A foreign architect asked Arata Isozaki what to do to consider problems of current Japanese family when she joined a design project of apartment house in Gifu. She received his answer that she should see both "Tokyo Story" (1953) directed by Yasujiro Ozu and "Family Game" (1983) directed by Yoshimitsu Morita at the same time. These are just "a trasitional Japanese residence space and a parody of contemporary houses". This means that an Ozu film is a goot text of typical images of families and houses of the past. However, Yasujiro Ozu did not always describe Japanese realistic house architecture.
Ozu films described Tokyo before the reconstruction in the 1960th, in which famous city architectures as well as houses appear. However, the role of these is just a sign to indicate locations such as "Wako" in Ginza, but not an important space in relation to the development of stories of the films. In spite of this, it is very interesting to know that his films describes a lot of vertical elements such as scens of factories, steel towers, light houses, and chimneys designed by unknown designers. This is partly because his living environemnt was nearby an industrial district, but because he purely loves visual elements dividing screen vertically which impress us a composition like a still-life painting.
Ozu often adopted common Japanese house, while several famous film directors adopts novel architectures. However, we would like to regard Ozu as an atchitects to the letter, and consider what kind of spaces he has constructed in his films.
Fig.1 Fig.2
Fig.3 Mr. Yuharu Atsuta, cameraman of Ozu films, said that Ozu had let taken persons in houses and buildings outside of houses in horisontally. Thus, taken objects keep verticality against a screen, which resembles the method of architecture photographs printed in atchitecture journals. However, low angle shots and radical composition as seen in Ozu films are very special to him. And, Ozu is a hunter of the visual who carries out location hunting completely. This is very similar to the attitude of Le corbusier. When Ozu built his cottage, he consulted on its design with Tomoo Shimogawara, an art director of Ozu films, and asked him to draw a sketching. This indeicates that Ozu wished to live within an image in his real life.
Fig.4 Fig.5 An image taken from low positions contains little horisontal elements such as ceilings and lintels in a screen, but makes vertical elements such as pillars, fusumas (papered sliding doors), windows, and shohjis (paper sliding doors) prominent, and emphasizes the hight of children and small objects. This gives Japanese houses solidity. However, he did not adopt "sukashi-rammas" (a transparent openwork screen above the sliding partitions between two rooms) because a ceilling of the imcomplete next room is sometimes exposed to the eyes in low positions through the ramma. While fusumas and shojis put on both sides of a screen consisute a frame of a space, prepared fusumas is just the half size because an enough wide frontage is required. Because Ozu does not select unrealistic glance, a room near to the camera position needs an enough space. For this purpose, the basic space composition of Ozu films becomes a straight connection of more than two rooms which are larger than six-mats. Surely, this kind of room compositions existed in the house in Matsuzaka in which Ozu had been lived in his childhood. Because shots of reverse directions are used much in the conversation scenes in his films, walls on all sides must be designed. This space composition principle is applied to western-style rooms and open-air space.
Fig.6 Fig.7 According to the art director Tomoo Shimogawara, as the arrangement and scale of the rooms are decided mainly by time intervals of acting, time flow of Ozu films makes the size of sets a little larger than the real scale. This generates the basic plan of housing that there are connected two eight-mat rooms at the center, an entrance and a kitchen connected by a corridor in each side, and a stairway to the upper floor. We can confirm this by images of Ozu films produced after WW II and set plans of "Akibiyori" and "An Autumn Afternoon (Samma no Aji)". Therefore, all houses designed by Ozu resemble with each other because of the similarity of the core space structure. The difference appears in the solid design of Fusuma and Shoji. In addition, we can recognize an interesting plan at the hotel in "Kobayakawake no aki", in which a courtyard is inserted in the unit of the connected two rooms. Another characteristic of his house design is the absence of the outside of houses. Fences, walls, or tile roofs of the house next door obstracts the view, and makes a room without the outside view. This is caused by the preference of Ozu that he dislikes location when taking indoor scenes, and always takes it in studios. This generates closing spaces different from Japanese architectures as open spaces.
Fig.8 Fig.9 Fig.10 Fig.11
Fig.12 However, the moment in which houses of Ozu becomes the most charming existence is not the time in which the space is filled by residents. Unmanned scene is just the scene of beauty: empty shots indicating the change of places, a scene just before a person is entering a room, an extra aftertasting scene just after a person has gone. This is very similar to arthicture photographs in which no person comes out. But, why is an empty or disposed room by marrage or bereavement so charming? This is because an unmanned room is corresponding to Terrain vague as a surplus space as Ignasi de solmorales rubisaid. It changes to unknown spaces in the house. The last scene of "Samma no Aji" projects an impressive unmanned view: a dress table in the second floor which reflects an inhouse scene, an unmanned kitchen and darkness, a shot of stairway indicating a simple and absolute absence. In this film, a special stairway plan as well as a ground plan of the Hirayama family was made. This is very surprising fact in considering that there are no special plan except of other parts. Maybe, the last shot of the stairway is recognized very important. Then, unexpectedly, this is the posthumous work of Yasujiro Ozu.
 |
 |
 |
