SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This text seeks to assess Yasujiro Ozu´s filmmaking method in relation to that of Susumu Hani, which was theorised and put into practice through documentary films during the fifties. These filmmakers belonged to different generations and while Ozu, staring his career in the 1920s, has been recognised as the early master of Japanese classicism, Hani is considered a leading figure of the New Wave beginning in the sixties. Ozu and Hani have never been object of any scholarly comparative analysis to date as they have been linked to different periods of Japanese cinema. However, they were contemporaries between 1951 and 1962, a period which corresponds to the last stage of Ozu´s career and Hani´s early career as a documentary maker. Unlike film theorists and historians’ tendency to explore Ozu’s films launching gazes to the past, and assessing his style in relation to the Japanese aesthetic and cultural tradition, I propose to interrogate Ozu with his present time and thus, to establish a dialogue with the filmmaking method simultaneously developed by Hani. Studying the aesthetics of the time that Ozu and Hani shared as filmmakers deliberately aims to defy old historical and theoretical categorizations, into which Japanese cinema has usually been dissected, and to set unorthodox alliances between authors traditionally either isolated or assessed in terms of opposition.