Fig.1 A typical stereogram Seeing an Ozu film is a strange experience. Most people viewing one of his films without any prior knowledge would probably think it was just a string of ordinary, everyday occurrences. Certainly anyone watching only a few minutes of an Ozu film, no matter what part, would find it dull. These are definitely not movies for the TV age, which demands change, or at least movement of some kind. The typical viewer armed with a remote controller would probably not continue watching for long, leaving only the committed Ozu fans.
If, however, you continue to watch straight from the opening scene, you are likely to be drawn in mysteriously to that world, as if suddenly captured by some telepathic force. Behind the simple words, you begin to see into the depth of the characters' hearts. You feel an empathy with what you are seeing, as you realize, "Ah, life can be like that."
Even when you watch an Ozu film from the start, however, you have to view it intently; otherwise you will only see what is on the surface. If you pay attention, you will gradually become attuned to Ozu's world and see beneath the surface. Even then, what you see will not knock you off your feet. It is much subtler than that. You experience the feelings of ordinary people in everyday situations. They may feel a slight frustration, which they hesitate to talk about; yet this makes them all the more aware of the dissatisfaction until it becomes more than they can bear. The feelings are like ripples that continue to build slowly, becoming a wave that can no longer be ignored.
This experience is something like the stereogram, which once enjoyed a brief popularity. On the surface, all you see is a repetitive series of pictures. When you learn to focus properly, however, you suddenly gain a feeling of depth (see the example). The solid image that emerges is really a flat, computer-generated mass; but it manages to create a feeling of depth that is mysteriously lifelike. You really have to see it for yourself to understand what I'm talking about; it's that much of an individual experience.
Thinking just about the empathy evoked by watching an Ozu film, this is much deeper than can be gained from the usual "interesting" movie. A typical film uses "interesting" people in "interesting" situations to try and get the audience to respond to emotions like "fear" or "bravery" or "righteous indignation" or "self-sacrifice." Rather than portraying the kinds of emotions felt by ordinary people from the time they awake to the time they fall asleep at night, these movies show us things people seldom experience during their entire lifetime. It's like looking at a medicine bottle labeled "poison", which the audience knows only as a symbol, or which they react to only instinctively, in a physiological way. The experience is at either of two extremes, the abstract or the animal, both of them divorced from the humanity of ordinary day-to-day life. It may evoke strong feelings, but ones that are alien to our everyday experiences. Such films are incapable of drawing out the feeling of empathy from within that we get when we watch an Ozu film, with its "Ah, life can be like that" reaction.
Stereogram
Going back to the stereogram for a moment, only recently has it become possible to create beautiful stereogram images based on actual photographs. First of all it requires that the image pattern be repeated at fixed intervals, so that the right and left eyes see past the flat images and focus on a different part. Then the pattern is slightly distorted so that the right and left eyes actually are looking at different parts, even though the viewer is under the illusion they are the same. This slight difference in the images seen by the right and left eyes is what creates the 3D image. Achieving this effect requires a series of fine adjustments based on extensive calculations, something that became possible only with the advent of the computer.
The films of Yasujiro Ozu have been subjected to a variety of analyses, interpretations and critiques. Setting aside the early criticisms that dismissed his works as those of a "mere artisan," certain concepts keep cropping up in his reappraisal, especially in treatments from abroad. Reading through these writings on this occasion, I was struck by expressions like, "repetition," "restriction, extreme economy of construction" and "carefully calculated." In many cases the critics regard these as very Japanese traits, reflecting a Japanese minimalist aesthetic. His works are said to be like haiku, or Zen-like. Ozu's films are described by these critics using the most stereotypical expressions of Japanese beauty, such as "the infinite inside a limited compass."
To a layman like me, for whom cinema is an interest but not a speciality, seeing phrases like "repetition," "restriction, extreme economy of construction" and "carefully calculated," and reading about the "mysteriously lifelike" impression we get from these films after becoming properly attuned to them, even though they are man-made artifacts, caused me to think of the computer-generated stereogram. Naturally, the danger of such a rough analogy is that it can lull you into thinking you understand and close your mind to the differences, though this is no worse than those who would drag haiku and Zen into their interpretations. As long as we are aware of this danger, even this analogy from a non-critic, whose specialty is science, may offer a fresh perspective that takes us in some interesting directions.
In other words, the use of "repetition," "economy of construction" and "restriction" are not to be taken as the result of "getting rid of unnecessary elements" or a Japanese minimalist aesthetic, but rather - just as a stereogram could not be created without such an approach - these are essential to the functioning of an Ozu film.
Global Standard
The fact is, recent works on Ozu's films are critical of the attempts to characterize Ozu with such stereotypes, and I believe that criticism is correct. Trying to fit Ozu's films into the framework of "the Japanese aesthetic" ends up itself discarding the many elements that do not fit into that interpretation.For example, what we learn from the diaries and other notes left by Ozu cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta about how Ozu went about his work shows that he calculated everything in meticulous detail ahead of time, writing it all down. This is quite the opposite of Japanese emotionalism. Cinema, of course, is a joint effort by many people, requiring strong budgetary control, so that careful advance planning tends to have a greater importance than with other art forms. Even so, in the case of an Ozu film, the timing of each shot is said to have been calculated already at the script-writing stage. It is even said that in spite of the cost of this initial preparation, the final result (length of the film, etc.) was so close to the original plan that it was actually possible to make meaningful forecasts from a business standpoint. This shows how Ozu stood apart from other Japanese directors with his emphasis on preproduction, rather than dealing with things on an ad hoc basis. The usual myth of the "artist" is someone who looks at the set through the camera, is hit with a sudden inspiration and decides to have the whole set be remade. This is in sharp contrast to Ozu, who proceeded right on budget. And that helps explain why the early Japanese-style "art-oriented" critics dismissed him as "a mere artisan."
From our present-day perspective, however, we can see that Ozu and his production team carried out their work by a "global standard" that would pass muster even in today's Hollywood. Ozu formed the Ozu-gumi production team and Akira Kurosawa had his Kurosawa Productions, but their reasons were 180 degrees apart. Kurosawa's team was a Japanese-style closely knit staff of people who knew his wishes well, and didn't need to wait around for detailed explanations. It has even been said that without them, the films he issued overseas in his later years would have ended up as failures. Ozu's team, by contrast, was a group that really knew how to carry out preproduction work - a rarity in Japan of that era - enabling them to implement his detailed planning.
After Ozu died, Atsuta continued to work with other directors, but never was able to get along as successfully as in his Ozu years, causing him eventually to drop out of the profession. It would be wrong to conclude that this was because he was so used to shooting according to Ozu's low-angle style that he could not learn the methods of other directors. It would be more natural to assume that it was a clash of styles. He would have no problem with shooting at high angles or doing pan shots; but whereas shooting an Ozu film involved careful planning ("For the effect we want in this next cut, we'll need to pan from this angle up to this angle, at this speed"), the typical director, without any prior planning, would simply say, "OK, do a pan here," and then decide it wasn't quite right and do a retake, "this time panning a little faster." In Atsuta's notes, the impression that this was the real problem comes out quite strongly. They include many painstakingly detailed records of pre-shooting investigations. Looking at the records he kept while on location, we realize the extent to which he favored careful pre-planning, surpassing even Ozu in meticulousness.
Atsuta's pocket notebook
Noise
A film director starts out with something he wants to express. This is no doubt true of any director. Directors have a large stock of techniques, based on past successes in their own work and on works they have seen by other directors, from which they choose as appropriate. Most directors - and especially those of Ozu's era other than Ozu himself - made this choice instinctively, based on feeling, rather than consciously. This instinctual approach sets human beings apart from computers, like a set of established tactics in chess.For Ozu, however, who made a science of observing human nature, it would not have been possible to proceed without being aware of this process itself. In fact, one of the main themes of Ozu films, notably in his later period, was to show us the parts of human nature that we normally are not conscious of. He did so by dissecting the way human beings use set expressions, or react to situations without thinking deeply, to protect themselves from the starkness of everyday reality. The same Ozu who was able to see all the way through to this mechanism of stock reactions would not have been able to make his own choices as a director by resorting to set tactics, as an unconscious process.
In spite of his purpose of conveying subtle shifts in emotion - or perhaps it was for this very purpose - Ozu needed to analyze feelings. This analysis was based on painstaking human observations extending to gestures and intonations, and it was this thoroughness of detail that prevented him from relying on set patterns for expressing set emotions, as in "to show sadness, use this technique."
He would start out with something he wanted to express. He would then make a thorough, conscious analysis of how to go about expressing it. Starting from zero, he would add necessary elements one by one. It was like constructing a chess problem, building the whole strategy one logical move at a time. This is what I see as Ozu's basic approach.
The way he went about his work, planning a detailed strategy in advance, writing it all down and making sure everyone in the group was thoroughly familiar with it before shooting, is close to the American way of approaching a film project. The emphasis on preproduction has become all the more important in today's Hollywood with its heavy use of computer graphics. Each cut, and each frame, must be planned out carefully in advance, often extending to each person's exact movements, so that the live action and computer graphics portions can proceed in parallel and be combined in the end.
In this sense Ozu and his production team were not typical either of Japanese filmmaking or of the 1950s in which they worked. The carefully analyzed, subtle expressions, resulting not from a process of pruning so much as of distillation, were the epitome of artificial creation - something that did not even exist in that day the way it does today. But it is just because he was able to free himself from the influences of his age, which can be seen as a kind of impurity, that he was able to continue creating such vivid works. Indeed, Ozu has been criticized for ignoring in his works the socio-political background of his age, when Japanese were returning from the war fronts and Japan was occupied by American forces; but such criticisms are wide of the mark. Bringing in such elements would have tied his films emotionally to the early post-war period. For what he was trying to portray, such elements would have been unnecessary noise.
Ozu's portrayal of feelings were intended to be universal; the generation gap he was interested in, for example, was not that between people born in the Meiji era and those born in the Showa era, but the gap between generation A and generation A+20. That was his ideal, and within the limitations of the film medium he tried to come as close to that ideal as possible. That is all the more reason his films have been well received abroad, and why there are enthusiastic Ozu fans even among today's young people.
Control
The way Ozu made his films, everything had some meaning. A simple tea cup, for example, was not there just because the scene happened to be in a living room. Everything placed on the table was put there consciously, with some purpose in mind, and had to be something that would fulfil its role to the director's satisfaction. Not only could there be no superfluous decoration, but the audience must not obtain any information that was not intended by the director.
Pieces of cut films The story is told that if there was anything on a set with writing on it, such as paper lanterns and signs, the lettering essentially had to be done by the director himself. He was very particular about the props used in his sets, to the extent of going to his house during a shooting and fetching a certain item, because only that item was right for the scene.
The props, the sets, the actors and all their lines had to be media for conveying just the information intended in the director's carefully calculated plans, no more and no less. That is all the more reason for his not introducing any elements he could not control. Even though wide film formats were in use in his time, he insisted on 35 mm standard format because he did not like the distortion at the edges of the screen common in wide formats. Along the same lines, he stayed away from panning shots and kept the audience focussed on the same spot, afraid that otherwise the audience would get information he did not intend to convey.
There have always been artists of both types. The "open-oriented" type, in the name of "collaboration with nature" or the like, prefer to send their works out into the world with the expectation of giving birth to unintentional encounters. The "control-oriented" type, intent on maintaining the independence of their works, dislike any peripheral information that they did not intend to be there. One sculptor I know, when exhibiting a work, pays attention even to the pedestal on which it is mounted, not allowing the use of natural stone and requesting that perfectly rectangular pedestals be made, whose size must be proportional to the size of each work. Without saying that one or the other approach is better, which is beyond the scope of this article, there can be no doubt that Ozu was of the latter type.
Medium
Next, let us consider the special limitations of film as an art medium. If Ozu sought a medium he could control fully in order to express himself, the film medium is notoriously unsuitable.The limitations of film are completely different from those of haiku. Working with words, a writer has complete control as he pens his words on a sheet of manuscript paper. There are rules of expression, however, which the writer follows, deliberately choosing expressions within those rules.
A painter also has a great deal of control over a painting. He deliberately chooses the colors to be placed on a white canvas. Naturally, the materials used in a painting have their own characteristics, and the extent of control does not permit these to be ignored. The painter cannot draw a dot smaller than his brush. He cannot make the canvas brighter than it is, or make use of colors not in his palette.(Hideo Kobayashi's theory of colors notwithstanding[1], Monet's pointillism can perhaps be seen as the product of a compromise between the materials of his time and his root desire to have complete control over each dot.)
The restrictions are even more severe when it comes to photography. Even though lighting and other effects can be called into play, the photographer still must work with forms that actually exist.
The more concrete a medium is, the more elements there are that are beyond the control of the artist. This is one of those obvious facts, but its ultimate manifestation is no doubt to be seen in cinema.
Ozu chose a medium over which the artist has the least control, and then sought to control it.
That is why I feel it makes little sense to compare Ozu's works with those of other filmmakers as one would compare, say, the paintings of Kandinsky and Van Gogh. Although Ozu sought to simplify the elements in his films, I do not believe he was aiming for a kind of minimalism, by getting rid of even more elements. What he was after was control. This is like an artist who chooses the medium of photography, but seeks the same degree of control as that of a painter.
If Ozu himself placed restrictions on his expression, in the manner of a haiku, it was in the act itself of choosing film as his medium from the start. From that point on, it was a struggle to see how much control over that medium he could exercise, not a matter of minimizing or restricting that medium.
Among Ozu fans there is a famous argument about tofu and tonkatsu (pork cutlets)[2]. For Ozu, though, it was not the tofu and pork that were important; rather, he made the lunch box himself because it was necessary to what he wanted to express. He would probably not be content, though, to make up the lunch box unless he also paid attention to how each grain of rice was laid out in it.
With the technology of his day, however, that was not possible. Even with the skills of Atsuta and the rest of his "control-oriented" staff, there are limits to the degree of complexity human beings can control. That's the point of the tofu. The complexity of tofu is within the range of human control. In asked of the slight ripples of a family's emotions, he may have wanted to create big works dealing with changes in society as a whole. More than considerations of budget, however, the greatest constraint was that the complexity of such an undertaking was beyond the limitations of any group of human beings. That is how I see it, anyway.
Computer
In our own era, the amount of control the artist has over a painting or photograph has expanded greatly in the past ten years or so. This is also the result of advances in computer technology. Using digital paintings, or computer software for retouching photos, the artist is able to control light at the pixel level if necessary. Brushes and filters that are physically impossible to create can be realized by means of computer algorithms.
The same wave of change has extended to cinema, with the earlier-mentioned use of computer graphics technology in film. From my perspective on Ozu's films as attempts to keep the degree of complexity to what could be controlled technically, the history of computer graphics serves as a useful model. In early computer graphics, what could be drawn was limited by the processing capabilities of computers. A ball could not be drawn as a perfect sphere, and human limbs were drawn by combining oval shapes. As computers became more powerful, more complex images could be handled. The difference is readily apparent when you compare the 1982 movie "Tron" with this year's "Antz". In "Antz" the subtle nuances of expression on the faces of the ants rival those of a good character actor, and the simulation extends to the muscles under their skin.
A film created with computer graphics can be made without the smudges or distortions in focus that affect ordinary films. As seen in the movie "Tron," it is a totally mathematical world. In fact, introducing smudges or focal distortions is probably done only when the film creators decide they are necessary to a scene, since these would add to the amount of processing. The labor expended to keep such elements out of ordinary films, as Ozu struggled so hard to do, is quite the opposite of this effort.
In that sense it is fun to imagine Ozu, as well as Atsuta and the rest of his crew, working on a well-budgeted computer graphics film in today's Hollywood. If the image of Ozu's films as "so very Japanese" is a correct one, I could be wrong; but I suspect he would quite enjoy computer graphics.
Noise Free
Ozu, for whom unintentional information was unwanted noise, can easily be imagined to have hated also any noise that was introduced into a film after its completion.Having so carefully captured the sound of a single drop of water, or having analyzed in detail the various intonations and accents in a simple verbal response, he would not want those sounds masked by noise. Imagine how he would react to a diagonal scratch cutting across the table he had laid out so carefully, paying attention to each article on it. More than anyone, Ozu (as well as Atsuta and the rest of the production team) could only feel sadness if his work were marred by such noise, after working so hard to exclude all unintended information.
Unlike many other media, a film has the limitation of having to be played back in order to be seen. If the medium is difficult to control in production, this difficulty is compounded when it comes to the conditions under which it is screened. Moreover, even though movie film can be stored for a long time - reportedly a hundred years for today's film - due to its basic chemical instability it is bound to deteriorate over time. Of the silent films made before the 1930s, some 90 percent are said to have been lost to time. The figure is around 50 percent for films made before the 1950s[3]. Of Ozu's 54 works, only 36 remain. For that reason, film restoration must be carried out.
Mainly this involves removing dust, fixing scratches, and correcting for faded dyes. The conventional approach was to wash the film, fill in scratches with a material having the same photo-optical characteristics as film, and if necessary, copy the original print to another film. Copying the original, however, lowers the quality with each generation. In many cases, deterioration of the sound track also requires restoration of some kind. There are limits, though, to these analog measures.
Recent advances in digital techniques have created a new wave.
The use of computers to repair film can be traced back to the digital image processing of the 1960s. Research started out initially on ways of compensating and improving satellite images such as those from remote sensing. Digital restoration of films really became practical in the 1990s as computers became more powerful and the cost of storage media dropped. Up to that time, the high cost of storage media made computers impractical for use in film preservation.
In digital restoration, first the film is read with a high-resolution scanner and changed to a digital form. Once it has been captured in digital form, it can be copied any number of times without any quality loss. Each frame of a 35 mm color film, however, contains up to 45 megabytes worth of digital information. Given a film speed of 24 frames per second, an hour-long film consists of 86,400 frames, or 3.9 terabytes of information[3]. Even if the frames can be viewed on a computer screen, it would be an enormous task for human operators to retouch and restore a film by hand. The process needs to be automated to the extent possible.
The first film to be fully restored digitally was Disney's 1937 film, Snow White. Films made prior to the 1950s used a nitrate base (cellulose nitrate), and most of the originals have deteriorated beyond the point where they can be shown. They require complete restoration, by copying and other means. Upon the 50th anniversary of Snow White in 1987, conventional photo-optical restoration was carried out by a highly regarded film restoration house; but Disney concluded the resulting quality was good enough only for video[4].
Using its Cineon Digital Film System, Kodak in 1992 demonstrated digital restoration on a one-minute segment of Snow White. That was enough to convince Disney to go ahead with digital restoration of the entire film. Using 40 workstations operated in three shifts, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, the project was completed in 18 weeks, at a cost of 7 million dollars[3]. The resulting film was released in 1993 to large audiences, raising the value of the restored work.
Cost still remains a sticking point, however. The UCLA film archive, for example, has an annual budget of 1 million dollars for film restoration, not enough for digital restoration of even one film[5].
If cost is a problem in the United States, it is even more so in Japan. For this special exhibit, restoration of one - Ozu film was attempted. I sincerely hope this will be the occasion for heightened interest in the field of digital cinematic restoration techniques, and that many films now lost to us can enjoy its benefits.
There have always been concerns about the harmful potential of digital restoration, just because it is so powerful. The industry reacted strongly against the use of computers in the 1980s to colorize original black-and-white films. In the digital restoration of Snow White, dust and other noise on the film that would make it less viewable was removed, but in some cases was deliberately left in to preserve the "character" of the original film[4]. Scratches were filled in only with other parts of the film, not from a raw palette. Even in digital restoration, too much retouching is apparently open to criticism.
Still, the potential of digital technology for realizing "freedom from noise" would likely have given joy to someone like Ozu or Atsuta. At least I would very much like to think that is true.
[1] Hideo Kobayashi, Modern Paintings, Shincho Bunko, 1968 (in Japanese)
[2] "For example, something like tofu" (Tokyo Shimbun, December 9, 1953). "But I'm practically like a tofu shop, so even when making a brand new film, we can't suddenly change to something completely different. It has to be something like tofu, maybe fried tofu or stuffed bean curd, but certainly not pork cutlets."
[3] Film Restoration in General (http://www.vcpc.univie.ac.at/activities/projects/FRAME/General.html)
[4] Rohrbough, Linda,"Massive effort restored Snow White to theater quality. (Eastman Kodak Co.'s Cinesite digital film center)", Newsbytes, July 9, 1993
[5] Turner, Dan,"Engineers developing technology to restore Hollywood movie classics.
(Special Report: High Technology)", Los Angeles Business Journal, August 7, 1995 v17 n32 p30
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