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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,…

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…

Transcendental style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism. To the transcendental artist rationalism is only one of many approaches t…

Transcendental style is not a vague label like “religious film” which can be attached to films which feature certain religious themes and evoke the appropriate emotions; it is not a catchbasin for all the sniffles, sobs, and goosebumps one has experienced at religious films. It is neither a persona…

As I said, I was the soft one. Maybe that’s why I was so desperate to escape San Francisco, by which I mean desperate to leave a specific world inside that city, one I felt I was too good for and, at the same time, felt inferior to. I had models that many of my friends did not have: educated parent…