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 divisive elements of modern Japan: the Second World War (the children are called the après-guerre generation) and Westernization (the compartmentalizing effect of office routine). The parent-child estrangement is not a failure to “communicate,” as in American juvenile delinquency films. Even in successful relationships Ozu’s characters do not communicate, as that word is used in sociological jargon, with commiseration and emotional interchange. The estrangement results from the loss of the traditional family unity which was never verbally communicated in the first place. In his later films Ozu set these opposing forces within a home-office superstructure containing a variety of interchangeable character-conflict infrastructures. One story (really nothing more than an anecdote) could sustain several films. Ozu was notorious for filming the same situation over and over again: the father-daughter conflict of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) became the mother-daughter conflict of Late Autumn and reverted to a father-daughter conflict in An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, 1962).

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, and man’s experience of the Transcendent?

The first, immediate answer must be: “both, of course.” There is no static-free communication with the Holy, and any work which expresses the Transcendent must also express the personality and culture of its artist. Then comes the thorny problem of individual instances, of determining influences and effects. The distinction between transcendental art and the art of transcendental experience resolves into several incumbent questions: which influenced Ozu’s art more? His personality,* Zen culture, or the Transcendent? And which critical definition of style is best suited to uncover that influence? The personal, cultural, or Eliade-Wölfflin (transcendental style)?

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

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 characters on screen are experiencing life, and the critic, who naturally empathizes with their feelings, may conclude that their feelings are representative of the film-maker and let the matter go at that. But the characters who are emoting on screen may be no more or less representative of the film-maker than a nonhuman shot of a train or a building. The characters’ individual feelings (sorrow, joy, introspection) are of passing importance: it is the surrounding form which gives them lasting value. Each person, each emotion is part of a larger form which is not an experience at all, but an expression, or rather, not an expression of the individual or cultural experience of transcendence, but an expression of the Transcendent itself.

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 occurs in Early Summer: Setsuko Hara has just told her parents of her intention to marry, a decision which displeases them. After a polite argument the parents, despondent, go upstairs. In the next shot the father is staring into the camera while in the background the mother does some busywork and speaks to him. She makes a trivial remark, and he replies, “Ah.” She makes another remark, he again replies, “Ah.” The mother leaves the room and Hara walks noiselessly through the background. The father again says, “Ah.” The silence has become electric, much more meaningful than anything the mother could have said.

A potential disparity between man and nature underlies Ozu’s films. He suggests that the flow of man and nature may be separate rather than unified, which, within the context of his traditional structure, certainly does create a schizoid reaction. This disparity becomes obvious when Ozu juxtaposes similar codas after contrasting family scenes. A shot of a snow-capped mountain inserted after a discussion by several parents plainly suggests the unity to which they aspire, but the same shot inserted after a parent-child quarrel suggests that the traditional unity may have little meaning within the postwar family structure. The codas can be not only a positive statement on the unity of man and nature, but also a wry commentary on the lack of it.

Ozu’s use of character ambivalence and irony is similar to that of Czech director Milos Forman, and an interesting comparison can be drawn between their films. Both perfected a form of light comedy which contrasted documentary “realism” with flashes of human density. In their comedies, disparity is reflected by a tragicomic attitude toward character and a resultant irony. Their early films, given cultural differences, were remarkably similar, but Ozu’s later films moved gradually out of the light comedy category and acquired a weight as yet unknown to Forman’s work. This is because the later Ozu films employ transcendental style: by changing superficial “realism” to the rigid everyday and by changing mild disparity (character ambivalence, irony) into unexpected decisive action, Ozu transforms human density into spiritual density. Assuming that Forman and Ozu started from an analogous base in light comedy (Black Peter vis-à-vis I Was Born, But . . .), Ozu’s evolution may be hypothesized thus: the twin influences of the age of postwar Westernization heightened the innate conflict between Zen culture and modernization in Ozu and forced him little by little to intensify his already schizoid style so that the differences could no longer be resolved but had to be transcended. The compassion of Ozu’s later films is so overburdening and disparate that rapprochement cannot be achieved by laughter as in light comedy, but only by a deep spiritual awareness. (Milos Forman is still a young director, of course, although the surrealistic conclusion of Firemen’s Ball suggests that his career will take a different course.)

The disparity in Ozu’s films is primarily internal: man cannot find nature within himself. The disparity in Bresson’s films is primarily external: man cannot live harmoniously with his hostile environment. In Ozu, there are no futile protests against the frailty of the body and the hostility of the environment, as in Bresson. In Bresson, there is no resigned acceptance of environment, as in Ozu.

The decisive action in Ozu’s films is a communal event between the members of a family or neighborhood. The decisive action in Bresson’s films is limited to a lonely figure pitted against a hostile environment. Bresson stands in the Judeo-Christian tradition of the single redeemer: Moses, Christ, the priests, saints, and mystics who each in his own life righted man with the world. Ozu does not structure his films around a specific Christ or a specific Calvary. In Ozu’s films a number of characters can participate in the Transcendent through a number of decisive actions.

The differences between Ozu and Bresson are unified in stasis, the culmination of transcendental style. The Wholly Other, once perceived, cannot be limited by culture.