LOLA
                                  

The Critical Event of Director Ozu Yasujiro   

 
Chris Fujiwara
Work, now? Never, never; I’m on strike.
     
– Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871

What is film criticism today? Its very existence has been put in question so insistently and
for so long that film criticism now seems like part of the mythology of a soon-to-be-
extinct tribe. When someone starts to discuss film criticism these days, it is predictable
that he or she will cite the often recycled reasons why it is in a crisis: the Internet with its
economy of ‘free’ information and its culture in which ‘user comments’ have displaced
 
professional cultural experts; the decline in readership and advertising revenues for print
newspapers and magazines, further limiting the space available for arts coverage; etc.
Sometimes also mentioned, though less often, is the emergence (in the English-speaking
 
world) of a powerful institutional rival to film criticism in the form of academic film studies
in the 1970s, a development that film scholar Geoffrey Nowell-Smith called a ‘disaster’  
that ‘nearly killed film criticism’. (1) Can anyone believe that Hasumi Shigehiko was wrong
  1. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘The Rise
to write, in 2006, that ‘At the beginning of this 21st century, the profession of film critic is and Fall of Film Criticism’, Film
quasi-fictional’? (2) Even when it seemed to be thriving, however (in the 1960s and ‘70s), Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Fall 2008), p.
11.  
and could compel at least the modicum of respect accorded to that which is acknowledged
to exist, even during that time, it could have been suspected that there was something
2. ‘Lettre de Tokyo’, Trafic, No. 58
fictional and evanescent about film criticism. Perhaps we should take its current non- (Summer 2006), p. 132. Unless
existence as settled, and instead ask the question: What was film criticism? otherwise noted, all translations from
  French in this essay are mine.    

In a 2004 conversation with Aoyama Shinji originally published in Japanese in

Intercommunication and partially published in French translation under the title ‘Dans un
monde où la critique tend à disparaître’ (‘In a World Where Criticism Is Disappearing’),
Hasumi said:

In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when new films, foreign as well as Japanese, were
released for the first time in Japan, I wondered how to make them known and 3. ‘Dans un monde où la critique tend à
disparaître’, translated from Japanese
  understood through criticism. I’m doing the same thing today, against the current   by Hirotoshi Ogashima, Vertigo, Vol. 2,
trend in which criticism is replaced by short promotional phrases that are called No. 34 (2008), p. 92.
‘commentaries’. (3)

This is a good, succinct statement of the purpose and the declined cultural place of    
criticism. It does not say anything, however, about the act of criticism. Although, in what
follows, I wish to concentrate on this act, let me acknowledge at once that, being mainly  
limited to those works of his that have been published in French or English, I am not in
the best position to say what Hasumi’s views on it are. Fortunately, the list of such  
publications can be considered short only by comparison with Hasumi’s output in his
native language. In English, he has contributed to the collectively written Movie  
Mutations, to the online journals Rouge and LOLA, to anthologies on Hou Hsiao-hsien,
Daniel Schmid, Victor Erice, Kato Tai and Naruse Mikio. The works available in French
 
include several substantial essays for Trafic and Cinéma, many texts on literature, and
Hasumi’s interviews with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Most importantly, the major
book-length monograph whose Japanese title is Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro (Director Ozu
 
Yasujiro) was published in French as Yasujiro Ozu. It is on this text that I will base my
study of Hasumi’s view of the act of criticism.  
 
4. Page references to the Ozu book will
In doing so, I am aware of the danger of placing an undue emphasis on a book that is be given in parentheses in the text. A
intended as the study of a single director, and not as a theoretical treatise on film number followed by ‘F’ refers to the
French edition, Yasujiro Ozu, translated
criticism. Nevertheless, the Ozu book is rich in statements of general validity on film and by Ryoji Nakamura, René de Ceccatty
film criticism. Hasumi writes of Ozu: ‘When one sees his films, one cannot remain and Shiguéhiko Hasumi (Paris: Éditions
de l’Étoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1998). A
comfortably in the middle of an event, because the filmic experience in the present has number followed by ‘J’ refers to the
neither beginning nor end’ (19F/7J). (4) This observation might be valid not just for Ozu’s Japanese edition, Kantoku Ozu
films but for cinema in general. Hasumi considers Ozu not merely as a great director but Yasujiro (definitive edition, Tokyo:
Chikuma Shobo, 2003).  
as one whose work ‘reveals the limits of the form of expression called cinema. It’s
because it confronts, as a productive “sign”, the impossibility of cinema, that Ozu is 5. Eiga yuuwaku no ekurichuru (Tokyo:
modern and innovative’ (31F/21J; italics in original). Ozu’s work is moving ‘because, at Chikuma Shobo, 1990), p. 353.  
moments, it ceases to be cinema’ (32F/21J).
6. ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means
  Without End: Notes on Politics
If Ozu’s films are privileged examples of cinema because they are at the limits of cinema, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press, 2000), pp. 49-59.  
threatening to cancel the very relation between the film and the viewer, perhaps film
criticism is a privileged form of the viewing experience because it is at the limit of that 7. Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul
experience, claiming its validity in acknowledging its own impossibility. Hasumi begins his Demeny, May 15, 1871.
short text called ‘Eiga to Hihyo’ (‘Film and Criticism’) with the phrase: ‘Criticism does not
exist, because criticism is an experience that can live only as an event.’ (5) This is a
provocative equation. It would be less surprising to read that criticism is a genre of
writing, or a form of thought, or even a mode of life. Hasumi seems to regard criticism
not primarily as an activity directed toward an end (such as the production of a critical
text) but as an activity that might be called, to use Giorgio Agamben’s formula, a ‘means
without end’. (6) As such, the adventure of criticism might be compared with that of the
poet, as described by Rimbaud in the Lettre du voyant: ‘He reaches the unknown, and
when, maddened, he ends up losing the intelligence of his visions, at least he has seen
them!’ (7) Let’s recall that the ‘unknown’ is not a category unknown to the writing of
Hasumi, who writes: ‘Liberation is precisely the duty of which all discourses on cinema
should acquit themselves’ (38F/29J). Perhaps it is not wildly inappropriate to see the film
critic’s task in Rimbaldian terms, as a Promethean mission that follows a path to
foredoomed failure.
 
 ***

To understand the power of Hasumi’s book on Ozu for a Western readership, it must be   8. Respectively, Transcendental Style
in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer
understood that the view of Ozu in the West has been shaped by three writers, Paul (Berkeley: University of California
Schrader, Donald Richie and David Bordwell. (8) (The impact of Noël Burch on the Press, 1972); Ozu: His Life and Films
(Berkeley: University of California
Western reception of Ozu has been less decisive, partly because of Burch’s commitment Press, 1974); and Ozu and the Poetics
to a reading of Ozu’s work that completely dismisses his postwar films.) (9) Schrader’s of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988).  
account of Ozu as one of the models of ‘transcendental style in film’, Richie’s reading of
Ozu’s films in terms of the grand narrative of the decline of the traditional Japanese 9. Revised and edited by Annette
family, and Bordwell’s detailed examination of the stylistic procedures that set Ozu’s work Michelson, To the Distant Observer:
Form and Meaning in the Japanese
apart from the norms of classical cinema, continue to influence the way Ozu is viewed and Cinema (Berkeley: University of
discussed. California Press, 1979).  
 
What does Hasumi’s Ozu book offer to challenge the dominant constructions of Ozu in the 10. If Bordwell is treated with greater
reticence, this can be explained by the
West? First, Hasumi puts the question, ‘What is it to watch an Ozu film?’, into the fact that his book Ozu and the Poetics
foreground of his concerns. In doing this, he criticises the approaches of Schrader and of Cinema was not published until
1988, five years after the first edition of
Richie. (10) Hasumi reproaches Richie for using a kind of ‘negative discourse’ that defines Hasumi’s Ozu book. (The chapters
Ozu in terms of absence and lack (e.g., the camera rarely or never moves). Turning this added for the expanded edition of
Hasumi’s book contain four references
discourse around, Hasumi asserts, ‘the view that is applied to his films is what suffers to Bordwell.) In the 1983 edition, and its
from an enormous lack’. In fact, Ozu’s ‘fecundity’ is ‘incontestable’ (25 F/13-14 J). Against French translation, Hasumi argues
against the approach taken by Bordwell
Schrader, Hasumi argues that it is mistaken to see Ozu’s films as the reflection of a and Kristin Thompson in their Summer
‘transcendent’ spirituality imbued with the values of Zen and Japaneseness. The highpoint 1976 Screen article ‘Space and
Narrative in the Films of Yasujirô Ozu’,
of this counter-argumentation takes place over the so-called shot of the vase in Late claiming that the interest of Ozu lies
Spring (1949), a locus classicus in the discussion of Ozu’s work. Hasumi calls the not, as they assert, in his deviations
attraction of this shot for Western commentators ‘disproportionate’, and observes from the cinematic norms of his period,
but rather in that Ozu’s work, at
(following Yamamoto Kikuo) that whereas Japanese viewers are more apt to notice other moments, ‘ceases to be cinema’ (32
areas of the shot of the vase, Westerners such as Schrader and Richie tend to ignore F/21 J).  

everything but the vase (219-220F/244J).

   
This discussion of the contradictory interpretations of the ‘image of the vase’ in Late
Spring implicates (without naming the discipline) cultural studies. Hasumi insists on the  
poverty of interpretations based on cultural prejudices: ‘when the meaning of an image is
not deployed fully, the interpretation belongs to the cultural domain’ (221F/246J). He  
further remarks that: ‘To the extent that seeing is a cultural gesture, the look is not free’
(217 F/241J). These remarks have a broad significance, since a concern for the cultural  
dimension of seeing distinguishes the approaches of academic film studies, as directed
and dominated by cultural studies, from film criticism. For Hasumi, the cultural dimension 11. Hasumi's Ozu book makes use of a
conceptual terminology that is highly
is a distraction and a lure that can cause viewers to fail to see a film. When Hasumi unusual within the Western context.
considers the sign the mother puts on her child’s back in I Was Born, But … (1932) – The ‘thematic system’, for Hasumi, is
that which operates a displacement of
‘Don’t feed him, he has a stomach ache’ – as ‘a real document of the history of the city of the interest of Ozu’s films from the
Tokyo’ (45F/35J), he performs a characteristic inversion. Ozu’s films are documents of narrative to a different level
characterised by a rich fusion of
their times not because of the grand symbolic themes so often used to explain his films elements, the perception of which is ‘a
(e.g., the postwar collapse of the multi-generation family), but because of a visual detail concrete event’ in which ‘narrative
duration is articulated in a living
that belongs to the Ozuian thematic system of eating/not eating. (11) Similarly, the social rhythm’. At that point, Ozu’s work
problem presented by I Was Born, But …, that of the lowly office worker, is made manifest ‘accords with the cinematographic
sensibility of our look, as a movement
because of the children’s decision to go on a hunger strike, which expresses the situation internal to the film. This is what
in terms of the same thematic system (45-46F/35-36J). happens when we are moved by a film’
(38F/28-29J). The thematic system is of
  tremendous importance: it is what
In Early Summer (1951), after Hara Setsuko unexpectedly agrees to marry Sugimura makes the cinema a cinema of auteurs.
‘Let’s say that the place where all
Haruko’s son (Nihonyanagi Kan), Sugimura impulsively proposes to celebrate by sharing authors – and not just Ozu – give free
anpan (a bun filled with red bean paste, generally thought of as a homely, popular rein to their imagination is precisely the
thematic system’ (119F/102J).
snack). Hasumi writes: ‘we feel a deep emotion on hearing this unexpected word: anpan’
(42F/32J). Can a viewer who does not understand Japanese share in this emotion, and
thus properly appreciate Hasumi’s account of Early Summer? Though it is certainly  
possible for viewers from whatever culture, whether they understand Japanese or not, to
feel emotion at this scene, probably it would not occur to a non-Japanese to ascribe this
emotion to Sugimura Haruko’s utterance of the word ‘anpan’. The English subtitles can do
no more than convey what the food is, while leaving its cultural connotations unexplored.
The surprise a native Japanese speaker might feel at hearing anpan named at such a
moment is almost totally inaccessible to most foreigners. Consequently, Hara Setsuko’s
laugh as she declines the offer of anpan must remain completely ambiguous. On the
other hand, for both Japanese and non-Japanese viewers, this ambiguity is not limited to
her laugh, but extends over the entire matter of her decision to marry Sugimura’s son,
for, as Hasumi writes, ‘the psychological necessity of the situation is hardly justified over
the course of the narrative’ (43F/33J). Hasumi’s location of the word ‘anpan’ at the centre
of the narrative is justified by his identification of eating (and not eating) as belonging to
the thematic system of Ozu’s work.

Another element whose appreciation would seem to require a knowledge of Japanese   12. ‘Fiction and the “Unrepresentable”:
All Movies are but Variants on the
culture is the paper carp in Early Summer, of which Hasumi writes (in the same terms he Silent Film’, LOLA, issue 1 (2011),
used concerning the word anpan in the same film): ‘the viewer feels a profound emotion’
(141F/126J). Is this emotion as deep if one does not know that the carp is a symbol of  
boys in Japanese culture? In any case, Hasumi explains the power of the shot in a way
that dispenses with its cultural meaning. The shot of the paper carp can be seen simply  
as an indication of the passage of time (rather than as the image of the object the
grandparents are looking at together). The emotional power of the scene comes not from  
any symbolism, but from the unidirectionality of the two people’s looks, which always, in
Ozu, introduces ‘departure and death’ (141F/127J). In other words, the cultural
significance of the carp is secondary and insufficient to arouse the emotion of the
 
spectator: only what belongs to the thematic system of the film can move us.
   
The critical act in Hasumi’s book is directed toward what is moving in Ozu as a sign of the
limits of cinema. To proceed in this direction, Hasumi starts from a willfully simple level of  
inquiry into the minimal structural constituents of the experience of watching a film.
There are two: looking and time. Seeing cinema reduced to these terms, it is quite  
possible to say, as Hasumi has, that ‘all movies are but variants on the silent film’. (12) In
this recall to first principles, Hasumi reminds us of the closeness of cinema to life.
 
In the scene near the end of Early Summer in which the grandfather (Sugai Ichiro), going
out to buy birdseed, stops to sit on a bench and wait for a train to pass, then continues
sitting after the train has passed, Ozu lays emphasis on these two minimal components,
in order to bring his cinema into the closest possible connection to life. (Hasumi briefly
mentions this scene in the Ozu book, 186F/156J.) Even before we reach the train crossing
where the grandfather’s progress comes to a stop, the scene is marked by a sense of
places watching humans: first in the shot of Sugai walking between the house and a tall
fence; next in the shot, immediately following, in which he walks past a group of
monuments. The act of looking, strongly echoed by the camera angles, is not attributed
to any human subject within the film, until the moment when the grandfather reaches the
train crossing and, seeing the gate lowering itself before him, slows his pace and looks
first to his right, then to his left. Since no shot corresponds to his vision at this point, we
realise that whether the train is approaching from the left or the right is a matter of
indifference. After the grandfather sits down on the bench, there is a cut to the first of
three close shots of him: looking forward, he sighs audibly, but his facial expression
suggests that he is looking at nothing in particular. In the second such close shot,
separated from the first by a long shot of the train hurtling by, his head is now turned
slightly upward, away from the direction of the train (which completes its passage across
the background). This shot is followed by another appearance of the long shot, in which
the gate rises. Then the third close shot of the grandfather appears: this time, his gaze is
again parallel to the ground; he blinks and swallows; it is impossible to tell what he is
looking at or whether he is looking at anything. This shot is followed by a shot of the sky,
which is bright, but partly covered with a crisp and delicate cloud formation. The entire
scene gives us a precise image of time in cinema in its connection with the look, in a
situation more or less detached from the narrative movement of the film. Two elements
produce time: the passage of the train and the intentionality of the grandfather. Apart
from that intentionality, he is viewed in a context of timelessness, as an object whose
passage is indifferent, just as the passage of the train is indifferent to him. His
intentionality itself flickers into life not in relation to the movement of the train, but in
relation to an object that the film leaves unspecified, allowing us to identify it after the
fact (after he has apparently ceased to be preoccupied with it) as the sky. The lack of
contact between the time of the grandfather’s look and the time of the train passing
threatens to suspend the narrative of Early Summer; we sense that we have reached, or
are perilously close to reaching, the limits of cinema.

Watching all these scenes in Early Summer, one can only agree with Hasumi that, in    
Ozu’s cinema, ‘everything is on the surface: nothing is hidden’ (104F/90J). Hasumi’s book
seeks to remain true to this realism of the cinematic sign. The title of Hasumi’s book in
Japanese is Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro. These words are reproduced in the frontispiece to the
Japanese edition, which is a reproduction of the card bearing Ozu’s credit in the titles of
Tokyo Story (1953). If this illustration is absent in the French edition, which otherwise
follows the Japanese edition in its use of illustrations, no doubt this is not only because
the French reader is presumed not to be able to read kanji, but also because, even if it
could be read, this title card no longer corresponds to the title of the book, which has
become simply Yasujirô Ozu. Whereas the French title merely identifies the book as a
monograph on a filmmaker, the Japanese title emphasises that the text will be concerned
with what is to be experienced through apprehending the letter of Ozu’s films, the reality
of what is visible in them. The emphasis on the word ‘director’ indicates that the book will
be about Ozu as an exemplary principle of the organisation of the material of cinematic
experience.
 
This title, or rather the frontispiece, already alerts us to one of the key themes of
Hasumi’s book, which can be stated in a single sentence: ‘Literally, there is nothing but
the image, and this image conceals nothing: everything is on the surface of the screen’
(215F/239J). There is nothing for the look to do but to slide over the image in search of
the other, virtual, images that it conceals, or ‘remain in suspense’ (216F/240J) alongside
the actualised image. Ozu does not flatter the illusion, commonly purveyed in narrative
cinema, that it is possible for the spectator’s look to go beyond the image.

Made uncomfortable by Ozu’s denial of this illusion, viewers lose themselves, Hasumi   13. Tom Milne (ed. & trans.), Godard on
Godard (London: Secker & Warbrug,
claims, in seeing Ozu’s films in terms of other illusions such as mono no aware (sensitivity 1972), p. 65.  
to things), yȗgen (mysterious depth), haiku, or ‘what is typically Japanese’ (216F/240J).
Instead of pursuing these fantasies, Hasumi advises viewers to use their eyes: literally, to  
‘think about what they see’ (217F/241J), instead of subjecting their vision to a prejudicial
thought. The vase in Late Spring is a perfect example: we may think we are seeing a shot  
of a vase, because we are predisposed to understand the meaning of the vase according
to certain preconceptions; but, in so doing, we blind ourselves to the background of the  
shot and to an entire network of elements, within which the vase is merely a part. We
could say that Hasumi asks us to watch a film as Jean-Luc Godard watched Nicholas Ray’s
 
Bitter Victory: ‘One is no longer interested in objects, but in what lies between the objects
and which becomes an object in its turn. Nicholas Ray forces us to consider as real
something that one did not even consider as unreal, something one did not consider at
 
all.’ (13)
   
What is it possible to see in the image, and what is it not possible to see? Hasumi writes
that the look is unrepresentable in cinema (151F/132J). This proposition at first seems  
difficult to agree with. One does not have to search one’s memory long to find examples
14. Cf. Agamben, ‘The Face’, in Means
of the cinema’s seeming to show nothing so movingly and powerfully as looks: James Without End, pp. 91-99.  
Stewart’s look at Kim Novak emerging from the bathroom in Vertigo (1958); Dorothy
Comingore looking up from her jigsaw puzzle floor at Orson Welles in Citizen Kane  
(1941); John Wayne looking down at Dean Martin at the beginning of Rio Bravo (1959);
in the same film, Angie Dickinson looking at Wayne as he holds a pair of red women’s
 
bloomers against his body; Tanaka Kinuyo looking at the face of a statue in a temple in
The Life of Oharu (1952) ... When Hasumi writes, however, that ‘seeing is not a visual
object’ (151F/132J), it is to force us to take a second look and see what is actually visible
 
in the image. In the cinema, we can see, strictly speaking, that a person is looking: the
eyes are open and oriented in a certain direction. What remains necessarily invisible is  
the look as an act of perception, uniting noesis and noema. This cannot be seen or
photographed, any more than can be seen or photographed the internal awareness of the
passage of time. In the face that we see in a film, or even in real life, looking at us, there
is an absence where the act of seeing should be, an absence that the face both reveals
and hides. (14)
 
It is in the context of this dislocation, one of the privileged terrains of cinema, that
Hasumi considers the structure of shot and reverse shot, a structure with an affinity for
situations of love and of action (154F/136J). Hasumi guards himself from calling this
structure the essence of cinema, preferring to say that this structure reveals the limits of
cinema. Watching the ‘duel of looks’ between Nakamura Ganjiro and Kyo Machiko in
Floating Weeds (1959), Hasumi writes, ‘we become aware that the cinema is impotent in
the face of this simultaneous phenomenon of the exchange of looks’ (197F/169J). The
failure of the cinema to capture the look itself is particularly acutely revealed at this
moment.
 
Why does Hasumi isolate this exchange of shots in Floating Weeds as singular? The
frequency with which Ozu’s cinema resorts to the shot/reverse shot structure is, after all,
extremely well known, as is the sense of discrepancy created by Ozu’s refusal to obey the
so-called 180-degree rule. If the sequence in Floating Weeds is remarkable, it is because
it is raining, and weather is identified as a major theme of Hasumi’s Ozu book, in which a
whole chapter is devoted to ‘Nice Weather’ (or, as a translated excerpt in English puts it,
‘Sunny Skies’). ‘When, without apparent reason, the weather changes drastically, Ozu’s
work places itself perfectly at the limit beyond which the cinema ceases to be cinema. It
is not merely the paroxysm of the film we are witnessing, but the paroxysm of cinema
itself’ (198F/169J). It is through its participation in Ozu’s ‘thematic system’ that the scene
reaches this paroxysm. It is also here that Ozu’s thematic system departs from the
framework of the personal universe of an author to reach the limits of cinema.

In Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945), there is a moment when Tom Neal, driving a car at    
night while its owner (Edmund MacDonald) sleeps in the passenger seat, fantasises about
his girlfriend singing. Before the fantasy, which is triggered by a track-in toward the  
rearview mirror of the car, we are, as usual in this film, unaware of any particular weather
conditions. After the fantasy ends and the camera tracks back from the mirror, it suddenly  
starts to rain. The sudden rain proves to be an ill omen for Neal, who, on stopping the car
to put up the convertible top, finds that his companion has died. The advent of rain
 
coincides with the appearance of a brightly lit, white fence hurtling past in the background
of the shot. This fence is the metaphorical revelation within the film of the apparatus of
cinema. The evenly spaced, white posts of this fence resemble frame divisions, rushing by
 
in the uncontrollable movement that gives to a succession of still images the appearance
of animation. Moreover, the image of the fence is perceptibly back-projected. Our  
recognition of the back projection as such threatens to expose the visual world of the film
as entirely fabricated, no more real than Neal’s fantasy of his girlfriend: a threat that is  
converted into narrative terms by the danger to Neal that the death of Edmund
15. As Hasumi observes, the scene
MacDonald represents. The fence thus doubly inscribes cinema within the film Detour, was sketched earlier in Story of
marking out what, following Hasumi, we can recognise as the limit of cinema – for which Floating Weeds (1934) and will be
repeated for the last time in the remake
continuous motion is the condition of existence or, at any rate, the condition of belief in Floating Weeds (158F/140J).
the reality of the narrative. As with the shot/reverse shot confrontation in Floating Weeds,
the unexpected rain causes the break in our relationship to the image that suddenly
enables us to perceive this limit.
 
A similar apprehension of cinema beyond cinema, of the danger of cinema ceasing to be
cinema, overwhelms the viewer of the famous scene of the father and son fishing with
identical movements in There Was a Father (1942). (15) Hasumi’s analysis of this scene
is extraordinary. The look, identifying with the rhythm of the movements of the scene,
ceases to be a look, and ‘we have the impression that the father and son, while fishing,
feel the flow of time’ (158F/140J). For Hasumi, the on-screen characters identify with the
movement of the river and with the flow of time. It is implied that the viewer joins them
in this identification, which is an identification with the cinema itself. We feel, according to
Hasumi, that this movement must stop if the film is to remain a film. Our identification
with cinema risks taking us out of cinema. A ‘suffocating tension’ (158F/140J) is
introduced that is relieved only when the regularity of the characters’ movements is
interrupted. Indeed, there is a certain pitilessness in the regularity of the movements, an
impression perhaps amplified by the dazzling light reflected from the surface of the river.

This moment, as analysed by Hasumi, can be compared with another famous scene, the   16. V.F. Perkins, ‘River of No Return’,
Movie, issue 2 (September 1962), pp.
long take in Otto Preminger’s River of No Return (1954) in which the river carries away 18–19. Charles Barr cited and
Marilyn Monroe’s suitcase. The scene is filmed from the river bank where, throwing them extended Perkins’ discussion of the
shot in his influential 1963 essay
a rope, Robert Mitchum saves Monroe and Rory Calhoun from being carried away on their ‘CinemaScope: Before and After’, Film
barge by a swiftly moving current. Disembarking, Monroe loses hold of her suitcase, Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Summer
1963), pp. 4-24.
which is borne away out of frame by the river. Later in the same shot, as the camera
tracks to follow the characters walking, the suitcase becomes visible again in the far  
background. The scene owes its fame to the late British critic V. F. Perkins, who analysed
it as a seminal example of CinemaScope mise en scène. (16) In this scene, it is
impossible for the viewer to identify with the movement of the river, which is simply a fact
of the scene. It carries with it, not Monroe herself, but her belongings, which, in that
movement, cease to be important in themselves and appear merely as something that
has been discarded, though it is only because ‘discarding’ belongs to the thematic system
of Preminger that it is possible to feel that his highlighting of the suitcase is important.
We may, or may not, ‘read’ the lost suitcase (still visible in the far background as Mitchum
and Calhoun walk back from the riverbank) as symbolic. What is important is that the
flow of the film has ceased to be wedded to the flow of the river: the movement of the
characters, and the camera, away from the river creates a new movement that is freed
from that pitiless, objective flow. The suitcase being carried away undergoes the fate of
the object as such, caught up within the objective world and unable to liberate itself from
it. This is the fate that threatens the father and son in There Was a Father. Thus, we can
say that Monroe’s suitcase is sacrificed in place of the spectator, in order that the
spectator may maintain a position apart from the objectivity of the natural flow. Whereas
in There Was a Father, according to Hasumi, only the certainty that ‘such an image
cannot be prolonged’ saves us from the oppressiveness of the scene (158F/140J).

In order to feel this salvation, of course, we must first feel the oppressiveness. Film    
criticism reminds us that such feelings exist and argues for their placement at the center
of the experience of cinema. To talk about these feelings, it is necessary to make a leap  
that is not normally admissible today in the academic study of film. Under the power of
cultural studies, academic film studies has turned away from cinema and toward the  
cinema audience as the empirical embodiment of the cultural dimension of seeing.
Throughout the Ozu book, Hasumi does not consider the audience at all except in terms
 
of a general misunderstanding of Ozu’s work. Hasumi is, of course, a famous academic,
but when he is a film critic he is not an academic. It would be impossible in the context of
English-language film studies for the Ozu book to be accepted as an academic work. This
 
is true not only because of Hasumi’s complete lack of interest in the question of the
audience, but because the priority his criticism gives to emotions is at odds with the ways  
in which film studies habitually situates emotion. By chance, there is before me an
academic text on Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). Seeking to define the  
intensity of certain moments in this film, the writer insists repeatedly that this intensity is
17. Anne Rutherford, What Makes a
something different from, perhaps even unrelated to, emotion. A leaf to which Malick Film Tick?: Cinematic Affect, Materiality
devotes a close-up ‘is not given an emotional coding, it is given a material presence.’ (17) and Mimetic Innervation (Bern: Peter
The climax of the film possesses an ‘intensity [that] is not about emotion’ but rather the Land, 2011), p. 31.  

‘orchestration of [the] material pulse’ of the image, of which the writer says that ‘to 18. Ibid., p. 29.  
understand this as emotion is a misnomer’. (18) Whether or not this analysis is
persuasive, it is certainly a world apart from Hasumi’s Ozu’s book (even though, for 19. Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis
Hasumi, Ozu’s late films offer the ultimate in material realism: ‘an experience of here and Comolli, Jean Narboni & Sylvie Pierre,
‘Time Overflowing’, Order of the Exile,
now which has nothing to do with the beyond’ [104F/90J, italics in original]). The great originally in Cahiers du cinéma, issue
climaxes of the book are moments when Hasumi refers to an experience that is 204 (September 1968), p. 20.  
powerfully emotional, perhaps even cruel, terrifying, and mortifying, that threatens to
20. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans.
annihilate the experience of the film and to negate cinema – the experience Jacques H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta (London: The
Rivette described when he claimed that the purpose of cinema is ‘to take people out of Athlone Press, 1989), p. 18.  
their cocoons and to plunge them into horror’, (19) and which Gilles Deleuze also noted in
21. Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet,
citing the power of cinema to suspend viewers in ‘a purely optical and sound situation’ trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam,
analogous to the paralysis experienced by the heroes and heroines of postwar cinema: ‘it Dialogues II – Revised Edition (New
York: Columbia University Press,
makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable.’ 2007), p. 52.  
(20) As a ‘living environment’ in a state of ‘continuous presence’, the Ozu film, for
Hasumi, deprives the viewer of the ability to take up an optional ‘distance’ in relation to 22. Cf. Émile Benveniste, ‘The
Structure of Relations of Person in the
it, ‘threatens existence and carries the viewer away in the whirlpool of its play’ Verb’ (1946), in Problems in General
(106F/92J). Nor is the reinstallation of this distance envisioned as the task, or the Linguistics (University of Miami Press,
privilege, of the critic. Hasumi is not explicit on this point, but nothing in the Ozu book 1973).  
leads us to assume that he regards writing on cinema as an activity that can overcome
(23) The French translation, which
the ‘whirlpool’ of the film and install the viewing subject in a position of mastery. (I Hasumi helped prepare, seems to use
imagine that, instead, Hasumi would agree with Deleuze that the writer is one who avoids ‘we’ or ‘us’ (‘nous’) more freely than the
Japanese text uses ‘wareware’. For
the ‘two traps’ of distance and identification.) (21) example, on p. 164, of the scene of the
  family photograph being taken in Early
Summer, we read: ‘Cette scène nous
In the Ozu book, Hasumi is completely uninterested in characterising, predicting or touche’ (‘this scene touches us’). But in
Japanese, it is merely: ‘kono koukei ha
controlling the responses of actual audiences. Who, then, is this emotionally sensitive kandouteki de aru’ (‘this scene is
spectator who is ‘discountenanced’ (89F/73J) by the wedding banquet in Equinox Flower, moving’) (147J). No doubt it is true that
there is a difference in the way the two
and who must hold his/her breath before the sight of the staircase down which Tanaka languages convey the experience of
Kinuyo will fall in A Hen in the Wind (106F/92J)? In other words, who is the ‘subject’ of emotion and, perhaps, in French the
experience is more likely to be
the book? In the French text, the word ‘on’ is frequently used. In the Japanese text, one attributed to a personal subject. On the
finds ‘hito’ (a person) used; for example: ‘what a person [hito] learns from a film is not other hand, it is perfectly possible to
say, in French, ‘Cette scène est
what is depicted on the screen’ (17F/6J). Here, hito is clearly an impersonal subject, a touchante’.  
‘non-person’. (22) Another term we find throughout Hasumi’s text is wareware (we), e.g.,
‘This is what happens when we are moved by the cinema’ (29J/38F). (23) Which
individuals might Hasumi be referring to when he writes wareware?
 
Hasumi says explicitly at the beginning of the Ozu book that it was written for Japanese
people. Could, possibly, wareware refer to the Japanese people, and are foreigners merely
to be witnesses at a conference to which it seems we were not invited? This is unlikely. In
his preface to the French edition, Hasumi calls Ozu ‘the least Japanese filmmaker’ and
explains for the benefit of his French readers that the original intention of the book was to
correct the popular misunderstanding of Ozu, based on the overfamiliarity of his films in
Japan – a situation Hasumi compares with that of Renoir in France (10F). If wareware
designates a group subject, it’s one that does not share the group misunderstanding of
Ozu.

I would insist on the impersonality of Hasumi’s viewing subject – an impersonality that   (24) 5001 Nights at the Movies: A
Guide from A to Z (New York: Holt,
may be seen as paradoxical, since intense emotion is attributed to it. I would contrast this Rinehart and Winston, 1982), pp. 613,
impersonal emotion-bearing subject to the ‘you’ of the American film critic Pauline Kael. 390, 496.  
She used the word ‘you’ constantly, often followed by the word ‘feel’, to describe how
(25) Adler, ‘The Perils of Pauline’, New
viewers in general supposedly respond to, or merely observe something happening in, a York Review of Books (August 14,
film. ‘Kinesthetically, the film gets to you’ (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981). ‘You feel 1980).
emotionally filled by the first and second stories’ of the Taviani brothers’ Kaos (1984).
Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck (1987) ‘can make you feel close to deliriously happy’. (24)  
In these sentences, and in the innumerable other instances when Kael described what
‘you’ feel while watching a film, it is clearly Kael herself, or a member of her in-group,  
who is meant. (As Renata Adler commented in her scathing attack on Kael’s work, ‘“You”
is most often Ms. Kael’s “I”, or a member or prospective member of her “we”.’) (25)  
Thanks to the influence that Kael exerted on the language of film criticism, not only
through her own popularity but also through the circumstance that a number of her loyal  
disciples and stylistic imitators (the ‘Paulettes’, as they were called by some who were
less susceptible to her influence) rose to positions of prominence in American journalism,
‘you’ has become ubiquitous in American film writing. It was, for example, standard
usage at the Boston Phoenix, where I worked as a film reviewer for several years. I hated
this ‘you’, hearing it as coercive and ideological, and, for a while, I tried substituting ‘we’,
which I felt was less prescriptive. Whenever I wrote ‘we’, however, the editors changed it
to ‘you’. (Arguing against this change to one editor, I was told that ‘we’ was no less
presumptuous than ‘you’ – a point I conceded.) What form should I adopt, then, to
express something definite about the emotional or intellectual response elicited by a film I
was reviewing? As the Phoenix was a general newspaper and not a scholarly journal,
writing ‘the viewer’ or ‘the spectator’ was rarely an option. The usage ‘one’ might have
been possible, but in written English it tends to seem old-fashioned and formal; and
adopting the first person singular would usually have been awkward (‘while watching the
film, I had the feeling that ...’). So I adopted a strategy of going around the whole
problem by avoiding pronouns altogether and instead using formulations such as ‘it’s hard
to imagine not being moved’ or ‘by this point in the film, it is clear that ...’ or ‘most
viewers would probably feel ...’.

The above may seem a digression, but I want to consider why someone writing about a
film – Hasumi, Kael, myself, or any other critic – would find it necessary to impute any
emotional reaction or cognitive process whatever to a viewer of a film who is not the
writer him/herself, and why this should cause linguistic controversy. I suspect that the
sense of this necessity reveals something that has to do with the nature of the film
experience: that what I am feeling is, or should be, shared by others, inasmuch as we are  
sharing an experience that has the same time and the same objective content. (26) The
controversy arises out of the difficulty of establishing, in this situation, who or what the (26) Even if it should happen to
become actualised at historically
‘subject’ is. Could criticism be defined as writing about an experience without definitely different times and places. Whether
determining a subject of that experience? In criticism, the film experience is abstracted Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) is
viewed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in
and depersonalised. It is not that the critic feels it necessary to call on others to share his 1963 or in Asunción, Paraguay, in
own experience of a film, but that this experience is, from the beginning, not the 2013, Susan Kohner always reaches
her mother’s funeral procession at the
experience of any viewer in particular, but an experience of cinema, an experience whose same moment in the film.  
subject, if it has one, is cinema itself.
   
One hears in Hasumi’s writing on Ozu that we have the obligation to be moved.
Wareware, or hito, is constituted by this obligation and has no other substantiality; i.e., it  
 
does not designate a community united by a common identity, to the exclusion of persons
who do not share this identity. In this sense, being moved can be something impersonal,
just as the sensibility that Ozu’s cinema touches is purely virtual. The emotion that the
 
spectator of an Ozu film experiences is an impersonal emotion, not tied to any single
person embodied at a certain time and in a certain place. There is a phrase that recurs  
throughout the Ozu book: ‘cinematographic sensibility’ (eigatekina kansei). Perhaps it is
in this phrase that the true referent of Hasumi’s wareware is to be located. What can we  
make of this concept, which in the Ozu book so violently displaces the ignored concept of
the audience? Let us consider once again the phrase at the beginning of the essay ‘Film  
and Criticism’: ‘Criticism doesn’t exist, because criticism is an experience that can live
only as an event’. The audience is constituted as a group of spectators who share an  
encounter with a film at the same time. This encounter is, for that audience, the event of
the film; the encounter is, for the film, the event of the audience. What would constitute
this event as an event can only be the exercise of the cinematographic sensibility. If the
cinematographic sensibility is not moved, then the projection of the film and the
attendance of the audience are in vain.
Hasumi identifies the shot of the staircase near the end of An Autumn Afternoon (1962)    
as a privileged moment in Ozu’s work. With the appearance of this staircase, it’s no
longer just the solitude of the father, but the absolute solitude of the ‘work’ of Ozu’s last 27. Why is the word sakuhin (‘work’, in
‘the work of Ozu’) suspended in
period that resonates in us (107F/93J). (27) ‘One no longer knows how to speak of
brackets throughout the text? Perhaps
cinema’ after having seen such an image (109F/95J). Clearly, Hasumi is not here it is to remind us that the film as a
recommending a certain way of responding to the films of Ozu, nor is he merely ‘work’ does not enter directly into our
describing his own response for autobiographical purposes. We might say that he is filmic experience; in this sense, the
bracketing of the word ‘work’ would be
prescribing his own subjective response as objectively valid for the film, claiming the related to the principle of avoiding
same universality and necessity for his experience of the film that Kant claims for discussing Ozu’s ‘style’ (cf. 56F/47J).
Also, the word ‘work’ confers on the film
judgments of beauty. There is more to it than this, however. Criticism is ahistorical. It is a fixed and constant status, denying its
not that the critic makes the claim that his or her judgment is valid for all viewers at all mobility. Perhaps Hasumi, in
questioning the application of the word
times. For Hasumi, it is only at the point where the Ozu film confronts the limits of ‘work’ to the films of Ozu, has in mind
cinema, and where cinema is disrupted and threatened, that any universality and the alternative of claiming for them the
status of a Barthesian ‘text’, which is
necessity can be claimed for the experience of cinema. At this point, where ‘one no longer ever in motion – ‘the Text cannot stop
knows how to speak of cinema’ (109F/95J), the critic’s function arises. This function, (for example, on a library shelf)’ – and
then, as the Ozu book leads us to define it, is paradoxical enough: to apprehend and live which ‘always involves a certain
experience of limits’ (Roland Barthes,
through the experience of the end of criticism by becoming incapable of speaking of ‘From Work to Text’, in Stephen Heath
cinema. [ed. & trans.], Image-Music-Text
[London: Fontana/Collins, 1977], p.
  157). It has to be recognised, however,
that Hasumi’s avoidance of making
*** such a claim in so many words has a
  certain force, and that it belongs to
what seems to be a definite strategy,
Hasumi’s account of the experience of an Ozu film clearly makes problematic any account pursued consistently throughout the
of ‘cinephilia’ that would theorise it as a fetishisation of the film image that entails certain book, of refusing to subject Ozu’s films
to any theoretical framework. Hasumi
preferred or necessary modes of encountering it (notably, theatrical projection) for the never cites Barthes or Deleuze, for
ulterior purpose of affirming and validating the cinephile’s personal, neurotic structure. example, in the Ozu book, with the
(28) Hasumi’s interest in the encounter with cinema is entirely different from such a self- single exception of one mention of
Barthes in the Epilogue, using his term
bolstering activity. For Hasumi, the spectator encountering Ozu’s cinema finds the highest ‘mythology’ to designate the ‘stiffening
degree of emotion at the moments when the cinema almost ceases to be cinema. Rather of thought and sensibility’ that can
cause viewers to become unable to see
than strengthening the personal, neurotic structure of the viewer, the function of Ozu’s Ozu’s films (217F/241J). Nevertheless,
cinema, at its highest moments, is to threaten the viewer’s very relationship with cinema. when Hasumi calls Ozu’s cinema ‘a
magnetic field fertile in meanings’
  (56F/47J), I am reminded of Barthes’
This might be seen as a kind of game. After all, the cinema does not fully cease to be definition of the text as ‘an irreducible
(and not merely an acceptable) plural’
cinema; something holds Ozu’s cinema back from a complete negation of cinema. It and his description of the experience of
might perhaps be argued that Hasumi is describing the fetishistic pleasure of going as the reader of the text in terms of his
own experience of an idle walk along a
close as possible to the edge and then pulling back, that what is valued in this experience valley: ‘what he perceives is multiple,
for its reaffirmation of the personal structure is merely the avoidance of annihilation at irreducible, coming from a
the most extreme moment survivable. It should be clear, however, that this is not what disconnected, heterogeneous variety of
substances and perspectives [...] All
motivates Hasumi. In his 2004 conversation with Aoyama, Hasumi says that the cinematic these incidents are half-identifiable:
culture of Tokyo in the 1970s made it possible to experience ‘the surprise and terror of they come from codes which are known
but their combination is unique, founds
seeing a film on its release’. (29) Hasumi’s cinephilic nostalgia is inseparable from this the stroll in a difference repeatable only
terror, which is the condition, Hasumi says, for forming a rich ‘cinematographic memory’: as difference. So the Text.’ (‘From Work
to Text’, p. 159). By putting ‘sakuhin’ in
brackets, Hasumi shows that he does
One thing is certain: it’s very important that Tokyo became, during the mid- not utterly reject the term as applied to
Ozu’s films. As a plurality and a
1970s, an exceptional place, where, in comparison with other great cities of multiplicity, Ozu’s cinema also retains,
 the world, it was possible to see a great diversity of films. That enabled us to however, the force of something that is
not a work, something that Barthes
experience the surprise and terror of seeing a film on its release, which has called a text, which is encountered only
nothing to do with the situation today, when people falsely believe they can in the dimension of time, and which for
Hasumi is the proper object of criticism.
see everything on DVD. The terror and surprise of having seen a film by  
Aldrich, Fleischer or Don Siegel on the big screen at the moment of its release
are essential. Certainly, in Paris or in New York, it was possible to see more 28. See Christian Keathley, Cinephilia
and History, or The Wind in the Trees
films than in Tokyo. But in those places, films were consumed much more (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
easily and were forgotten quickly. Whereas in Tokyo, the relative marginality 2006); Dale Hudson & Patricia R.
Zimmermann, ‘Cinephilia, Technophilia,
of the city enabled us to hold on to what had been seen and experienced in and Collaborative Remix Zones’,
the cinema. Thus, we formed for ourselves a cinematographic memory much Screen, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2009), pp. 135-
richer and more durable than that of a Parisian or a New Yorker. (30) 146.    

29. ‘Dans un monde où la critique tend

The reference to the illusory accessibility of films on DVD should be noted. Observing in à disparaître’, p. 91.  
the preface to the French edition that, as of 1998, fifteen years after the original
publication of the book, all Ozu’s extant films have become available on video, Hasumi 30. Ibid.

asserts that, nonetheless, ‘even if I had used a videotape player, my essay would have
been identical to what it is today’ (11F). This assertion claims a primacy and permanence  
for what was, for the author, the original mode of encountering Ozu’s cinema – a claim
that is grounded in time. Hasumi writes that he was born in 1936, the year (he points  
out) of The Only Son, and thus belonged to the generation that first discovered Ozu with
Late Spring. He recounts the experience of learning of Ozu’s death in ‘a foreign city’ in  
December 1963, by reading a newspaper obituary while sitting on the frozen bank of ‘a
pond full of ducks and swans’ (20F/9J). This Mallarméan reminiscence forms an  
irrevocable bond between Hasumi’s time and Ozu’s time. The event of Ozu’s death is an
incorporeal wound, necessitating the writing of a book that would appear twenty years  
later.
   
In this sense it is understandable why Hasumi asserts that the possibility of studying the
films on video would not have made the book any different. Hasumi points out in the
preface to the French edition that the Ozu book is probably one of the last monographs on
 
film directors not to benefit from use of video (11F). This remark is of extreme
significance. Ultimately it has come about that a film is an object that is consultable under
conditions similar to those under which the scholar consults a literary work, and with as
much liberty regarding the point at which the ‘reading’ is to commence and the point at
which it finishes, the repeated review of passages, the rate of reading, etc. Video has,
moreover, transformed film into an object that can be owned and domesticated.
 
In view of the fate that has befallen cinema, it becomes possible to imagine that the
encounter with the film as such (rather than the video representation of it) was never
anything but fictive. The film that is encountered always passes us by, like the white
fence back-projected behind Tom Neal sitting in a car in Detour and, if ever it stops to let
us examine it at leisure, that can mean only that the film has ceased to exist in time and
now exists only in space. During a theatrical projection, such a moment does not occur,
and all spectators are caught up together in the continuous flow of the film. That, at any
 rate, is what the myth says, for today, after the advent of video, and especially after the
installation of digital video (with its liberation from the linearity of tape) as a primary
mode of encountering cinema, the conditions of theatrical projection have assumed an
all-but-mythical status. In this light, the Ozu book becomes readable as a tragic text: an
effort to assert the value of the impersonal and non-possessive encounter with the flow of
the film, in the face of the historical transmutation that will have transformed this
cinematic encounter into a personal one with space.

I will conclude with a question that is not explicitly posed in Hasumi’s text, but that may
be said to underlie it: when does criticism happen? One possible answer would be an  
inverted paraphrase of the last line spoken in Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965):
 
31. ‘Sleep well, now that you exist’.
(31) that it is still to happen, now that it has become impossible.

© Chris Fujiwara 2016.

Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.

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