot during the Allied Powers'
Allies of World War II
The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...
Occupation of Japan and was subject to the Occupation's official censorship requirements.
The work belongs to the type of Japanese film known as shomingeki, a genre that deals with the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people of modern times. (The jidaigeki
Jidaigeki
is a genre of film, television, and theatre in Japan. The name means "period drama" and is usually the Edo period of Japanese history, from 1603 to 1868. Some, however, are set much earlier—Portrait of Hell, for example, is set during the late Heian period—and the early Meiji era is also a popular...
genre customarily focuses on heroic, or at least out-of-the-ordinary, figures of Japan's historic past.) The film stars Chishu Ryu
Chishu Ryu
was a famous Japanese film actor, a favourite of the director Yasujiro Ozu. From 1928 to 1992 he appeared in at least 155 films, including Ozu's Tokyo Story and Yoshitaro Nomura's Castle of Sand...
, a performer featured in most of the director’s movies, and Setsuko Hara
Setsuko Hara
is a Japanese actress who appeared in six of Yasujirō Ozu's films, most notably as Noriko in the 'Noriko Trilogy': Late Spring , Early Summer and Tokyo Story . Her other films for Ozu were Tokyo Twilight , Late Autumn and finally The End of Summer in 1961.She was born 会田 昌江 Masae Aida in...
, making her first of six appearances in Ozu’s cinema. It is the first installment of Ozu’s so-called “Noriko trilogy” — the others are Early Summer
Early Summer
is a 1951 film by Yasujiro Ozu. Like most of Ozu's post-war films, Early Summer deals with many issues ranging from communication problems between generations and the rising role of women in post-war Japan....
(Bakushu, 1951) and Tokyo Story
Tokyo Story
is a 1953 Japanese film directed by Yasujirō Ozu. It tells the story of an aging couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children. The film contrasts the behavior of their biological children, who are too busy to pay them much attention, and their daughter-in-law, who treats them with...
(Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) — in each of which Hara portrays a young woman named Noriko, though the three Norikos are completely distinct and unrelated characters, linked primarily by their status as single women in postwar Japan.The surnames of the three Norikos in Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story are, respectively, Somiya, Mamiya and Hirayama. See Bordwell (1988), pp. 307, 316, 328.
Late Spring is frequently regarded as the initial film of the director’s final creative period, which is characterized by, among other traits, the use of extremely simple plots, an exclusive focus on stories about families during Japan's immediate postwar era, and a generally static camera. Late Spring is also sometimes seen as either a forerunner, or one of the first major examples, of Japanese cinema's so-called “Golden Age,” a period of exceptional cinematic quality, widely regarded as having begun at the turn of the 1950s, about the time this movie was first shown.
The film was very well received on its initial release, and its reputation has not diminished over the years. In 1950, it was awarded the prestigious Kinema Jumpo
Kinema Junpo
, commonly called , is a Japanese film magazine which began publication in July 1919. The magazine was founded by a group of four students, including Saburō Tanaka, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology . In that first month, it was published three times on days with a "1" in them. These first three...
critics' award as the best Japanese production released in 1949. Late Spring has been called "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema." Both as an individual film and as a representative work of the last period of Ozu's oeuvre, it has generated an enormous amount of critical praise, commentary and controversy.
The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, in the latest (January 2011) edition of its annual “1000 Greatest Films” compilation, places Late Spring in the 195th position among all movies ever made, which makes it, on that list, the eighth highest-ranking Japanese-language
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
film of all time.
Plot
Professor Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a widower, has only one child, a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried daughter, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who takes care of the household and the everyday needs of her father. On a shopping trip to Tokyo, Noriko encounters a friend of her father's, Jo Onodera (Masao Mishima), who lives in KyotoKyoto
is a city in the central part of the island of Honshū, Japan. It has a population close to 1.5 million. Formerly the imperial capital of Japan, it is now the capital of Kyoto Prefecture, as well as a major part of the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto metropolitan area.-History:...
, and they go to a restaurant together. Noriko knows that Onodera, also a widower, has remarried, and she tells him that she finds the very idea of his remarriage distasteful, even filthy. Onodera, and later her father, tease her for having such thoughts.
Shukichi's sister, Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimura
Haruko Sugimura
was a Japanese stage and film actress, best known for her appearances in the movies of Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse from the late 1940s to the early 1960s...
), convinces him that it is high time his daughter got married. Noriko is friendly with her father’s assistant, Hattori (Jun Usami), and Aunt Masa suggests to her brother that he ask Noriko if she might be interested in Hattori. When he does bring up the subject, however, Noriko laughs: Hattori already has been engaged to another girl for quite some time.
Undaunted, Masa tries to serve as her niece’s matchmaker. She pressures Noriko to meet with a marriageable young man, a Tokyo University graduate named Satake who, Masa believes, bears a strong resemblance to Gary Cooper
Gary Cooper
Frank James Cooper, known professionally as Gary Cooper, was an American film actor. He was renowned for his quiet, understated acting style and his stoic, but at times intense screen persona, which was particularly well suited to the many Westerns he made...
. Noriko declines, explaining that she doesn’t wish to marry anyone, because to do so would leave her father alone and helpless. Masa surprises Noriko by claiming that she is also trying to arrange a match between her brother and Mrs. Miwa (Kuniko Miyake), an attractive young widow known to Noriko. If Masa succeeds, it would mean Shukichi would have someone other than Noriko to care for him.
At a Noh
Noh
, or - derived from the Sino-Japanese word for "skill" or "talent" - is a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Many characters are masked, with men playing male and female roles. Traditionally, a Noh "performance day" lasts all day and...
performance attended by Noriko and her father, the latter nods to Mrs. Miwa, which triggers Noriko's jealousy. When her father later tries to talk her into going to meet Satake, he tells her that he intends to marry Mrs. Miwa. Devastated, Noriko reluctantly decides to meet the young man and, to her surprise, gains a very favorable impression of him. Shaken by thoughts of her father taking a second wife, Noriko gives in and consents to the arranged marriage with Satake.
The Somiyas go on one last trip before the wedding to Kyoto, where they meet Onodera and his family. Noriko changes her opinion of Onodera's remarriage when she discovers that his new wife is a nice person. While packing their luggage for the trip home, Noriko asks her father why they can't simply stay as they are now, even if he does remarry – she is very happy living with him and marriage certainly wouldn’t make her any happier. Shukichi admonishes her, saying that she must embrace the new life she will build with Satake, one in which he, Shukichi, will have no part, because "that’s the order of human life and history." Noriko asks her father’s forgiveness for her "selfishness" and agrees to go ahead with the marriage.
Noriko’s wedding day arrives. At home just before the ceremony, both Shukichi and Masa admire Noriko, who is dressed in a traditional wedding costume. Noriko thanks her father for the care he has taken of her throughout her life and then leaves in the car for the wedding. Afterwards, Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka), a divorced friend of Noriko’s, goes with Shukichi to a bar, where he confesses to her that his claim that he was going to marry Mrs. Miwa was a ruse all along; he had said so only to help persuade Noriko to get married herself. Aya, touched by his sacrifice, promises to visit him often. Shukichi returns home and faces the quiet night all alone.
Cast
- Chishu RyuChishu Ryuwas a famous Japanese film actor, a favourite of the director Yasujiro Ozu. From 1928 to 1992 he appeared in at least 155 films, including Ozu's Tokyo Story and Yoshitaro Nomura's Castle of Sand...
... Shukichi Somiya - Setsuko HaraSetsuko Harais a Japanese actress who appeared in six of Yasujirō Ozu's films, most notably as Noriko in the 'Noriko Trilogy': Late Spring , Early Summer and Tokyo Story . Her other films for Ozu were Tokyo Twilight , Late Autumn and finally The End of Summer in 1961.She was born 会田 昌江 Masae Aida in...
... Noriko Somiya - Yumeji Tsukioka ... Aya Kitagawa
- Haruko SugimuraHaruko Sugimurawas a Japanese stage and film actress, best known for her appearances in the movies of Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse from the late 1940s to the early 1960s...
... Masa Taguchi - Hohi Aoki ... Katsuyoshi
- Jun Usami ... Shuichi Hattori
- Kuniko Miyake ... Akiko Miwa
- Masao Mishima ... Jo Onodera
- Yoshiko Tsubouchi ... Kiku
- Yōko Katsuragi ... Misako
- Toyoko Takahashi ... Shige
- Jun Tanizaki ... Seizo Hayashi
- Youko Benisawa ... teahouse proprietress
Shochiku and shomingeki
Shortly after the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, Shiro Kido, barely thirty years old, became manager of Shochiku Company’sShochiku
is a Japanese movie studio and production company for kabuki. It also produces and distributes anime films. Its best remembered directors include Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yōji Yamada...
Kamata film studios. He transformed the Japanese film industry by developing what was later to be called the shomingeki genre (also known as the “home drama”) of movies about contemporary life. According to film scholar David Bordwell
David Bordwell
David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the...
, “Mixing laughter and tears, the ‘Kamata-flavor’ film was aimed at an urban female audience. Kido wanted films that, in his words, ‘looked at the reality of human nature through the everyday activities of society.’ The films might be socially critical, but their criticism was based on the hope that human nature was basically good. People struggle to better their lot, Kido believed, and this aspiration should be treated in ‘a positive, warm-hearted, approving way.’” The pioneer Shochiku director Yasujiro Shimazu
Yasujirō Shimazu
was a Japanese film director and screenwriter, who was one of the major creators of the shōshimingeki genre at the Shōchiku studios in pre-World War II Japan....
made the early film Sunday (Nichiyobi, 1924), which helped establish the typical “Kamata flavor” movie and he personally trained other notable directors, including Heinosuke Gosho
Heinosuke Gosho
was a Japanese film director who directed Japan's first talkie, The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, in 1931. He once served as president of the Directors Guild of Japan.- Selected filmography :* Aiyoku no ki...
, Shiro Toyoda
Shiro Toyoda
was a Japanese film director.-Career:Born in Kyoto, Toyoda moved to Tokyo in his teens and began studying under the pioneering film director Eizō Tanaka. He joined Shōchiku's Kamata studio in 1924 and worked as an assistant director under Yasujirō Shimazu...
and Keisuke Kinoshita
Keisuke Kinoshita
was a Japanese film director.Although lesser known internationally than his fellow filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa , Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu , Keisuke Kinoshita was nonetheless a household figure at home beloved by audience and critics alike, especially in the forties through the sixties...
, who all helped make the shomingeki type of film into Shochiku’s “house style.”
Early work
Yasujiro Ozu, after growing up in Tokyo and in Mie PrefectureMie Prefecture
is a prefecture of Japan which is part of the Kansai regions on Honshū island. The capital is the city of Tsu.- History :Until the Meiji Restoration, Mie prefecture was known as Ise Province and Iga Province....
and engaging in a very brief career as a teacher, was hired by Shochiku, through family connections, as an assistant cameraman in 1923. He became an assistant director in 1926 and a full director in 1927. (He would remain with the company for the rest of his life.) His breakthrough film in the shomingeki genre was the 1931 silent filmFor various complex reasons, including the institutionalized power of the katsuben (silent film narrators), better known as benshi
Benshi
were Japanese performers who provided live narration for silent films . Benshi are sometimes also called or .-Role of the benshi:...
, the Japanese industry was much slower than Hollywood in embracing sound technology. According to J.L. Anderson, even as late as 1937, "two years after talkies became the dominant form of domestic production, one-fifth of all new Japanese films were still silent." They only ceased completely in 1941, when the military government banned silents for both ideological and pragmatic reasons. See Anderson, J.L., "Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or, Talking to Pictures," in Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History (eds. Arthur Nolletti, Jr. and David Desser), 1992, p. 292. Tokyo Chorus
Tokyo Chorus
was a 1931 silent movie produced by Shochiku Company, directed by acclaimed and influential Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu and starring Tokihiko Okada and Emiko Yagumo. It was based on various stories in the Shoshimin-gai series and also shares influences with King Vidor's The Crowd...
(Tokyo no Gassho) about a young office worker with a family and a house in the suburbs who stands up for an unjustly fired office colleague and promptly gets fired himself. As the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
had hit Japan severely by this time, the hero’s predicament is no minor problem (one intertitle
Intertitle
In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...
reads "Tokyo: Town of Unemployment"). In its movement from broad office comedy to the grim drama of (temporary) poverty, Ozu achieved in this depiction of the lives of ordinary people the synthesis of humor and pathos that Kido was urging his directors to strive for. (It has been said that the influence of the screenwriter Kogo Noda
Kogo Noda
was a Japanese screenwriter most famous for collaborating with Yasujirō Ozu on many of the director's films.Born in Hakodate, Noda was the son of the head of the local tax bureau and younger brother to Kyūho, a Nihonga painter. He moved to Nagoya after completing elementary school and later went to...
, ten years Ozu’s senior, was instrumental in this change towards a tone darker than the director’s more lighthearted early works.)
This film became only the second by the director to win a place (third prize) in the most prestigious of Japanese film awards: the “Best Ten” critics’ prizes offered by Kinema Junpo
Kinema Junpo
, commonly called , is a Japanese film magazine which began publication in July 1919. The magazine was founded by a group of four students, including Saburō Tanaka, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology . In that first month, it was published three times on days with a "1" in them. These first three...
magazineSeparate awards have intermittently been, and still are, given by Kinema Junpo to non-Japanese productions, including Hollywood films. See http://www.imdb.com/event/ev0001001/overview. However, in the following three years, Ozu accomplished the (in the opinion of one scholar) “astonishing” feat of winning the “Best Film” award in the Kinema Junpo poll three times in a row, for I Was Born, But...
I Was Born, But...
is a 1932 black-and-white Japanese silent film directed by Yasujiro Ozu. It became the first of six Ozu films to win the Kinema Junpō Critics' Prize...
(Umarete wa Mita Keredo, 1932), Passing Fancy
Passing Fancy
is a 1933 silent movie produced by Shochiku Company, directed by Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu and starring Takeshi Sakamoto, Nobuko Fushimi, Den Obinata and Chouko Iida....
(Dekigokoro, 1933) and A Story of Floating Weeds
A Story of Floating Weeds
is a 1934 silent film directed by Yasujiro Ozu which he later remade as Floating Weeds in 1959 in color.-Plot:The film starts with a travelling kabuki troupe arriving by train at a provincial seaside town. Kihachi Ichikawa , the head of the troupe, is a very popular actor...
(Ukigusa Monogatari, 1934), respectively. Other films Ozu directed during the 1930s also won awards: Until the Day We Meet Again, now considered lost (Mata Au Hi Made, 1932, #7 in the Kinema Junpo poll); An Inn in Tokyo
An Inn in Tokyo
is a 1935 silent film directed by Yasujiro Ozu. The film is Ozu's last extant silent film.The script of the film is credited to a person by the name of Uinzato Mone, which means in Japanese, "Without Money"...
(Tokyo no Yado, 1935, #9); his first talkie, The Only Son
The Only Son
The Only Son may refer to:*A male who is the only child or son of a father* The Only Son , directed by Oscar Apfel* The Only Son , directed by Yasujiro Ozu* The Only Son , a Burmese film...
(Hitori Musuko, 1936, #4); and What Did the Lady Forget?
What Did the Lady Forget?
is a 1937 Japanese film directed by Yasujiro Ozu.-Plot:Komiya is an affluent, respected and good-natured professor of medicine at a Tokyo university. He has a wife, Tokiko , though they are without children. His niece from Osaka, Setsuko comes recently for a visit to Tokyo...
(Shukujo wa Nani o Wasuretaka, 1937, #8). One critic, Hideo Tsumura, wrote in 1938 that Japan had produced thus far only two great filmmakers: Ozu and Sadao Yamanaka
Sadao Yamanaka
was a Japanese film director and writer who directed 24 films during a seven-year period in the 1930s. He was a contemporary of Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi and one of the primary figures in the development of the jidaigeki, or historical film. Yamanaka died of dysentary in...
, a director of jidaigeki films who was Ozu’s close friend… despite the fact that such notable figures as Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
, Heinosuke Gosho and Mikio Naruse
Mikio Naruse
was a Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed some 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967.Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook...
were all active during this period.
Wartime and the early postwar years
As critically esteemed as they were, Ozu’s many pictures of the 1930s were not conspicuously successful at the box office. During the first phase of the Sino-Japanese WarSecond Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...
(1937–1941) and then the Pacific War
Pacific War
The Pacific War, also sometimes called the Asia-Pacific War refers broadly to the parts of World War II that took place in the Pacific Ocean, its islands, and in East Asia, then called the Far East...
(1941–1945), owing partly to several long stints serving in the Japanese militaryOzu during this period served in the Japanese Army from September 1937 to August 1939 and again from 1943 to his release from a British POW camp in February 1946. See High, pp. 180-183 and Richie, pp. 231-232. and partly due to the fact that a number of scripts he worked on during this time were never filmed, Ozu directed only two movies. Nevertheless, these two works — Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
is a 1941 Japanese film directed by Yasujirō Ozu.-Plot:The upper-class Toda family celebrates the 69th birthday of their father with a commemorative photoshoot at their outdoor garden. Unfortunately, shortly after the photo session, the father, Shintaro Toda , suffers a fatal heart attack...
(Toda-ke no Kyodai, 1941) and There Was a Father
There Was a Father
-Production:Yasujiro Ozu wrote the first draft of There Was a Father before he went to China in 1937. On returning for Japan, he re-wrote it again and feeling that "it could still be improved".-Release:...
(Chichi Ariki, 1942) — became his most popular up to that time. It has been surmised that the public embraced them because the family themes Ozu had always favored suddenly were in full accord with official government ideology. In his book about the Japanese film industry during wartime, Peter B. High writes that though There Was a Father was "made in strict accordance to the ideological requirements of the Pacific War era, [the movie] is one of the few such films to be recognized as an artistic masterwork today."
For virtually all Japanese film professionals, but particularly for the older generation, to which Ozu belonged, the first years after the end of the Pacific War were a difficult and disorienting period. Not only did they have to cope, like other Japanese, with the humiliation of defeat and the widespread physical and economic devastation of their homeland, but they were forced to confront a new kind of film censorship from the victorious Americans,Although officially all the Allied nations were involved in the governing of occupied Japan, in practice the American government generally acted alone, and this included the censorship. See Sappin, Edward J., Military Governance During The US Occupation Of Japan And The Role Of Civil Affairs Troops, Strategic Studies Research Seminar, John Hopkins SAIS (2004), pp. 2, 12 and 13. Downloadable at http://btg.typepad.com/SAIS_papers/G.pdf. one that seemed with its alien values, in the words of Audie Bock
Audie Bock
Audie Elizabeth Bock is an American film scholar and politician who served in the California State Assembly from 1999 to 2000....
, "to be trying to change the very fabric of Japanese daily life, from which they drew their subject matter." Perhaps the greatest challenge was comprehending the brand-new concept of democracy. As Bock notes, the director Shohei Imamura
Shohei Imamura
was a Japanese film director. Imamura was the first Japanese director to win two Palme d'Or awards.His eldest son Daisuke Tengan is also a script writer and film director, and worked on the screenplays to Imamura's filmsThe Eel , Dr...
, in a film
The Pornographers
The Pornographers is a 1966 Japanese film directed by Shohei Imamura and based on a novel of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. Its original Japanese title is Erogotoshitachi yori Jinruigaku nyumon , which means 'An introduction to anthropology through the pornographers'. It tells the story of porn...
made several decades later, would poke fun at all the fuss over democracy by equating it with group sex
Group sex
Group sex is sexual behavior involving more than two participants. Group sex can occur amongst people of all sexual orientations and genders...
, "but in the late 1940s it was very serious, if confusing business."
During this period, Ozu directed two movies, widely regarded as among his least typical: Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya no Shinshiroku, 1947) which portrays the plight of homeless children, and A Hen in the Wind
A Hen in the Wind
is a 1948 drama film directed by Yasujiro Ozu, starring Kinuyo Tanaka and Shûji Sano.-Plot:The film is set in immediate postwar Japan, Tokyo. Tokiko , a twenty-nine-year-old mother of a young boy of four, is waiting for her husband's repatriation from World War II...
(Kaze no Naka no Mendori, 1948) which deals with the problems of repatriated soldiers. The two works are thought to display a "civic" character remote both from his previous films — even the socially conscious ones — and his subsequent pictures. For example, Record of a Tenement Gentleman ends with the heroine giving a didactic speech against society’s selfishness and resolving to adopt an orphan, a scene that one critic claims "almost ruins" the film and which several have called "un-Japanese." Critics have described A Hen in the Wind as "awkwardly sordid" and "uncharacteristically bleak and violent." These two works received, in Japan, much less popular and critical acceptance than his two wartime films.
Many critics have tried to account for the apparent major change in Ozu's approach to filmmaking from 1949 on. Bordwell provides one explanation when he writes: "According to [critic Tadao] Sato
Tadao Sato
is a prominent Japanese film critic and film theorist. Satō has published more than 30 books on film, and is one of the foremost scholars and historians addressing Japanese film, though little of his work has been translated for publication abroad....
, Ozu [after finishing A Hen in the Wind] was thereafter told by friends that he had reached the limits of his formal powers. He set out to find a stable subject through which he could refine his technique, and the life of the middle-class family was his choice."
Censorship problems with Late Spring
The central event of Late Spring is the marriage of the heroine to a man she has met only once through a single arranged meeting. This immediately presented a problem for the censors of the American Occupation. According to film scholar Kyoko Hirano, these officials "considered feudalistic the Japanese custom of arranged meetings for prospective marriage partners, miai, because the custom seemed to them to downgrade the importance of the individual." Hirano notes that, had this policy against showing "arranged" marriages onscreen been rigidly enforced, Late Spring could never have been made. In the original synopsis, Noriko’s decision to marry was presented as a collective family decision, not an individual choice, and the censors apparently rejected this.The synopsis explained that the trip to Kyoto by father and daughter, just prior to Noriko’s marriage, occurs so she can visit her dead mother’s grave. This motivation is absent from the finished film, possibly because the censors would have interpreted such a visit as “ancestor worship,” a practice they frowned upon.
Any reference in the script to the devastation caused by the Allied bombings was removed. In the script, Shukichi remarks to Onodera’s wife in Kyoto that her city is a very nice place, unlike Tokyo, with all its ruins. The censors deleted the reference to ruins (as an implied critique of the Allies) and, in the finished film, the word “hokorippoi” (“dusty”) was substituted as a description of Tokyo.
The censors at first automatically deleted a reference in the script to the movie star Gary Cooper, but then reinstated it when they realized that the comparison was to Noriko’s suitor Satake, who is described as attractive, and was thus flattering to the actor.
Sometimes, the censors’ demands seemed irrational. A line about Noriko’s health having been negatively affected by "her work after being conscripted by the [Japanese] Navy during the war" was changed to "the forced work during the war," as if even the very mention of the Japanese Navy was somehow suspect.
At the script phase of the censorship process, the censors demanded that the character of Aunt Masa, who at one point finds a lost change purse on the ground and keeps it as a kind of good-luck charm, should instead hand over the purse to the police. Ozu responded by turning the situation, in the finished film, into a kind of running gag in which Shukichi repeatedly (and futilely) urges his sister to turn the purse in to the police. This change has been called "a mocking kind of partial compliance with the censorship."
Ozu's alleged "subversion" of the censorship
One scholar, Lars-Martin Sorensen, has alleged that Ozu's partial aim in making the film was to present an ideal of Japan at odds with that which the Occupation wanted to promote, and that he successfully subverted the censorship in order to accomplish this. "The controversial and subversive politico-historical 'message' of the film is… that the beauty of tradition, and of subjugation of individual whims to tradition and history, by far outshines the imported and imposed western trends of occupied Japan."Sorensen uses as an example the scene early in the film in which Noriko and her father's assistant Hattori are bicycling towards the beach. They pass a diamond-shaped Coca-Cola sign and another sign, in English, warning that the weight capacity of a bridge over which they are riding is 30 tons: quite irrelevant information for this young couple, but perfectly appropriate for American military vehicles that might pass along that road. (Neither the Coke sign nor the road warning are referred to in the script approved by the censors.) Sorensen argues that these objects are "obvious reference(s) to the presence of the occupying army."
On the other hand, Late Spring, more than any other film Ozu ever made, is suffused with the symbols of Japanese tradition: the tea ceremony that opens the film, the temples at Kamakura, the Noh performance that Noriko and Shukichi witness, and the landscape and Zen gardens of Kyoto. Sorensen argues that these images of historical landmarks "were intended to inspire awe and respect for the treasures of ancient Japan in contrast to the impurity of the present." Sorensen also claims that, to Ozu’s audience, "the exaltation of Japanese tradition and cultural and religious heritage must have brought remembrances of the good old days when Japan was still winning her battles abroad and nationalism reached its peak." To scholars such as Bordwell who assert that Ozu was promoting with this film an ideology that could be called liberal, Sorensen argues that contemporary reviews of the film "show that Ozu (the director and his personal convictions) was considered inseparable from his films, and that he was considered a conservative purist."
Sorensen concludes that such censorship may not necessarily be a bad thing. "One of the positive side effects of being prohibited from airing one's views openly and directly is that it forces artists to be creative and subtle in their ways of expression."
Ozu's collaborators
On Late Spring, Ozu worked with a number of old colleagues from his prewar days, such as actor Chishu Ryu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta. However, a long-deferred reunion with one artist and the beginning of a long collaboration with another — the screenwriter Kogo Noda and the actress Setsuko Hara, respectively — were to prove critical artistically, both to this movie and to the direction of Ozu's subsequent work.Kogo Noda
Writer Kogo Noda, already an accomplished screenwriter, had collaborated with Ozu on the script of his debut film of 1927, Sword of PenitenceSword of Penitence
is a 1927 Japanese silent film by Yasujirō Ozu. It is the first film directed by Ozu and was also the first of his many collaborations with screenwriter Kogo Noda.- Production :...
(Zange no Yaiba), the director's first and only movie in the jidaigeki genre. Noda had subsequently worked with Ozu (while also writing scripts for other directors) on many of his best silent pictures, including the groundbreaking Tokyo Chorus, as noted above. Yet by 1949, the director hadn't worked with his old friend for fourteen years. However, their reunion on Late Spring was so harmonious and successful that Ozu wrote exclusively with Noda for the rest of his career.
Ozu once said of Noda: "When a director works with a scriptwriter they must have some characteristics and habits in common; otherwise, they won't get along. My daily life — what time I get up, how much sake I drink and so on — is in almost complete agreement with that of [Noda]. When I work with Noda, we collaborate even on short bits of dialogue. Although we never discuss the details of the sets or costumes, his mental image of these things is always in accord with mine; our ideas never criss cross or go awry. We even agree on whether a dialogue should end with wa or yo."Yet, in the very same interview, Ozu immediately, and very typically, contradicts himself: "Of course sometimes we have a difference of opinion. And we don't compromise easily since we're both stubborn." From Late Spring on, partly due to Noda's influence, all Ozu’s characters would be safely middle class and, unlike the characters in, for example, Record of a Tenement Gentleman or A Hen in the Wind, beyond immediate physical want and necessity.
Setsuko Hara
Setsuko Hara was born Masae Aida in YokohamaYokohama
is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu...
, Kanagawa prefecture
Kanagawa Prefecture
is a prefecture located in the southern Kantō region of Japan. The capital is Yokohama. Kanagawa is part of the Greater Tokyo Area.-History:The prefecture has some archaeological sites going back to the Jōmon period...
on June 17, 1920. Barely in her teens, she was signed in 1935, under her new stage name, to an acting contract with Nikkatsu
Nikkatsu
is a Japanese entertainment company well known for its film and television productions. It is Japan's oldest major movie studio. The name Nikkatsu is an abbreviation of Nippon Katsudō Shashin, literally "Japan Cinematograph Company".-History:...
, Japan's oldest major film studio. It is said that her brother-in-law, the director Hisatora Kumagai, was instrumental in this decision. Decades later, she would claim that she had had no personal ambition to appear in films and, in fact, did not enjoy acting; she had worked, she said, only to help support her large family. Her tall frame and strong facial features — including very large eyes and a prominent nose — were unusual among Japanese actresses at the time; it has been rumored, but not verified, that she had a German grandparent.
Two years after her debut, she was cast as the female lead in the first German-Japanese co-production, The New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, 1937), which was shown in the West as Die Tochter des Samurai (Daughter of the Samurai). The film broke box office records in several Japanese theatres, despite very poor reviews. She maintained her popularity throughout the war years, when she appeared in many films made primarily for propaganda purposes by the military government, becoming "the perfect war-movie heroine." After the defeat of Japan, she was more popular than ever, so that by the time Ozu worked with her for the first time on Late Spring, she had already become "one of Japan's best-loved actresses."
Ozu had a very high regard for Hara's work. He once said, "Every Japanese actor can play the role of a soldier and every Japanese actress can play the role of a prostitute to some extent. However, it is rare to find an actress who can play the role of a daughter from a good family." Speaking of her performance in Early Summer, he was quoted as saying, "Setsuko Hara is a really good actress. I wish I had four or five more like her."
In addition to the three "Noriko" films, Ozu directed her in three other roles: as an unhappily married wife in Tokyo Twilight
Tokyo Twilight
is a 1957 film by Yasujirō Ozu. The film is considered amongst Ozu's darkest postwar films.-Synopsis:Akiko Sugiyama is a young college graduate girl learning English shorthand. Her elder sister Takako , running away from an unhappy marriage, has returned home to stay with Akiko and their father...
(Tokyo Boshoku 1957), as the mother of a marriageable daughter in Late Autumn
Late Autumn
is a 1960 drama film directed by Yasujiro Ozu. It stars many of his favourite actors including Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu. It is based on a story by Ton Satomi....
(Akibiyori, 1960, which is sometimes said to be a "remake" of Late Spring, with Hara's character substituting for Chishu Ryu's father figure from the earlier film), and the daughter-in-law of a sake plant owner in the director's penultimate film, The End of Summer
The End of Summer
is a 1961 film directed by Yasujirō Ozu. It was entered into the 12th Berlin International Film Festival. The film was his penultimate film; only An Autumn Afternoon followed it....
(Kohayagawa-ke no Aki, 1961). Bordwell summed up the critical consensus of Hara's significance to the late work of Ozu when he wrote, "After 1948, Setsuko Hara becomes the archetypal Ozu woman, either the bride-to-be or the widow of middle years."
Narrative strategies
The movies of Yasujiro Ozu are well known for their unusual — some would say highly eccentric — approach to film narrative. Scenes that most filmmakers would consider obligatory (e.g., the wedding of Noriko) are often not shown at all by the director, while apparently extraneous incidents (e.g., the concert attended by Hattori but not Noriko) are not merely shown, but given seemingly inordinate prominence. Sometimes important narrative information is withheld not only from a major character, but from the viewer (e.g., Hattori’s engagement to another girl, about which neither Noriko’s father nor the audience has any knowledge until Noriko, laughing, informs him). And at times, the filmmaker proceeds, within a scene, to jump from one time frame to another without transition, as when two establishing shots of some travelers waiting for a train on a platform lead to a third shot of the same train already on its way to Tokyo."Parametric" narrative theory
Bordwell refers to Ozu’s approach to narrative as "parametric narration." By this term, Bordwell means that Ozu’s "overunified" visual approach, characterized by its “stylistic rigor,” often provides the basis for "playful deviation," including narrative playfulness. As Bordwell puts it somewhat more plainly, Ozu "back[s] away from his own machinery in order to achieve humor and surprise." He claims that "in narrative poetry, rhythm and rhyme need not completely subordinate themselves to the demand of telling the story; in art song or opera, 'autonomous' musical structures may require that the story grind to a halt while particular harmonic or melodic patterns work themselves out. Similarly, in some films, temporal or spatial qualities can lure us with a patterning that is not wholly dependent on representing fabula [i.e., story] information."He points out that the opening scene of Late Spring "begins at the railroad station, where the characters aren’t. A later scene will do exactly the same thing, showing the train station before showing [the characters] already hurtling towards Tokyo… In Tokyo, [Professor] Onodera and Noriko discuss going to an art exhibit; cut to a sign for the exhibit, then to the steps of the art gallery; cut to the two in a bar, after they’ve gone to the exhibit."
"Essentialist" narrative theory
However, to Kathe Geist, Ozu’s narrative methods reflect the artist's economy of means, not "playfulness." "His frequent use of repetition and [narrative] ellipsisEllipsis (narrative device)
Ellipsis is the narrative device of omitting a portion of the sequence of events, allowing the reader to fill in the narrative gaps.An ellipsis in narrative leaves out a portion of the story. This can be used to condense time, or as a stylistic method to allow the reader to fill in the missing...
do not 'impose their will' on Ozu’s plots; they are his plots. By paying attention to what has been left out and to what is repeated, one arrives at Ozu’s essential story."
As an example, Geist cites the scene in which Noriko and Hattori bicycle together to the beach and have a conversation there, an incident that appears to imply a budding romantic relationship between them. When Noriko slightly later reveals to her father that Hattori, before that bicycle trip, had already been engaged to another woman, "we wonder," writes Geist, "why Ozu has wasted so much time on the 'wrong man' [for Noriko]." However, the key to the beach scene’s importance to the plot, according to Geist, is the dialogue between Hattori and Noriko, in which the latter tells him that she is "the jealous type." This seemingly unlikely claim, given her affable nature, is later confirmed when she becomes bitterly jealous at her father’s apparent plan to remarry. "Her jealousy goads her into her own marriage and is thus the pivot on which the plot turns."
Geist sums up her analysis of several major Ozu films of the postwar period by asserting that "the narratives unfold with an astounding precision in which no shot and certainly no scene is wasted and all is overlayered with an intricate web of interlocking meaning."
Major themes
The following represents what some critics regard as important themes in this film. This summary is not intended to be comprehensive.Marriage
The main theme of Late Spring is, of course, marriage; specifically, the persistent attempts by several characters in the film to get Noriko married. The marriage theme had resonance for Japanese of the late 1940s. On January 1, 1948, a new law had been issued in Japan which allowed young people over twenty to marry consensually without parental permission for the first time. Commentator Richard Peña has pointed out that one reason why Noriko is still unmarried at the relatively late age of 27 is that many of the young men of her generation had been killed in the Second World War, leaving far fewer eligible potential partners.An interesting aspect of the film involves the absence of any preoccupation in it with the traditional Japanese family system, or ie
Ie (Japanese family system)
The , or "household", was the basic unit of Japanese law until the end of World War II: most civil and criminal matters were considered to involve families rather than individuals . The ie is considered to consist of grandparents, their son and his wife and their children , although even in 1920,...
. As Sumiko Iwao, a psychology professor based in Tokyo, describes it, during the Meiji era (and for a considerable time before that), "the basic unit of society was the ie, or household. The head of the household, who was as a rule male, exercised unchallengeable authority over the lives of all family members. Women (wives) were seen primarily in terms of their role as bearers of male offspring who would carry on the family line and assume the responsibilities of family head. Women exercised no authority over marriage, divorce, or inheritance. The ie as part of the legal system was abolished in 1947." Although by 1949, the legal concept of the ie had, thanks to the American occupation, disappeared, the system remained informally in place in numerous Japanese households (and still exists today in parts of Japan). But in Late Spring, Noriko's father never orders her to marry; even when he pleads with her to agree to the miai to meet Satake, he "assures her that she is free to decline [marriage with him]." And when he tries to persuade her to accept Satake after she meets him, he never uses as a rationale that she must bear offspring, though his direct line would die out if she remained childless. He "emphasizes marrying for love and happiness not for perpetuation of the ie. (There is no emphasis on having children to maintain the family)." Peña claims that, for Ozu, marriage is not about procreation, but about one’s place in society.
Marriage in this film, as well as many of Ozu’s late films, is strongly associated with death. Prof. Onodera's daughter, for example, refers to marriage as “life’s graveyard.” Says Geist: "Ozu connects marriage and death in obvious and subtle ways in most of his late films… The comparison between weddings and funerals is not merely a clever device on Ozu’s part, but is so fundamental a concept in Japanese culture that these ceremonies as well as those surrounding births have built-in similarities… The elegiac melancholy Ozu evokes at the end of Late Spring, Late Autumn, and An Autumn Afternoon arises only partly because the parents have been left alone… The sadness arises because the marriage of the younger generation inevitably reflects on the mortality of the older generation." Robin Wood stresses the marriage-death connection in commenting on the scene that takes place in the Somiya home just before the wedding ceremony. "After everyone has left the room… [Ozu] ends the sequence with a shot of the empty mirror. Noriko is no longer even a reflection, she has disappeared from the narrative, she is no longer ‘Noriko’ but ‘wife.’ The effect is that of a death."
Tradition vs. modernity
The tension between tradition and modern pressures in relation to marriage — and, by extension, within Japanese culture as a whole — is one of the major conflicts Ozu portrays in the film. The characters in the work are, as several critics have pointed out, largely defined in terms of their relation to tradition. Sorensen indicates by several examples that what foods a character eats or even how he or she sits down (e.g., on tatami mats or Western-style chairs) reveals the relationship of that character to tradition. According to Peña, Noriko "is the quintessential moga — modan gaaru, 'modern girlModern girl
were Japanese women who followed Westernized fashions and lifestyles in the 1920s. These moga were Japan's equivalent of America's flappers, India's kallege ladki, Germany's neue Frauen, France's garçonnes, or China's modeng xiaojie...
' — that populates Japanese fiction, and really the Japanese imagination, beginning in the 1920s onward." Throughout most of the film, Noriko wears Western clothing rather than a kimono, and outwardly behaves in up-to-date ways. However, Bordwell asserts that "Noriko is more old-fashioned than her father, insisting that he could not get along without her and resenting the idea that a widower might remarry… she clings to an outmoded notion of propriety."
The other two important female characters in the film are also defined in terms of their relation to tradition. Noriko’s Aunt Masa appears in scenes in which she is associated with traditional Japan, such as the tea ceremony in the ancient temples of Kamakura. Noriko’s friend Aya, on the other hand, seems to reject tradition entirely. Under the new constitution of the prior year (1948), Japanese women had just been granted the right to divorce their husbands. Thus, Aya is presented as a new, Westernized phenomenon: the divorcee. She "takes English tea with milk from teacups with handles, [and] also bakes shortcake (shaato keeki)," a very un-Japanese type of food.
Prof. Somiya’s assistant, Hattori, Noriko’s friend, is also associated with symbols of modernity: the previously mentioned Coca-Cola sign, the "Balboa" coffee shop (the shop’s sign is in English) where he and Noriko briefly meet and the concert of Western classical music that Hattori, but not Noriko, attends.
Like Noriko, her father has an ambiguous relation with modernity. Shukichi is first seen in the film checking the correct spelling of the name of the German-American economist Friedrich List
Friedrich List
Georg Friedrich List was a leading 19th century German economist who developed the "National System" or what some would call today the National System of Innovation...
– an important figure during Japan’s Meiji era
Meiji period
The , also known as the Meiji era, is a Japanese era which extended from September 1868 through July 1912. This period represents the first half of the Empire of Japan.- Meiji Restoration and the emperor :...
, as List’s theories helped the economic modernization of the country. Prof. Somiya treats Aya, the divorcee, with unfailing courtesy and respect – though one critic suspects that such a person in the real-life Japan of that period might have been considerably less tolerant.
On the other hand, he, like Aunt Masa, is also associated with the traditions of old Japan, such as the city of Kyoto with its ancient temples and Zen rock gardens, and the Noh play that he so clearly enjoys. Most importantly, he pressures Noriko to go through with the miai meeting with Satake, though, as noted above, he makes clear to her that she can reject her suitor without negative consequences.
Sorensen has summed up the ambiguous position of both father and daughter in relation to tradition as follows: "Noriko and [Professor] Somiya interpolate between the two extremes, between shortcake and Nara-pickles, between ritually prepared green tea and tea with milk, between love marriage/divorce and arranged marriage, between Tokyo and Nara. And this interpolation is what makes them complex characters, wonderfully human in all their internal inconsistencies, very Ozu-like and likable indeed."
The home
Late Spring has been seen by some commentators as a transitional work in terms of the home as a recurring theme in Japanese cinema. Tadao Sato points out that Shochiku’s directors of the 1920s and 1930s — including Shimazu, Gosho, Naruse and Ozu himself — in their best pre-World War II films, "presented the family in a tense confrontation with society." In A Brother and His Young Sister (Ani to sono imoto, 1939) by Shimazu, for example, "the home is sanctified as a place of warmth and generosity, feelings that were rapidly vanishing in society." By the early 1940s, however, in such films as Ozu’s There Was a Father, "the family [was] completely subordinate to the [wartime] state" and "society is now above criticism." But when the military state collapsed as a result of Japan’s defeat in the war, the idea of the home collapsed with it: "Neither the nation nor the household could dictate morality any more."Sato considers Late Spring "the next major development in the home drama genre," because it "initiated a series of Ozu films with the theme: there is no society, only the home. While family members had their own places of activity — office, school, family business — there was no tension between the outside world and the home. As a consequence, the home itself lost its source of moral strength." Yet despite the fact that these home dramas by Ozu "tend to lack social relevance," they "came to occupy the mainstream of the genre and can be considered perfect expressions of 'my home-ism,' whereby one’s family is cherished to the exclusion of everything else."
The season
Late Spring is the first of several extant Ozu films with a "seasonal" title.A 1932 silent film, Spring Comes from the Ladies (Haru wa gofujin kara) is missing and considered lost. See Bordwell (1988), p. 223. (Later films with seasonal titles are Early Summer, Early Spring (Soshun, 1956), Late Autumn and The End of Summer (literally, "Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family")).Although Ozu's final film, Sanma no aji (1962), was released as An Autumn Afternoon in English-language countries, the original Japanese release title of the film refers to fish rather than to any season, and has been variously translated as "The Taste of Mackerel," "The Taste of Mackerel Pike," or "The Taste of Saury." See Richie (1974), p. 250. The "late spring" of the title refers on the most obvious level to Noriko who, at 27, is in the "late spring" of her life, and approaching the age at which she would no longer be considered marriageable.However, there may be another meaning to Ozu's title derived from ancient Japanese culture. When Noriko and Shukichi attend the Noh play, the work performed is called Kakitsubata or "The Water Iris." (The water iris in Japan is a plant which blooms, usually in marshland, in late spring/early summer.) In this play, a traveling monk arrives at a place called Yatsuhashi
Chiryu, Aichi
is a city located in central Aichi Prefecture, Japan. As of October 2011, the city had an estimated population of 69,127 and a population density of 4230 persons per km². The total area was 16.34 km².-Neighboring municipalities:*Toyota*Kariya* Anjō...
, famous for its water irises, when a woman appears. She alludes to a famous poem by the waka
Waka (poetry)
Waka or Yamato uta is a genre of classical Japanese verse and one of the major genres of Japanese literature...
poet of the Heian period
Heian period
The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. The period is named after the capital city of Heian-kyō, or modern Kyōto. It is the period in Japanese history when Buddhism, Taoism and other Chinese influences were at their height...
, Ariwara no Narihira
Ariwara no Narihira
was a Japanese waka poet and aristocrat. He was one of six waka poets referred in the preface in kana to Kokin Wakashū by Ki no Tsurayuki, and has been named as the hero of The Tales of Ise, whose hero was an anonym in itself but most of whose love affairs could be attributed to Narihira.He was the...
, in which each of the five lines begins with one syllable that, spoken together, spell out the word for "water iris" ("ka-ki-tsu-ba-ta"). The monk stays the night at the humble hut of the woman, who then appears in an elaborate kimono
Kimono
The is a Japanese traditional garment worn by men, women and children. The word "kimono", which literally means a "thing to wear" , has come to denote these full-length robes...
and headdress and reveals herself to be the spirit of the water iris. She praises Narihira, dances, and at dawn receives enlightenment
Enlightenment in Buddhism
The English term enlightenment has commonly been used in the western world to translate several Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese and Japanese terms and concepts, especially bodhi, prajna, kensho, satori and buddhahood.-Insight:...
from the Buddha
Buddha
In Buddhism, buddhahood is the state of perfect enlightenment attained by a buddha .In Buddhism, the term buddha usually refers to one who has become enlightened...
and disappears.Although there has been some dispute over the identity of the Noh play shown in the film, a French translation of Ozu and Noda's original script explicitly identifies the play as Kakitsubata, "nom d'une fleur" ("the name of a flower"). See Ozu and Noda, La fin du printemps, translated by Takenori Noumi [no date], p. 23, downloadable at http://www.01.246.ne.jp/~tnoumi/noumi1/books/lafinduprin.pdf.
As Norman Holland explains in an essay on the film, "the iris is associated with late spring, the movie’s title" and the play contains a great deal of sexual and religious symbolism. The iris' leaves and flower are traditionally seen as representing the male and female genitalia, respectively. The play itself is traditionally seen, according to Holland, as "a tribute to the union of man and woman leading to enlightenment." Noriko calmly accepts this sexual content when couched in the "archaic" form of Noh drama, but when she sees her father nod politely to the attractive widow, Mrs. Miwa, who is also in the audience, "that strikes Noriko as outrageous and outraging. Had this woman and her father arranged to meet at this play about sexuality? Is this remarriage 'filthy' like [Onodera's] remarriage? She feels both angry and despairing. She is so mad at her father that, quite uncharacteristically, she angrily walks away from him after they leave the theater." Holland thus sees one of the movie's main themes as "the pushing of traditional and inhibited Noriko into marriage."
Major characters
Late Spring has been particularly praised for its focus on character, having being cited as "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema." Ozu’s complex approach to character can best be examined through the two protagonists of the film: Noriko Somiya and her father, Shukichi.Noriko Somiya
Noriko, at 27, is an unmarried, unemployed young woman, completely dependent financially upon her father and living (at the film’s beginning) quite contently with him. Her two most important traits, which are interrelated, are her unusually close and affectionate relationship with her father and her extreme reluctance to marry and leave home. Of the first trait, the relationship between father and daughter has been described as a "transgenerational friendship," in which there is nevertheless no hint of anything incestuous or even inappropriate. However, it has been conceded that this may primarily be due to cultural differences between Japan and the West and that, were the story remade in the West, such a possible interpretation couldn’t be evaded. The second trait, her strong aversion to the idea of marriage, has been seen, by some commentators, in terms of the Japanese concept of amaeAmae
Amae is a Japanese word coined from the verb amaeru by Takeo Doi to serve as a noun, which he then used as a keyword to unlock, analytically, the behavior of a person attempting to induce an authority figure, such as a parent, spouse, teacher or boss, to take care of him...
, which in this context signifies the strong emotional dependence of a child on its parent, which can persist into adulthood. Thus, the rupturing of the father-adult daughter relationship in Late Spring has been interpreted as Ozu’s view of the inevitability — and necessity — of the termination of the amae relationship, although Ozu never glosses over the pain of such a rupture.
There has been considerable difference of opinion amongst commentators regarding the complicated personality of Noriko. She has been variously described as like a wife to her father, or as like a mother to him; as resembling a petulant child; or as being an enigma, particularly as to the issue of whether or not she freely chooses to marry. Even the common belief of film scholars that she is an upholder of conservative values (expressed primarily by her opposition to her father’s alleged remarriage plans) has been challenged. Robin Wood, writing about the three Norikos as one collective character, stated that "Noriko" "has managed to retain and develop the finest humane values which the modern capitalist world… tramples underfoot — consideration, emotional generosity, the ability to care and empathize, and above all, awareness."
Prof. Shukichi Somiya
Noriko’s father, Shukichi, works as a college professor and is the sole breadwinner of the Somiya family. It has been claimed that the character represents a transition from the traditional image of the Japanese father to a very different one. Sato points out that the national prewar ideal of the father was that of the stern patriarch, who ruled his family lovingly, but with an iron hand. Ozu himself, however, in several prewar films, such as I Was Born, But… and Passing Fancy, had undercut (according to Sato) this image of the archetypal strong father by depicting parents who were downtrodden "salarymenSalaryman
refers to someone whose income is salary based; particularly those working for corporations. Its frequent use by Japanese corporations, and its prevalence in Japanese manga and anime has gradually led to its acceptance in English-speaking countries as a noun for a Japanese white-collar...
" (or sarariman, to use the Japanese term), or poor working-class laborers, who sometimes lost the respect of their rebellious children. Bordwell has noted that "what is remarkable about Ozu's work of the 1920s and 1930s is how seldom the patriarchal norm is reestablished at the close [of each film]."
The character of Prof. Somiya represents, according to this interpretation, a further evolution of the “non-patriarchal” patriarch. Although Shukichi wields considerable moral influence over his daughter through their close relationship, that relationship is "strikingly nonoppressive." One commentator calls Shukichi and his friend, Professor Onodera, men who are "very much at peace, very much aware of themselves and their place in the world," and are markedly different from stereotypes of fierce Japanese males promulgated by American films during and after the World War.
It has been claimed that, after Noriko accepts Satake’s marriage proposal, the film ceases to be about her, and that Prof. Somiya at that point becomes the main protagonist, with the focus of the film shifting to his increasing loneliness and grief. In this regard, a plot change that the filmmakers made from the original source material is significant. In the novel by Kazuo Hirotsu, the father’s announcement to his daughter that he wishes to marry a widow is only initially a ruse; eventually, he actually does get married again. Ozu and his co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda, deliberately rejected this "witty" ending, in order to show Prof. Somiya as alone and inconsolable at the end.
Visual style
Ozu's unique visual style has been widely noted by critics and scholars. Some have considered it an anti-Hollywood style, as he eventually rejected many conventions of Hollywood filmmaking. Some aspects of this style (and it is not possible to discuss the style of Late Spring without discussing Ozu's style in general, as the film is typical in almost all respects) include Ozu's use of the camera, his use of actors, his idiosyncratic editing and his frequent employment of the distinctive shots that some have called "pillow shots."Low camera angle
Probably the most frequently noted aspect of Ozu's camera technique is his consistent use of an extremely low camera position to shoot his subjects, a practice that Bordwell traces as far back as his films of the 1931-1932 period. An example of the low camera in Late Spring would be the scene in which Noriko visits her friend Aya in her room. Noriko is seated and Aya is in a standing position, so Aya is looking down towards her friend. However, "the camera angle on both is low. Noriko sits looking up at the standing Aya, but the camera [in the reverse shotShot reverse shot
Shot reverse shot is a film technique where one character is shown looking at another character , and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character...
] looks up on Noriko's face, rejecting Aya's point of view. We are thus prevented from identifying with Aya and are forced into an inhuman point of view on Noriko."
Ozu's decision to use the camera this way puzzled not only critics, but his filmmaking colleagues as well, and he was always evasive as to why he did so. (One story goes that one night, at the home of director Daisuke Ito
Daisuke Itō (film director)
was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who played a central role in the development of the modern jidaigeki and samurai cinema.-Career:Born in Ehime Prefecture, Itō joined the actors school at Shōchiku in 1920, but soon began writing screenplays under the recommendation of Kaoru Osanai. He...
, Ozu set a sake bottle on a rock in Ito's garden; crouching down to observe the rock and the bottle, Ozu declared himself pleased: "That stone - that is my position, Ito, and you know it!") Bordwell suggests that his motive for using it was primarily visual, to create distinctive compositions within the frame and "make every image sharp, stable and striking." Richie believed that one of the reasons he used this technique was as a way of "exploiting the theatrical aspect of the Japanese dwelling." However, other critics believe that the ultimate effect of the low camera position was to elevate and "ennoble" the ordinary people in his films, such as Noriko and her father.
Static camera
Ozu was widely noted for a style characterized by a frequent avoidance of the camera movements — such as panning shotsPanning (camera)
In photography, panning refers to the horizontal movement or rotation of a still or video camera, or the scanning of a subject horizontally on video or a display device...
, tracking shots
Tracking shot
In motion picture terminology, a tracking shot is a segment in which the camera is mounted on a camera dolly, a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails while the picture is being taken...
or crane shots
Crane shot
In filmmaking and video production a crane shot is a shot taken by a camera on a crane. The most obvious uses are to view the actors from above or to move up and away from them, a common way of ending a movie. Some filmmakers like to have the camera on a boom arm just to make it easier to move...
— employed by most film directors. (As he himself would sometimes remark, "I'm not a dynamic director, like Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
.") Bordwell notes that, of all the common technical practices that Ozu refused to emulate, he was "most absolute" in refusing to reframe (for example, by panning slightly) the moving human figure in order to keep it in view; this critic claims that there is not a single reframing in all of Ozu's films from 1930 on. In the late films (that is, those from Late Spring on), the director "will use walls, screens, or doors to block off the sides of the frame so that people walk into a central depth," thus maintaining focus on the human figure without any motion of the camera.
The filmmaker would paradoxically retain his static compositions even when a character is in constant movement (e.g., walking) by moving the camera with a dolly
Camera dolly
A camera dolly is a specialized piece of filmmaking and television production equipment designed to create smooth camera movements . The camera is mounted to the dolly and the camera operator and focus puller or camera assistant, usually ride on the dolly to operate the camera...
at the precise speed at which the actor or actors move. He would drive his devoted cameraman, Yuharu Atsuta, to tears by insisting that actors and technicians count their steps precisely during a tracking shot so that the movements of actors and camera could be synchronized. An example in this film is the tracking shot of Noriko walking away from her father immediately after they have both attended the Noh performance: since Shukichi is walking behind her as he watches her go, the viewer might well assume that the view of Noriko walking is from the father's point-of-view, "were it not for the grotesquely low position of the moving camera." Thus, the speed of the camera, maintaining the moving character (Noriko) fixed within the composition, is not determined by Shukichi's viewpoint, but is rather an arbitrary choice of the director.
"Pillow shots"
A very distinctive feature of Ozu's work is the use of a series of shots — often but not always excluding all of the major characters — that serve as transitions from one scene location or time frame to another, substituting for such devices, in the work of other filmmakers, as the dissolveDissolve (filmmaking)
In the post-production process of film editing and video editing, a dissolve is a gradual transition from one image to another. The terms fade-out and fade-in and are used to describe a transition to and from a blank image. This is in contrast to a cut where there is no such transition. A dissolve...
or the fade.
The vase sequence
The most discussed "pillow shot" sequence, not only in Late Spring, but in all of Ozu's work, is the nighttime scene at the inn in Kyoto, prominently featuring a vase.Interpretations
Like many celebrated works of cinema, Late Spring has inspired varied and often contradictory critical and scholarly interpretations. The two most common interpretations of Late Spring are: a) the view that the film represents one of a series of Ozu works that depict part of a universal "life cycle," and is thus either duplicated or complemented by other Ozu works in the series; b) the view that the film, while similar in theme and even plot to other Ozu films, calls for a critical approach entirely distinct from those other works.The film as part of "life cycle" series
Ozu’s films, both individually and collectively, are often seen as representing either a universal human life cycle or a portion of such a cycle. Ozu himself at least once spoke in such terms. “I wanted in this picture [Early Summer] to show a life cycle. I wanted to depict mutability (rinne). I was not interested in action for its own sake. And I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”Those who hold this interpretation argue that this aspect of Ozu's work gives it its universality, and helps it transcend the specifically Japanese cultural context in which the films were created. Bock writes: "The subject matter of the Ozu film is what faces all of us born of man and woman and going on to produce offspring of our own: the family… [The terms "shomingeki" or "home drama"] may be applied to Ozu’s works and create an illusion of peculiar Japaneseness, but in fact behind the words are the problems we all face in a life cycle. They are the struggles of self-definition, of individual freedom, of disappointed expectations, of the impossibility of communication, of separation and loss brought about by the inevitable passages of marriage and death." Bock suggests that Ozu’s wish to portray the life cycle affected his decisions on technical matters, such as the construction and use of the sets of his films. "In employing the set like a curtainless stage Ozu allows for implication of transitoriness in the human condition. Allied with the other aspects of ritual in Ozu's techniques, it reinforces the feeling that we are watching a representative life cycle."
According to Geist, Ozu wished to convey the concept of sabi
Wabi-sabi
represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete"...
, which she defines as “an awareness of the ephemeral”: "Much of what is ephemeral is also cyclical; thus, sabi includes an awareness of the cyclical, which is evinced both formally and thematically in Ozu’s films. Often, they revolve around passages in the human life cycle, usually the marriage of a child or the death of a parent." She points out scenes that are carefully duplicated in Late Spring, evoking this cyclical theme: "Noriko and her father’s friend [Onodera] sit in a bar and talk about [Onodera’s] remarriage, which Noriko condemns. In the film’s penultimate sequence, the father and Noriko’s friend Aya sit in a bar after Noriko’s wedding. The scene is shot from exactly the same angles as was the first bar scene, and again the subject is remarriage."
The "life cycle" interpretation, for some critics, implies a certain interchangeability of characters and situations within the Noriko trilogy and the late-period works in general. (Perhaps the most extreme expression of this perceived sameness in Ozu's work was written by film historian David Shipman: "It is not too much to say that virtually the only difference between Late Spring and Early Summer (1951) is that the latter is thirty minutes longer and Mr. Ryu plays Setsuko Hara’s brother instead of her father.") For example, Geist implies that Ozu's conception of the life cycle ensured that the three Norikos in the trilogy are all approximately the same age. "In Ozu's cosmology, Noriko [in Tokyo Story] is a candidate for remarriage only because she is still young and childless. Her niche in the life cycle is akin to that of the unmarried but slightly 'old' (late twenties) daughters in Late Spring and Bakushu (Early Summer). Ozu did not permit those who had passed this rung of the ladder to remarry with grace."
The film as distinct work
A school of thought opposing the "life cycle" theory emphasizes the differences in tone and intent between Ozu films that deal with very similar themes, situations and characters. As critic Roger EbertRoger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
explains, "Late Spring began a cycle of Ozu films about families... Did he make the same film again and again? Not at all. Late Spring and Early Summer are startlingly different. In the second, Noriko takes advantage of a conversational opening [about marriage] to overturn the entire plot... she accepts a man [as husband] she has known for a long time — a widower with a child." In contrast, "what happens [in Late Spring] at deeper levels is angry, passionate and — wrong, we feel, because the father and the daughter are forced to do something neither one of them wants to do, and the result will be resentment and unhappiness." Ebert goes on, "It is universally believed, just as in a Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
novel, that a woman of a certain age is in want of a husband. Late Spring is a film about two people who desperately do not believe this, and about how they are undone by their tact, their concern for each other, and their need to make others comfortable by seeming to agree with them." The film "tells a story that becomes sadder the more you think about it."
The degree to which Ozu accepted marriage as a universal or inevitable part of the life cycle has also been questioned. Michael Grost, in his essay about the film, claiming that Ozu "seems to [have been] a gay man, although nobody wants to say so,"Speculation that Ozu may have been homosexual is, in fact, quite common. However, it should be noted that the only support that has ever been offered for the claim is the fact that he never married — which proves nothing one way or the other — and his alleged expulsion, in 1920, from the dormitory of his school for having written a letter to a younger (male) student that was "as indiscreet as it was sentimental." (See Richie (1974), pp. 195-196.) Furthermore, Richie elsewhere claims that "there is no evidence that he [wrote the letter] and some evidence that it was someone else who did," but does not offer such evidence. (See Richie's essay in the Criterion DVD release of An Autumn Afternoon, available at http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/668-an-autumn-afternoon-ozus-diaries.) asserts that, although "no one in the film speaks out against marriage as an institution... the film never makes any transcendental moral argument in favor of marriage. It shows that it is socially demanded, but it never shows it benefiting anyone, or hurting anyone by its absence... It is merely unthinkingly accepted by everyone as the natural order of things, a universal obligation of nature. Ozu's films are not ambiguous on this point: they do not make the slightest case for marriage as a moral obligation... I have been unable to find any claim in Ozu's films that the experiences of his characters, in particular their problems with marriage, represent a 'universal' experience of all human beings."
Wood's interpretation contains similarities to those of both Ebert and Grost. Late Spring, in Wood's view, "is about the sacrifice of Noriko’s happiness in the interest of maintaining and continuing 'tradition,' [which sacrifice] takes the form of her marriage, and everyone in the film — including the father and finally the defeated Noriko herself — is complicit in it." He asserts that, in contradiction to the view of many critics, the film "is not about a young woman trying nobly to sacrifice herself and her own happiness in order dutifully to serve her widowed father in his lonely old age," because her life as a single young woman is one she clearly prefers: "With her father, Noriko has a freedom that she will never again regain." He points out that there is an unusual (for Ozu) degree of camera movement in the first half of the film, as opposed to the "stasis" of the second half, and that this corresponds to Noriko’s freedom in the first half and the "trap" of her impending marriage in the second. He also claims that Ozu was able to empathize with Noriko's plight in part due to the fact that he "was able to remain in touch with his innate bisexuality." Rather than perceiving the Noriko trilogy as a cycle, Wood asserts that the three films are "unified by its underlying progressive movement, a progression from the unqualified tragedy of Late Spring through the ambiguous 'happy ending' of Early Summer to the authentic and fully earned note of bleak and tentative hope at the end of Tokyo Story."
Home Video releases
In 2006, The Criterion Collection released a two-disc set with a restored high-definition digital transfer and new subtitle translations. It also includes Tokyo-GaTokyo-Ga
Tokyo-Ga is a 1985 documentary film directed by Wim Wenders ostensibly about filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. However, only two scenes actually focus on Ozu—one where Wenders interviews Ozu’s regular cinematographer, Yuharu Atsuta, and another where he interviews Ozu’s favorite actor, Chishu Ryu. The rest...
, Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
' Ozu tribute, audio commentary by Richard Peña
Richard Peña
Richard Peña is the American film program director of the prestigious Film Society of Lincoln Center noted for his organization of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films series and Scanners .-Early life:Interested in film at a very young age, when Richard was just 12 years old, he was...
, and essays by Michael Atkinson and Donald Richie
Donald Richie
Donald Richie is an American-born author who has written about the Japanese people and Japanese cinema. Although he considers himself only a writer, Richie has directed many experimental films, the first when he was 17...
.
In June 2010, the BFI
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
released the film on Region B-locked Blu-ray
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
. The release includes a 24-page illustrated booklet as well as Ozu's earlier film The Only Son
The Only Son (1936 film)
is a 1936 film directed by Yasujiro Ozu, starring Chouko Iida and Shinichi Himori. The film was Ozu's first "talkie" feature.-Plot:The film starts in the rural town of Shinshū in 1923. A widow, Tsune Nonomiya , works hard at a silk production factory to provide for her only son, Ryosuke...
, also in HD, and a DVD copy of both films.
External links
- Rotten Tomatoes Reviews
- Review of Late Spring
- A video "appreciation" of Late Spring set to music by Malian musicians, in collaboration with Damon Albarn
- William Rothman, "Notes on Ozu's Cinematic Style" in the Stanley Cavell special issue, Jeffrey Crouse (ed.), Film International, Issue 22, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2006, pp. 33–42.