It has been six months since my last post, in which I claimed to be returning to a more regular posting schedule in the near future.  In spite of the fact that I still haven't finished watching the television series that I am writing about, I will post some thoughts about the series.

 

My one previous experience watching a Korean television drama was with "Alone in Love."  I had heard Korean dramas referred to as the equivalent of soap operas, but there are several key differences that are worth observing between the two forms.  We tend to think of soap operas as a genre of daytime television following the romantic exploits of a group of characters with lots of deception and implausible plot turns.  Of course, there is nothing unusual about implausibility being an integral part of any narrative form, but the implausible plot twists of soap operas are distinct in their arbitrariness and often make it seem as if the writing staff is making the story up as they go along.  This is the first and perhaps most significant distinction between the two forms: Korean dramas, or at least the ones that I have seen, have carefully planned narrative arcs that take place over a limited period of time (usually one to three seasons).  And whereas soap operas are dragged on for as long as they are profitable, adding and taking away cast members and characters when necessary, a Korean drama finishes when the story as planned completes and the cast and crew move on to their next project.  In that respect, Korean dramas are more like a dramatic miniseries than they are like a soap opera.  The plot of "Alone in Love," which was that a young couple that divorced after the death of their first child, might have been fitting for a soap opera, but it would have to be used as one of many subplots.  The fact that the show lasted for a single season and focused on these two characters allowed for a more meandering narrative style than would be possible in a feature with the same plot, but usually the diversions ended up exploring aspects of the main couple's attempts to cope (or not cope) with grief and their relationship.

 

But while "Alone in Love" had a plot that would fit a soap opera (as well as a contemporary setting), "The Great Queen Seondeok" has neither a plot nor a setting to connect it to that form in any way.  It is a highly fictionalized version of the life of the first female ruler of the Silla Dynasty.  For those of you know who don't know Korean history, the Silla Dynasty was the first dynasty to unite the Korean peninsula under the rule of a single kingdom.  The events of the series take place several decades before the conquering of the Baekje and Goguryeo kingdoms in the western and northern parts of the peninsula, respectively, but after the conquering of the Gaya Kingdom in the southeastern part of the peninsula.  The Silla and Baekje kingdoms fight several battles over the course of the show, but the overarching focus is on Silla's royal family and its conflict with powerful nobles.  In particular, it shows how one particularly influential noble named Mi Shil attempts to take control over the kingdom and how Queen Seondeok stops her by empowering the little people against the nobles.

 

The subject matter means that there is a lot more action, in battles and sword fighting, than there is in a romantic drama with a contemporary setting like "Alone in Love."   Furthermore, the shows creators seemed interested in giving its audience an idea of what the world was like in the Silla Dynasty, so a great deal of resources are devoted to recreating details of historical and cultural interest, and periodically, explanations of rituals practiced during the Silla Dynasty appear as characters perform them and definitions of archaic Korean words and phrases as characters use them in dialogue.

 

But in spite of the huge differences in setting, subject matter, and some formal qualities, there are some overwhelming similarities between the two shows that are just as noteworthy.  In spite of all the fighting and attention to recreating life in the Silla Dynasty, “The Great Queen Seondeok” emphasizes emotion rooted in relationships between characters as much as “Alone in Love” does, and both milk melodramatic situations for their emotional content.  In “Alone in Love,” the overarching situation is that the two main characters are still in love but incapable of having a functional relationship because of an unwillingness to face their grief together.  “The Great Queen Seondeok,” which has about four times as many episodes, does not have a single melodramatic situation, but it has several in succession instead.  After the prologue sends one of the twin princesses off to hide in China in early childhood, the first of these situations takes control of the narrative: she wants to return to Korea to discover her identity while simultaneously hiding everything that might identify her from the people she meets for fear of being killed.  As she meets several characters without realizing their relationship, such as her twin sister, we grow to anticipate their reconciliation when they discover their relationship with each other.  Remarkably, the writers are able to make this single situation last throughout the first season of the show.  Even though there are several battles, encounters with con-artists, and other events that take place, these are mere obstacles in the resolution of the overarching situation.  The use of cliff-hangers at the end of each episode is notable because it tends to emphasize the situation rather than an impending violent clash; even though there are a handful of episodes that end by setting up a violent confrontation and leave the confrontation to the next episode, it is much more frequent that an episode ends in a place such that it seems the Princess’s identity is about to be revealed to an important character.  This emphasizes the overarching melodramatic situation rather than the action.

 

Perhaps the most striking tendency that I noticed in both “Alone in Love” and “The Great Queen Seondeok” was the prevalence of jarring shifts in tone.  It is not uncommon for humorous interludes to take place in between, or in the middle of, intensely dramatic scenes, and this is made all the more jarring by the fact that the humor is often so vulgar and puerile that Jerry Lewis or Jim Carrey might be embarrassed by it.  However, the mark of effective integration of comedy into a dramatic form has less to do with how gradually or comfortably the transition is from one to the other and more to do with whether the comedy furthers the narrative and thematic purposes of the work.  “The Great Queen Seondeok” does this with some consistency, using the transitions of characters from one-dimensional dimwits into more serious, even pathos-inducing, characters is used to raise the emotional stakes on several occasions, notably when the King’s maid becomes the Princess’s foster mother near the beginning and when the con-man’s bumbling sidekick turns into a serious general in the ellipsis near the end of the show.  At other times, humor is used as a way to provide expositional details to viewers who may have missed a few episodes, such as whenever the con-man attempts to explain what is happening to his imbecilic cohorts and they struggle to understand the explanation; this way, the viewers who have already seen the events being described are not bored by being told what they already know.  Mi Shil’s dimwitted son is used as a foil of all the clever conspirators in the room.

 

Still, for everything that I admired about the show, there were a handful of things that bothered me:

1.)        Beginning when Bo Jong embarrases Yoo Shin’s Flower Youth group early on in the series, there are several near confrontations between the two of them, leading us to anticipate a final showdown between the two at some point.  It seems to be coming closer when they vie to be the head of the Flower Youths, but then Bi Dam defeats Bo Jong instead so that Yoo Shin can win.  Why spend so much time setting the stage for a showdown only to disappoint us?  The anticipation for the fight between Bo Jong and Yoo Shin is not capable of being transferred to Yoo Shin and another character so simply.

2.)        The character Chil Sook bothered me.  Here is a character who prides his integrity above all else, is completely loyal to Mi Shil because she saved his life, and head over heels in love with So Hwa (the maid and the Princess’s foster mother).  It goes without saying that he will never be able to satisfy all of these guiding forces at once, but shouldn’t there at least be some internal conflict before he makes his decisions?  He never takes any time to deliberate before he acts, and always acts with complete conviction and in accordance with one of his three guiding forces, but which one he follows at which time seems quite arbitrary.  Rather than a man with conflicting goals, he is a man with multiple personality disorder who has three one-dimensional personalities.

3.)        The foreshadowing of Bi Dam’s turn to evil was done improperly.  The show was very careful to show his dark side even when he was the Princess’s most loyal follower and to provide a back-story to explain it, but he did not become evil in the way that the foreshadowing led us to believe that he would.  He is prone to violent outbursts throughout the show and is consistently shown to be single-minded in his desire to marry the Princess so that he can take control for himself, but he is far too rash to become the clever conspirator and worthy heir of Mi Shil that we see him become in the final episodes.

4.)        My interest in the show died with Mi Shil.  I am aware, of course, that the show is called “The Great Queen Seondeok,” as opposed to “The War between Queen Seondeok and Mi Shil,” but the first fifty episodes or so are devoted to Mi Shil’s attempt to control the kingdom and the way that Princess (and later Queen) Seondeok prevents her from doing so and ultimately defeats her in a civil war.  Having invested all of our energy into that story, suddenly the writers expect us to be interested in what happens afterwards.  I found it difficult to care, which is probably the main reason that I never finished watching the show.

5.)        The ellipsis between the end of the civil war and several years into Queen Seondeok’s rule makes her look like a bad Queen.  When we skip from the time that she assumes control over the kingdom, it gives the impression that everything that has happened during the ellipsis has been the leading up to the conditions that we see after the ellipsis, namely that Bi Dam and his secret police are attempting to destroy Yoo Shin’s career.  Thus, the whole time in between the events that we have seen (and by extension, the entirety of Queen Seondeok’s rule), the only significant development has been Bi Dam’s rise to power and his manipulation of the Queen’s trust.  This does not give any credence to the moniker “Great” (but then again, Korean rulers dubbed “the Great” have been a little hit-or-miss, haven’t they?)

At least part of the reason for the joke that nobody can tell one Ozu movie from another is the fact that so many of his postwar movies have an almost identical premise: a family has a daughter who has reached the age at which she is expected to marry and the family takes it upon itself to find her a suitable groom.  For this posting, I will be dealing with five of his movies that work within this premise: Late Spring, Early Summer, Equinox Flower, Late Autumn, and An Autumn Afternoon.  This premise is also present as a subplot in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, which focuses on the young woman’s aunt and uncle, Tokyo Twilight, in which the marriage attempt is prematurely aborted because of the daughter’s delinquency, and in The End of Summer, in which the youngest daughter’s marriage is but one thread within the workings of the Kohayagawa family.   I will be dealing only with the movies in which the daughter’s marriage is the main narrative concern for the purposes of this writing in order to find why Ozu felt the need to make so many movies with the same premise.

            Before I continue, I would like to point something out about Ozu’s body of work pertaining to his movies outside the marriage cycle.  While I hope to demonstrate that these movies diverge more in their thematic concerns, in their attitudes towards the subject matter and characters, and even in terms of cinematic style than you might think, I should point out that a closer look at Ozu’s career, particularly his pre-war career, reveals Ozu as a much more versatile filmmaker than we are accustomed to think.  He made far more movies in this period than he did after the war, and while some of the best of them—I Was Born, But…, Passing Fancy, An Inn in Tokyo, and The Only Son—are movies about families, he also made movies about gangsters (That Night’s Wife and Dragnet Girl), comedies of manners (The Lady and the Beard and What Did the Lady Forget?), dramas focusing on groups of friends of the same generation rather than families (Where Are The Dreams of Youth?), and the woman’s picture Woman of Tokyo, whose premise looks more like something out of Mizoguchi’s body of work than Ozu’s.  And it’s not just the plots that are different; Ozu puts to use a wide range of stylistic devices that he would be famous for shying away from in his postwar career.  While he seems to have developed his eye for compositions early in his career, he employs camera movements, particularly unmotivated tracking shots and even an occasional pan, without hesitation.  All of which is to say that you should look at these movies before trying to argue that his movies all look the same.

 

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949) – This is the earliest movie in the Ozu’s marriage cycle and it is also the best known and respected; it is frequently ranked behind only Tokyo Story within Ozu’s body of work.  The movie focuses primarily on the relationship between the widowed father, Shukichi, and his daughter, Noriko, whom he is preparing to marry off.  There are other characters, specifically an Aunt, Shukichi’s apprentice Hattori, Noriko’s best friend Aya, the father’s friend Mr. Onodera, and Mrs. Miwa, a widow who is a potential marriage prospect for the widowed father.  These other characters, however, are relatively minor and serve primarily a narrative function.  The Aunt is the character most actively looking for a suitable match for Noriko; her presence in the movie allows Shukichi to be more passive in the search for a groom, suggesting his reluctance at seeing his daughter go. Mr. Onodera’s decision to remarry plants the possibility that Shukichi might do the same in our minds long before the possibility is brought up, and Mrs. Miwa’s appearance as Shukichi’s potential new wife allow us to see Noriko’s jealousy directed at her.  The other characters are suggestive of possibilities for Noriko’s future: Noriko’s relationship with Hattori begins to show an idealized romantic relationship before crushing it as a possibility, and Aya, who is herself recently divorced, highlights the uncertainty of Noriko’s future happiness after being married.

            As is often the case in Ozu movies, the characters and their relationships to each other are introduced performing daily rituals.  In the first scene, Noriko meets with her Aunt at a ceremony (Mrs. Miwa is also there, though her significance has not yet been established) and they joke about her father’s inability to complete anything on time.  The dialogue thus tells us that Noriko lives with her father and alludes to her relationship with him, which is to become the subject of the movie.  The second scene introduces the father and Hattori working on a project that was due the day before.  The electrician also comes to the house, though we are not able to see him (more on that later).  Noriko appears shortly thereafter, and performs chores customarily designated to a housewife.  It is significant that we already know she lives with her father and not a husband because we might otherwise mistake her for Shukichi’s wife; because we know she’s his daughter, Ozu can show her performing the chores of a housewife and we understand that she has taken on the homemaker role in her mother’s absence.

            The next day, Noriko and Shukichi ride into Tokyo on the train and Noriko runs into Mr. Onodera after visiting the hospital for a blood check.  They discuss Onodera’s remarriage and Noriko states that she finds it “filthy”; later she invites him home to visit with Shukichi, and Onodera is the first one to suggest to him that it might be time for Noriko to get married.  Though Noriko’s coincidental meeting with Onodera on the street appears to be unrelated to the rest of the movie, it serves the narrative purposes of bringing up marriage for both Noriko (explicitly) and Shukichi (implicitly).  Thus Ozu succeeds in making the causal logic of the movie invisible.

            We also learn, from several lines delivered in passing, that Noriko had previously been in poor health, most likely due to being overworked at a labor camp during the war.  Ozu never specifically invokes this as the motivating force for any of Noriko’s behavior, but simply presents it as her back-story and allows us to judge in what way it affects her in the present.

            Not long afterwards, Noriko and Hattori go on a bike ride in one of the few scenes of the movie that uses camera movement.  The use of extended tracking movements in a movie where camera movement is so scarce provides the scene with a celebratory energy, and in the following scene Shukichi and Noriko’s Aunt bring up the possibility of Noriko’s marrying Hattori.  Having set up our hopes by showing that Hattori and Noriko could be a happy couple, we quickly learn that it is impossible because Hattori is already engaged.  We later learn that Hattori himself seems to prefer Noriko to his own fiancée (whom we never see except in a wedding picture) when he invites her to a violinist’s performance and opts to watch the performance alone after Noriko turns him down.  Hattori only appears twice more in the movie: once to deliver his wedding picture to the family when they are not home and once near the end as Noriko is preparing for her wedding.

            After Hattori has been ruled out, Noriko’s Aunt finds another prospect for her, but Noriko is reluctant to marry because she does not want to leave her father behind.  Her Aunt thus tells her that Mrs. Miwa, who has made a handful of brief, seemingly inconsequential appearances, might marry her father.

            Noriko and Shukichi attend a Noh performance together one night, and it is here that Noriko’s feelings about her father’s remarriage are best expressed to us.  The performance itself goes on uninterrupted for nearly three full minutes before we see Mrs. Miwa and this has two primary effects: 1) the mournful tone of the Noh performance establishes the tone of the scene and 2) it misleads us by withholding the scene’s purpose, thereby hiding the narrative logic once again.  However, soon, a series of shots emerges showing an exchange between Shukichi and Mrs. Miwa, and how Noriko interprets it:

First, the editing pattern shows Noriko and Shukichi watching the performance straight ahead, until Shukichi turns and bows slightly to an unknown figure off-screen:

Noriko notices, looks off-screen, and bows herself:

It is not until the next shot that we learn whom they are greeting:

It turns out to be Mrs. Miwa, whom we have recently learned is a potential marriage prospect for Shukichi.  It is only after we know this that we return to Noriko to see a very different expression on her face:

and we cut back to Mrs. Miwa again, no longer as part of a shot/reverse shot showing a non-verbal exchange, but instead as a point-of-view shot showing the motivating force for Noriko’s unpleasant expression:

From here, we cut back to Noriko, this time in a close-up emphasizing her discontent even further:

and then we cut back to a longer shot, in which we can still see Noriko’s expression, but can also see her disengagement with everything around her, demonstrating her loneliness in spite of the fact that she is surrounded by people.

            These kinds of close-ups we see of Noriko are rare in Late Spring and will become even rarer (perhaps it would be more accurate to say ‘entirely absent’) in Ozu’s later movies.  In a scene shortly thereafter in Aya’s house we even get to see this:

a close-up of an emotional expression.  Perhaps part of the reason that Late Spring is more emotionally expressive than the later movies in Ozu’s marriage cycle is that the focus is more on the relationship between the father and daughter in this movie, whereas in the later movies he focuses on themes like the changing attitudes towards marriage or aging, which do not require as much emotional expressiveness as the portrayal of a relationship does.

            At Aya’s house, Noriko discusses her distaste for her father’s remarriage.  In addition to Aya’s back-story as a divorcee, she also functions as a person with whom Noriko can discuss her feelings more openly than with her father (similarly, Shukichi discusses his own feelings more with the Aunt than he does with Noriko) since both Noriko and Shukichi consistently want to do what is best for the other character without imposing and are thus reluctant to discuss how they feel about the impending marriage openly.  The scene ends with an argument, and Ozu punctuates it with an expressive pillow shots; after Noriko runs out, he cuts to some books falling off a chair:

Though the cut away could hardly be regarded as baroque, it demonstrates that Ozu’s style can be more expressive than is frequently acknowledged by those who deem him a minimalist.

            There are two rather large ellipses in the last part of the movie; Ozu has already sketched the relationship between the characters and their attitudes towards the end of that relationship well enough that he can trust us to fill in the blanks ourselves.  The first one comes right after the argument with Aya; suddenly we join Shukichi and Noriko’s Aunt, visiting a temple, and learn that Noriko has met with the marriage prospect and a full week has passed without a response from her.  Meanwhile, Noriko discusses her feelings about her prospective husband with Aya before somewhat passively accepting the prospect when her Aunt and father come home.

            After another ellipsis, we find Noriko and Shukichi on their final trip together visiting Mr. Onodera and his new wife.  Noriko gets along well with his new wife, demonstrating that she has grown comfortable with the idea that her father might remarry.  However, at precisely the moment she says this, Shukichi finally gets around to explaining that the idea of his remarrying was all a trick to get Noriko to marry.  This leads into the father/daughter discussion that we have been waiting for for most of the movie; until now, they have avoided discussing their feelings about Noriko’s marriage for fear of offending each other, but at last they can speak openly and Shukichi delivers a monologue explaining that Noriko cannot expect happiness without hard work to achieve it.  Now that they’ve had the talk that they’ve been putting off, Noriko can get married.

            After she has gotten married, Ozu lingers on Shukichi at home after she has left:

We start on a wide shot of Shukichi removing his coat and sitting down.  His actions do not suggest emotion in and of themselves, but the aperture framing and large amounts of black space on screen provide the sense of loneliness that will pervade the rest of the scene.  Ozu then cuts to a medium-close up so that we can see his facial expression better, which shows a subtle sense of regret:

and then he shows Shukichi cutting the skin off an apple, allowing actor Chishu Ryu to use the action to show his sadness:

He cuts back to Shukichi’s face to show the growing sense of loss; his face is much more expressive than it was in the previous shot, and it is also much closer to his face:

but at the moment that the emotion seems to be about to peak, Ozu cuts away from Shukichi’s face back to the apple as the skin falls off.  Cutting away from his face undercuts melodrama, but the falling of the skin allows Ozu to continue to express the emotional state, albeit in a more abstract manner:

and finally, we go back to Shukichi, this time facing away from the camera; again, by not showing his face, Ozu undercuts melodrama while expressing the emotion primarily through his posture:

Ending the movie with Shukichi this way emphasizes the loss of the relationship with his daughter; we don’t follow Noriko in her new life because doing so would shift the emphasis away from this loss to her new life.  It is for this reason that we never see Noriko’s groom, or even the off-screen electrician who supposedly looks like him; Ozu is less interested in the life that she’s starting than the one that she’s leaving behind.

 

Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951) – Another type of movie Ozu worked with repeatedly was that of the extended family saga, which follows a large extended family, allowing him to deal with intergenerational conflicts and the changes in Japanese society over time.  The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Tokyo Story, and The End of Summer all fit this pattern, as does Early Summer.  What distinguishes Early Summer from the others is that the central event of the other movies is the death of one of the family members, whereas in Early Summer, the central event is the daughter’s marriage.  It fits fairly well into both the family saga pattern and the marriage cycle pattern.

            The movie opens rather mysteriously with a shot of a beach:

I say “mysteriously” because we do not see this beach again until near the end of the movie, when Noriko and her sister-in-law have a discussion on the beach, at which point Noriko convinces her that she’s made the right decision.  The seemingly randomly picked pillow shot thus functions to provide a kind of ring structure for the movie’s narrative trajectory.

            After the opening shot, we have this series of two pillow shots, showing parts of the family’s house:

before showing us any of the family members.  This series of two pillow shots will be repeated later in the movie, and I will address the significance of their reappearance then.  After these shots, however, Ozu brings us into the household so that we can see the family in action.  The shots are all densely staged, showing family members performing different actions in the foreground, middle ground and background:

We thus see the household as an active place and see all the family members fulfilling their implicitly understood roles in it.  It is not yet entirely clear who each of these characters are in relation to each other, but they all seem to know what to do so the house seems to be running in order.

            Because the focus is on the interaction between many characters of several generations, Ozu dwells on moments not directly related to Noriko’s marriage.  We see the mischievous antics of Noriko’s nephews and the first part of the movie seems to focus on her uncle’s visit.  At first glance, the narrative seems to lack an underlying logic, but these errant scenes tend to serve a purpose that is not clear until later in the movie.  As Noriko waits at the train station, she has a pleasant casual conversation with Kenkichi.  In a later scene when Noriko is out with her Uncle, she runs into Kenkichi’s mother, who is out with his daughter for the day.  Even though we are not told directly at first that Kenkichi’s wife has died, Ozu provides details like the fact that Kenkichi’s mother is wandering around with his daughter to plant the seeds for the ultimate revelation that Kenkichi’s wife has died, which will allow Noriko to marry him.  The Uncle also serves at least two other important narrative functions: he is the first to suggest that it is time for Noriko to get married, and his suggestion that Noriko’s parents move to live with him sets up their decision to do so at the end of the movie.

Ozu also introduces motifs that seem to be ordinary details about daily life but are later integrated into the marriage plot.  The first several times we see Noriko’s nephews, their antics are unrelated to Noriko’s marriage (the younger one tells his grandfather that he loves him in order to get more candy, they test their uncle’s deafness, and they demand payment for giving a massage to their grandmother).  Later, however, they run away from home after their father doesn’t buy them some railroad track, and thus Noriko enlists Kenkichi to help her find them, allowing them to bond in doing so.  We also learn of a family member whom we never meet—Noriko’s other brother, Shoji, who has never returned since the end of the war and whom Noriko’s mother remains convinced will return one day.  He is referred to by her parents near the beginning and seems to be a simple reminder of the effects of the war on the family, entirely unrelated to the marriage plot, but later we find out that Shoji was Kenkichi’s friend, which provides another link between Kenkichi and Noriko that sets up their interest in each other.  Ozu also briefly develops a seemingly unrelated subplot about Noriko’s friend’s senile mother who wanders around the house repeatedly looking for things and is wrongly convinced that she has a heart condition.  Her entire existence seems extraneous, but she visits Noriko’s brother, a doctor, and inadvertently drops the bit of information that Noriko has received a marriage proposal from her boss’s friend.  As a result of his learning this, he takes on an almost conspiratorial role in trying to make Noriko accept the proposal.

In depicting her brother’s attempts to control the situation, Ozu develops a somewhat comical deep-space staging technique, building from the dense compositions from earlier in the movie.  In this long shot,

when Noriko and her sister-in-law are discussing her date with some friends, the composition seems to be much less dense than it was at the beginning; instead of showing multiple rooms by means of aperture framing with different characters occupying each room, we are focused on only two characters within the same room and we cannot see behind them because of a wall and door behind Noriko’s sister.  Ozu places the two women so that they are blocking the door, preventing us from paying too much attention to it.  Then, when Noriko leaves the frame

Noriko’s brother suddenly opens the door in the background completely catching his wife, and us, off-guard.  Though Ozu tricks us into thinking that their conversation is private at the beginning of the scene, we can now observe that the house is as densely packed as before and that Noriko’s brother has been eavesdropping on them.  He tells his wife to convince Noriko to accept the proposal in this scene, and by having him do so in such a frightening manner emphasizes the shadiness of his actions.

            Though there are no more eavesdropping scenes like this, Ozu shows a series of discussions between the other family members about Noriko’s marriage from which she is absent.  In the scenes in which the advantages and disadvantages of her prospective husband are freely discussed, she is always absent; whenever she is present, the other family members put up a unified front insisting that she should marry this man.  We are thus permitted to see a lingering uncertainty that is not openly admitted, leading us to wonder whether this is, in fact, a good match.

            As Ozu develops this narrative thread, he begins to give Noriko opportunities to meet with Kenkichi.  However, because the movie has been set up with a seeming lack of coherent narrative logic, we are able to watch these scenes without necessarily knowing at first that these two will marry at the end.  The earliest scene in which they meet is near the beginning, very briefly at a train station, but after that they share cake with Noriko’s sister-in-law, go searching for Noriko’s nephews together, and finally, meet with each other briefly at a café.  It is only at this point that Ozu begins to suggest the possibility of their marriage, and even now he does so in a rather abstract way.  He starts by showing the two of them walking outside:

cuts to a pillow shot showing a Cathedral:

and then cuts back to the two of them, now at the café:

Ordinarily, cutting to a shot of a Cathedral in this way would be a rather obvious way to hint at their marriage, but because Ozu has been showing us innocuous insert shots of the landscape throughout the movie, it is entirely possible to overlook this.

            After Noriko has accepted the proposal, Ozu repeats the second and third insert shots of the movie:

The repetition of these shots is designed to call back the beginning of the movie to memory as a way of showing contrast.  Whereas Ozu goes from this series of shots into the family’s energetic morning rituals, he cuts from this second shot to Noriko’s mother and sister-in-law lamenting Noriko’s marriage decision.  In addition to highlighting the contrast in tones between energetic at the beginning and mournful now, Ozu has led us to expect to continue the earlier pattern of shots and to show us the family’s morning rituals again.  That he does not suggests that Noriko’s decision has, in fact, broken the household.

            The family sends Noriko’s sister-in-law to try to talk her into reconsidering their marriage, and thus Noriko and her sister-in-law discuss the matter on the beach, but Noriko is able to convince her sister-in-law that she knows what she is doing.  Having done so, she runs out gleefully onto the beach:

into the very same composition that opened the movie.  This suggests that the conflict has now been resolved, and, indeed, after this scene, the rest of the family, too, has come to terms with Noriko’s decision to marry Kenkichi.

            As in Late Spring, Ozu uses two major ellipses near the end of the movie; he skips over Kenkichi’s departure to Hokkaido (indeed, we never see Kenkichi and Noriko together after they are both aware of the fact that they will marry each other) and another one that skips over Noriko’s marriage and her parent’s moving to live with her uncle.  Again, having set everything up, Ozu does not think it necessary to show us how these things play out.  And as a result of this, we never see Noriko’s wedding, but instead, the movie ends with Noriko’s parents looking out at another marriage, reminding them of Noriko’s marriage just as a lost balloon earlier in the movie brings back an old memory of Noriko’s older brother as a child.  The entire affair has already passed into memory.

 

Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu, 1958) – This is probably the lightest of Ozu’s movies in the marriage cycle, and while I write that primarily in reference to its tone, it certainly gets less attention in Ozu’s oeuvre than Late Spring, Early Summer, or An Autumn Afternoon.  Part of that could be in response to the poor box office reception of Tokyo Twilight, released the previous year, or due to an artistic desire to move in another direction after the three bleak movies that he had made just before this—Tokyo Story and Early Spring in addition to Tokyo Twilight.  It is also his first color movie, and it is perhaps worth noting that, according to his collaborators, he resisted color for so long not out of an insistence on black-and-white so much as a disappointment with the way that colors registered on all of the color film stocks that were available at the time; he disliked one because the red was too strong and the other because the blue was too intense.  Ultimately, he chose the strong red stock.

            The movie opens showing newlyweds in a train station:

and some station attendents gossiping about them:

We haven’t seen any of our main characters yet, but by opening the movie in this way, Ozu introduces the main theme before he introduces the characters and demonstrates that the story that we will see is merely one of many similar stories of marriage that take place daily.  Indeed, even after this scene, when we do begin to meet some of our main characters, we meet them at another wedding and we continue to hear about other impending marriages throughout.  Beginning in the train station also sets up a ring structure for the movie; the movie will end with Setsuko’s father taking the train to see his daughter.

            The second scene further defines the major thematic concerns.  It is at the wedding of a family friend’s daughter, at which Setsuko’s father and mother are present.  Setsuko’s father is asked to give a speech, in which he celebrates the ability of the younger generation to marry for love rather and are not expected to have arranged, pragmatic marriages like his own.  The speech thus addresses the changing attitudes towards marriage, which is the subject of the movie, and is also played for comedy, both because his own wife is sitting next to him as he laments his lack of choice in choosing a bride and because his behavior for the rest of the movie will run 180 degrees counter to the sentiments he professes to have here.

            He begins to contradict his speech as soon as he gets home from the wedding, when he and his wife decide to begin searching for prospects for their eldest daughter without discussing the matter with her beforehand.  In fact, we barely even get a glimpse of Setsuko until after her boyfriend approaches her father and requests his permission for marriage; the implication is that her father has not seriously considered the possibility that she have some of her own ideas about her upcoming marriage.

            There are two other young women about Setsuko’s age whose marriages are discussed throughout: Mr. Mikami’s daughter and Mrs. Sasaki’s daughter.  Mr. Mikami’s daughter has left home to move in with her boyfriend after her father did not consent to their marriage, and she demonstrates Hirayama’s fears of what his own daughter might do.  Mrs. Sasaki, on the other hand, is a parent comically over-involved with her daughter’s marriage prospects, and explicitly attempts to force her daughter to live out her own fantasies.  She thus exhibits the most negative aspects of parental involvement in her child’s marriage in a much more blunt manner than Hirayama himself does.  Her presence also addresses an aspect of marriage that Ozu plays up more in other movies: that of a single parent’s being left alone after the marriage of a daughter.  Even though the family at the center of this movie has two living parents, unlike the families in Late Spring, Late Autumn, or An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu is sure to bring up this aspect with the Sasaki family here (and also with Aya and her mother in Early Summer).

            As soon as Hirayama decides to attend his daughters wedding, his begrudging attitude in making the decision and the scenes that will follow takes away the necessity of showing the ceremony.  Thus, as is the case with all the movies in the marriage cycle, Ozu elides out the wedding ceremony itself.  It is perhaps worth noting that the only actual wedding ceremony in any of these movies is the one at the beginning of Equinox Flower, between two characters whom we never see again.  We go directly to a class reunion, where he and his friends reminisce about the old days with songs from their youth.  The mournful tone of this reminiscing and his conversation with Mr. Mikami suggest a sense of regret at having been defeated by the younger generation.  It is not until the next scene, when Mrs. Sasaki talks him into visiting his daughter, that we see him make his peace with the marriage.  Because the movie is about his changing attitude, it is unnecessary to show him with the newlyweds; the fact that he has changed his mind is all that is important.  It ends on a shot of the train, harking back to the opening in the train station:

The more open-minded opinion he now holds also harks back to the beginning: he finally believes what he was saying at the wedding reception.

 

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960) – Late Autumn opens on two shots showing Tokyo Tower, one up close and one from a distance, before entering into the temple:

By beginning with one of the central images of modern Japan and cutting directly to a much more traditional setting without conflict, Ozu suggests that this movie will not be as concerned with the kind of generational conflict that we have seen in Early Summer and Equinox Flower.  There is less conflict between arranged marriage and love marriage here—in fact, the ultimate marriage is equally an arranged marriage and a love marriage—because the differing attitudes toward marriage is not the central issue here.

            From here, we enter into the temple to see some men discussing a deceased friend for whom they are having a memorial service.  Ozu introduces them from a distance:

before entering into shot/reverse shot between the man’s friends:

and his former assistant:

It is not until the ninth shot inside the temple that he cuts to this angle:

showing us the man’s widow and daughter, who have been in the room listening to the conversation for the whole time without our being aware of it.  The way that Ozu conceals their presence from us while showing the friends sets up the relationship that the friends will have with the widow and daughter as they attempt to find the daughter a husband: they will act without consulting them and will even largely ignore the unintended consequences that their actions have on their relationship.

            Of course, one of the deceased friend’s is absent from this opening scene, and his late entrance to the memorial service will demonstrate the attitude that these characters have towards their responsibility and will introduce their not inconsiderable comic value.

            As in Late Spring, conflict arises when the daughter expresses a desire to continue living with her widowed parent and thus refuses to marry.  In the earlier movie, the role of conspirator was played by an aunt; here, it is filled by the dead father’s three best friends, to whom more screen time is devoted than was to Late Spring’s aunt.  That all three of them remain deeply infatuated with her mother allows Ozu to depict their interest in her marriage as a way of playing out their own fantasies, a concept that he touched upon in Equinox Flower.

            While the movie finds their half-baked conspiracies and transparent attempts to use the daughter’s marriage to play with their fantasies about her widowed mother a constant source for humor, it does not entirely discount the concept of arranged marriage in doing so; the romance that they arrange does turn out quite successfully, though not until they are set up again by a more impartial group of mutual friends.

            As the movie spends a great deal of time focusing on the comic relief characters, his depiction of the emotions of the mother and the daughter is more subdued than that of the father and daughter in Late Spring.  Consider this shot, from the day after Ayako learns her mother wants to remarry, and has voiced vehement opposition:

She is the character in the green dress facing away from the camera in the distant background.  This is perhaps the most restrained way to depict a character’s emotion; her motionlessness is contrasted sharply with her coworkers’ joyful movements, and the fact that she is turned away from her coworkers and us contrasts her with their playful interaction.  Though we cannot see her face, we know from the shot her state of loneliness, and we know from its context in the movie the reason she feels this way.  He is able to emphasize her in spite of this blocking by dressing her in a recognizable green dress, placing her in the center, and ensuring that she is the only character not moving in the frame.

            The series of shots that ends the movie, showing the mother alone, is also much more subdued than the apple peeling that comes at the end of Late Spring.  Before we discuss that, however, we should look at two shots that present a contrast with the final series of shots.  This comes when Ayako’s best friend is leaving after visiting Akiko.  First, we have a shot of her leaving:

followed by a shot of her in the hallway, in which she briefly turns back to the door:

suggesting that she is still thinking about Akiko.  Though she has literally left her alone, this brief gesture undercuts the sense of loneliness we might feel.

            In the movie’s final scene, Ayako’s friend leaves again, promising to visit Akiko now and then so she won’t be lonely.  The series of shots begins with a shot of her leaving:

but puts Akiko in the frame, emphasizing that she is, in fact alone when the door closes:

We don’t cut outside here to see Ayako’s friend; this time, we remain inside with Akiko, emphasizing that she is, in fact, alone:

The series of shots even includes the mourning clothes she wore in the first scene, providing a kind of ring structure while at the same time emphasizing her widowhood.  In the final shot, we do cut out to the hallway:

but by this point, Ayako’s friend has already left, and the hallway is completely empty, so we are not permitted any reassuring glances from her.  Akiko is never expressive enough to drop an apple peel within this sequence, but Ozu is still able to depict her loneliness even without a direct expression on her part.

 

An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962) – Ozu’s final movie returns to a much bleaker tone than those of the relatively comic Early Summer, Equinox Flower, and Late Autumn.  Unlike Late Spring, however, our relationship with Hirayama, the widowed father of the bride again played by Chishu Ryu, is relatively detached.  Though we follow him for most of the movie, our knowledge most closely corresponds to his,  and his experience is what primarily motivates the way we understand and experience the movie emotionally, our experience is not identical to his.

            The movie’s opening image is one of a distinctly modern Japan, but it has much bleaker implications and effects than those of Equinox Flower and Late Autumn.

Unlike the efficient rail system or Tokyo Tower, there is not a whole lot of national pride associated with this particular factory.  Furthermore, it is a rather unpleasant looking structure in its own right, particularly because of the smoke pouring out of it.  Thus, the shot gives us a sense of the mood that will pervade the rest of the movie.  Ozu then links the shot to the story with two more shots:

placing us inside the building where Hirayama works.  It should be noted that Ozu typically prefers to link his pillow shots with the narrative in some way, clarifying that they are, in fact, part of the diegesis, and not non-diegetic inserts.  It then takes him two more shots to show us the interior of the building:

and to bring us to Hirayama’s office within the building.  This is a series of shots he will repeat later in the movie, and I will address it again there.

            After bringing us into Hirayama’s office, Ozu uses a conversation with an Office Lady to introduce the subject of the movie.  When she walks in

he asks her about one of her coworkers, whom we learn his leaving soon to get married.  They briefly discuss that she herself will likely be marrying soon.

            In the second scene, Ozu introduces not only the fact that Hirayama will be marrying off his own daughter, but also a series of characters whose own lifestyles will present different courses that Hirayama’s own life might take.  The second scene shows Hirayama with two friends at an izakaya, preparing  a reunion for their middle school class.  One of his two friends, who had been a widower like Hirayama, has remarried to a much younger woman.  Later, Hirayama will meet his old teacher from middle school, also a widower, who did not find a husband for his daughter out of fear of living alone and thus finds his existence living with his unhappy, middle-aged spinster daughter to be wretched.  He will even meet a relatively young auto repairman who was positioned under him in the army who is apparently expecting to be a grandfather in the near future.  These seem to be the three courses his life might take: he can either marry a younger woman, though he seems to find that distasteful, or allow his daughter to turn into an unhappy spinster, or simply try to make the best of the prospect of being a grandfather while spending his free time drinking and reminiscing about his youth while listening to the old army song.

            The young repairman also introduces him to a new bar that will have a multifaceted significance.  It allows him to continue the overdrinking that we see and hear about in the second scene and his return home after it, but with a significant difference; in the earlier scene, Hirayama’s drinking was part of a social activity with his friends, whereas by the end of the movie, he is coming to this bar on his own to do his drinking, implying that the act is no longer just a social activity.  It also shows him reminiscing about happier times from the past.  The first time he comes to the bar, it is with the auto repairman, and they listen, salute, and dance to an old army song, and Hirayama continues to ask them to play it when he returns and even sings it to himself in the final scene.  He also seems to enjoy ogling the waitress there and claims that she looks like his late wife, even though his eldest son states that they do not resemble each other at all.  Thus, from these things we get to see Hirayama’s dissatisfaction with his current state of affairs.

            Later on in the movie, we return to a series of shots that directly recalls the series near the beginning of the movie:

which cues the entrance of the Office Lady, about whom they were speaking in the first scene, to enter:

This sort of structure is suggestive of the cyclical nature of these marriage stories, and the fact that another marriage has been planned and arranged as this story has been going on reminds us that the Hirayama is only one of many families to whom this sort of thing happens.  But perhaps most importantly, it suggests an urgency in the marriage of Hirayama’s own daughter; this one started around the same time that he began to look for a husband for her daughter, so it’s time that he finish up the marriage for his daughter as well.   If this meaning isn’t clear enough at first, we are reminded of it because his old teacher pays him a visit immediately afterward, reminding us of the man who did not hurry up and get his daughter married as he was supposed to.

            There is another series of shots that is repeated, though in this case it is to demonstrate the effect of the daughter’s departure on the Hirayama’s household.  The first iteration immediately precedes the daughter’s wedding:

and the second iteration of these shots comes near the end of the movie, after she has been married:

The compositions of the corresponding shots are identical; the only thing that is altered is the lighting, which is much darker and moodier in the second than it is in the first.  This has a perfectly natural explanation of course: it was day the first time and night the second time.  However, the purpose is to show that the mood of the entire house has shifted for the worse with her departure.  After these shots and another shot of the house’s interior, we go back to see Hirayama in a distraught state:

and we retreat from him in the final shot, in which he continues to imbibe while singing the old army song to himself:

The final shot detaches us from Hirayama and thus gives us a substantially different emotional relationship with him than the apple-cutting scene at the end of Late Spring.  The primary reason for this is that Shukichi in Late Spring was much more willing to express himself emotionally upon his daughter’s departure: we could see his unhappiness best by looking at it from up close.  However, in An Autumn Afternoon, Hirayama is continuing to repress his emotions in the last scene, through alcohol and his reminiscence, so the only way that Ozu can get us to sense the underlying emotion is by detaching us from his actions: he shows them in an extreme long shot, emphasizing the empty house and deemphasizing any movement on Hirayama’s part to give the action a sense of loneliness that would be lost from up close.

            Because An Autumn Afternoon follows Hirayama much more than it follows his daughter or any of the other characters, Ozu is able to emphasize the experience of aging and the inevitable loneliness that comes when children grow up more than he has in the other movies in this cycle.  Of course, he has explored this to some extent in the other movies.  There are also a handful of scenes that show us his daughter’s experience; namely, we learn about her infatuation with her older brother’s engaged friend, and we also see the unpleasant relationship that her brother has with his wife, which is played for comedy but suggests that her life may also be lonely and unpleasant after her marriage.  However, the bulk of the movie follows Hirayama, so while he does deal with the other aspects of the situation that he focuses on more thoroughly in other movies, the main focus of An Autumn Afternoon is on Hirayama’s aging.