Activity

Like the traditional Zen artist, Ozu directs silences and voids. Silence and emptiness are active ingredients in Ozu’s films; characters respond to them as if they were audible sounds and tangible objects. Although such responses are usually quite subtle, a rather obvious use of active silence occu…

The personal interpretation of Ozu’s films has been encouraged by two misleading circumstances: one, that we simply happen to know much more about Ozu than we do about earlier traditional artists, and two, that Ozu, unlike a Zen poet or painter, must use living human beings as his raw material. The…

Before one can analyze the transcendental style in Ozu’s films, one must make (or attempt to make) the crucial yet elusive distinction between transcendental art and the art of transcendental experience within Ozu’s work. Do Ozu’s films express the Transcendent, or do they express Ozu, Zen culture,…

of chiaroscuro, non-“flat” lighting, although this is very rare even in early Ozu

Ozu’s later cycle of family-office films (thirteen films from 1949 to 1962) features the estrangement of parents and children. The incidents of estrangement are in themselves remarkably petty: marriage, relocation, bickerings, and at most running away from home. Behind these incidents are the divis…