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there is a level of deceit going on when someone like Straub states they are influenced by Ozu

I don't think that's the best characterization of what I wrote. I think part of the problem is the vagueness of the word "influence" and in the interest of clarity we should probably ban it from this conversation. I have no doubt that in one of the many senses of that word, Costa was "influenced" by Ozu. I also think Costa often suggests that he is working in the tradition of Ozu, that his films are updates of Ozu, or some such--and I think that sort of argument is willfully perverse. And it's a familiar argument.

As for Straub, I don't know if he's ever mentioned Ozu. He's hailed Ford before, sometimes for the way that Ford's films can often hold two viewpoints in tension, as in Fort Apache and The Long Gray Line (in the latter: admiring the traditions and family-like society of West Point and bitterly mourning the sacrifice of generations of promising young men to war). But at times when discussing Ford and others, Straub will make impatient statements like "my films are exactly like those of Ford, isn't it obvious?" that seem designed less to communicate and more to separate those "in the know" from others for whom the connection is not immediately evident. This is just part of the severe personae Straub and Huillet adopt(ed), a pose that seems snobbish to me.

I think Costa and others take on versions of that persona--it's part of a game cinephiles like to play, even the ones who disavow cinephilia. And I guess here's where personal taste comes in with a vengeance: I happen to think Costa is writing checks his films can't cash (not as true with Straub).

Back to Ozu: Bordwell would likely deny that "content" exists apart from "form"; or, put another way, he might argue that "content" is an element of form. This is the legacy of the formalists who influenced (that word again!) him (Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Jakobson...). So the way Ozu deploys meanings, including emotional meanings, is part of his complex and supple experiments with form. I also think it's unwise to reduce those experiments to "visual style." Ozu, without but especially with Noda, is a master of large-scale form, of arranging the big blocks and little motifs of a narrative in a way that activates an incredible number and dense interweaving of formal patterns, making them a feast for the attentive viewer. (I think the same holds for much poetry, and IMO some training in prosody and scansion is of great benefit to anyone who wants to analyze film.)

If you haven't read Bordwell's Ozu book in a while--and although it's the best book on Ozu we have, I don't think it exhausts or claims to exhaust what could be written about his films--I'd recommend re-reading the section on Early Summer, which I think gets at all this in a clear and concise way. It even quotes Tynyanov IIRC.

Edit: posted this at the same time as immediately preceding message, so apologies if I'm just repeating stuff.

I don't see anything perverse in any of the statements of influence/ similarity. Maybe they aren't seeing these artists as the artist intended and their differences are more heightened then their similarities but that's not snobbishness to me. For instance the Ford thing you quoted seems to make a lot of sense to me especially with a film like Moses and Aron where that way of portraying dialogue is the whole of the film's style. Or you can go to the logical extreme of all of this with Costa's Casa de Lava which steals so fully from Tourneur that Warners would have every right to sue for plagiarism. Though of course I'm one of those sorts who see content and form absolutely intertwined (certainly van Sant proved that with Psycho), but I think that doesn't mean much in the terms of borrowing, influence, and other such ideas.

"IMO some training in prosody and scansion is of great benefit to anyone who wants to analyze film"

What a great line...

The worst students are the ones who simply repeat the lessons of their teacher exactly as the lessons were taught to them. So if you're only seeing influence when it's displayed in a superficial, obvious manner, you're not seeing the teacher's best pupils, the ones who truly understood the lessons.

I love Bordwell's book on Ozu (and it now exists in improved form -- for free -- online. I would agree with Jonah, "form" in Bordwell is a lot more than a few visual tics. It involves the totality of what Ozu is doing (even down to who he casts to play certain parts). And, yes, he clearly sees his work as a starting point for further exploration of Ozu -- and not the final word in explanation.

mattkc, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. If you are, I just meant that scansion and prosody give more and closer attention to subtleties of form than anything else I know, and can make you really alert to complex patterns of similarity/difference, repetition/variation, parallelism, development, etc. (My typical reaction after applying the lessons I learned in poetry classes to something really good: you can do all that in a poem?!) You could probably say something similar about a background in formalist strains of musicology, but that's not my background so I can't speak to it...

Again, my problem is not that Costa doesn't make films that are sufficiently Ozu-like (or that Straub doesn't make films that are sufficiently Ford-like, etc.). Michael might have been making an argument like that; I didn't intend to. I feel like I've already done my best to explain this, though, so I'll bow out for now...

jonah—have been studying scansion (poetry as well as prose, a la Saintsbury) somewhat casually and meant the comment in all seriousness. It's a wonderful idea.

Michael, I was trying to get at what your earlier comment, below, might suggest about Bordwell's approach.

Michael Kerpan wrote:There are many aspects of "late Ozu" that exist in some of his earliest suriving films, which are "purely stylistically" very different form his late films. The superficial (visual) formal aspects of Ozu are relatively insignificant. (In other words, I agree with Matt).

But a whole Bordwell/formalism discussion seems too daunting to me at present, so I'll have to just see where others may take this, but it does seem like I should clarify one thing I wrote before. When I said that the formal qualities and techniques Ozu used to make his films are important but not the be-all and end-all, I didn't mean to suggest that Bordwell's book presumed to exhaust what could be written about the films. I just meant that there are many ways of approaching and writing about them, and in choosing what aspects of the films to write about, what questions to address, and how to write about these questions, there are a lot of possibilities one closes off depending on the writer and the methodology. I wish there were more books on Ozu. As strong as Bordwell's is, it seems like there are crucial ways of engaging with them that are missing from it. In other words, I would disagree with Michael that Bordwell's approach involves, or could involve, "the totality of what Ozu is doing." Because all anyone can really do, aside from providing factual details about the film, is analyze and interpret that totality in any number of ways.

I think Bordwell presents a whole array of ways to look at Ozu's films (even if not every possible way) -- the one thing he's not particularly interested in (and neither am I) are purely content-based approaches.

I can't even imagine how a purely content based approach would work as the differences in the later films is presented and highlighted by the form they take with things even as subtle as casting creating the difference. The complimentary nature of the post Tokyo Story films which truly feel like an epic portrait of life would not be able to be examined from a purely content point of view.

mattkc, glad to hear that you weren't being sarcastic! it's hard to tell on the interwebs.

Bordwell's book talks about a lot about how Ozu and his films fit into the culture of the shōwa period -- from the craze for Western (esp. American) popular culture, to the ways that "Japaneseness" was deployed to justify a program of imperialism/militarism. A lot of that stuff helped me to understand the references, motifs, and topical themes in Ozu's work (and this is evident in the Early Summer section I recommended above). What's key is that all of this stuff was filtered through Ozu's consistent interest in formal play, and has to be understood in that context. Or as Barthes wrote: "a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it."

If I remember correctly, Donald Richie's excellent book on Ozu does go into some depth into the ways in which his films can be read (to return to mattkc's point) through the focusing on objects and the wider mise en scene as opposed to the narrative and the characters. One particular passage in which he goes into meticulous detail over one very small passage when the camera cuts between an empty room, a vase and then back to the room (I think in Early Summer) is particularly insightful into the ways in which Ozu imbued inanimate objects with a whole range of emotional and philosophical meanings. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to check exactly what he wrote as I only borrowed the book from the library.

Likewise Yoshida Kiju's similarly fascinating book on 'Ozu's Anti-Cinema' goes to some length to show how Ozu's treatment of mise-en-scene was a deliberate attempt to fracture the artifice of narrative and elicit a wider range of philosophical responses to the action on screen. The book on the whole makes some very compelling arguments for viewing Ozu as a major radical force in cinema, and acts as a nice rejoinder to the accusations of conservatism leveled at him by Yoshida and some of Yoshida's contemporaries.

knives wrote:Or you can go to the logical extreme of all of this with Costa's Casa de Lava which steals so fully from Tourneur that Warners would have every right to sue for plagiarism.

Hardly.

If one can read French, Shigehiko Hasumi's book on Ozu (published in translation by Cahiers du Cinema) offers some pretty useful criticisms of the way most Western critics have interpreted Ozu's films (he seems to be least harsh with Bordwell).

zedz wrote:

knives wrote:Or you can go to the logical extreme of all of this with Costa's Casa de Lava which steals so fully from Tourneur that Warners would have every right to sue for plagiarism.

Hardly.

I'll admit I was engaging in hyperbole, but certainly the broad point stands that he used the film as a basis for his.

I am trying to find a couple of things - first, I want to find a list of all the literary sources that Ozu based his films on. Of course, many were his own screenplays, so, I would also like to find a way to get/look at the scripts.

And, all of this needs to be in English translation.

any leads will be appreciated.

kc0olm --

There is no comprehensive English language source (or French or German, for that matter) for the information you want. The (more or less) complete scripts have been published, but only in Japanese. The only English script translation I am aware of is for Tokyo Story.

Michael Kerpan wrote:kc0olm --

There is no comprehensive English language source (or French or German, for that matter) for the information you want. The (more or less) complete scripts have been published, but only in Japanese. The only English script translation I am aware of is for Tokyo Story.

Yeah, Richie's Ozu (1974) mentions no scripts in translation in the bibliography or index, although Richie does somewhere mention that Ozu's scripts are published in Japan as works of literature in their own right. In the bibliographical notes of The Donald Richie Reader, there is this: "His translations of Ozu's Tokyo Story (with Eric Klestadt) and Kurosawa's Ikiru appear in Contemporary Japanese Literature, edited by Howard Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1977)". Of course these are rather old sources.

I think there was a somewhat annotated stand-alone translation of Tokyo Story, not sure if it is still in print. Definitely nothing else, however. Anyone who wants to struggle through the Japanese scripts can always visit my house. ;~}

IFC Center in NYC is playing 35mm prints of a bunch of Ozu films this summer. I only caught Late Spring during the Film Forum run after Donald Ritchie's death, so this is a pleasant surprise.

Most of his movies really benefit a lot from being seen on a big screen. I was surprised a bit to discover this.

I'm ashamed to admit around here how often I find that isn't the case for me, and Late Spring was no exception, unfortunately /shame

Probably going to see Tokyo Twilight, Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, and Early Spring, the ones that aren't on blu-ray!

Don't miss Tenement Gentleman, which is still unavailable even on DVD.

I was going to decide against it, seeing as I'm very busy that weekend. But if that's the case, I'll have to go, thanks!

Seeing Late Spring on the screen (after several VHS and DVD viewings) finally made it one of my (many) favorites.

A Who's Who of the Tenement Block (proper translation of title) is sort of the last hurrah of (most of) Ozu's pre-war repertory company. I was immensely excited when this first came out on VHS -- but the initial price (New Yorker) was over $80. Fortunately, it was rentable.