FOR SOME OF US, THERE IS NO MORE MOVING moment in cinema than when, in Tokyo Story (1953), which many consider the quintessential film by Yasujiro Ozu (1903–63), Kyoko remarks, “Isn’t life disappointing?” and her sister-in-law Noriko replies, with a smile of calm radiance, “I’m afraid
it is.” The poignancy of this exchange is a hallmark of the Ozu we have admired ever since his films slipped into Western film culture in the ’60s. And alongside this poignancy sits an extraordinary formal precision, that much-lauded restraint typically characterized as a set of dogged refusals: constant angle, static camera, rudimentary cutting.

This version of Ozu, defined by the postwar films, puts the emphasis not only on Tokyo Story but on Late Spring (1949), Early Summer(1951), Floating Weeds (1959), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Yet even this great body of work does not transcend its historical circumstances, and one way to understand how such a flagrantly formalist cinema could summon up such depths of emotion is to consider these films as late fruits of a rich filmmaking tradition. Ozu’s accomplishments built on his earlier work—and the work of others. To take his full measure, we must go back some eighty years.

IN THE WAKE OF THE DEVASTATING 1923 EARTHQUAKE, Tokyo film studios were forced to rebuild, and like the companies refurbishing department stores and coffee bars, they set out to Westernize themselves. Shochiku was the most self-consciously modern studio, rejecting the trappings of kabuki and other theatrical forms while embracing American techniques. Under producer Shiro Kido, Shochiku remade itself as a bastion of urban middle-class dramas mixing tears and smiles. Yet by encouraging talented directors to form cadres of collaborators—writers, cinematographers, and actors—and letting them pursue their instincts, Kido’s regime sometimes fostered bleak comedies and bitter melodramas. Through these Depression-era stories move shiftless college students, disillusioned salarymen, and broken families on the edge of destitution. After college comes unemployment; jobs offer little security; women are treated as chattel. With their ineffectual fathers and stoic mothers and unbending bureaucracies, these 1930s films constitute a muted but massive rebuke to the traditions of Japanese patriarchy and collective welfare. To work in the shoshimin-geki, the film of lower-middle-class life, was to work in a genre that gave poignancy a central place.

Despite aiming at the mass market, Japan’s studio system produced the most formally experimental commercial cinema the world has yet seen. Teinosuke Kinugasa’s delirious Page of Madness (1926), linked to the contemporary Neo-Perceptionist literary avant-garde, was an original response to German Expressionist cinema, while many films of the late ’20s explored dynamic montage in ways parallel to the work of Pudovkin and Eisenstein. The violent swordplay sagas known as chambara displayed frantic camera movements and disjunctive cutting that would have made Abel Gance proud. In the early ’20s Mizoguchi started testing his exquisitely refined staging, which would reach full flower in The Downfall of Osen (1935), Sisters of the Gion(1936), and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939).

Kido’s firmly middle-class policy discouraged extreme styles, but that simply pushed experimentation more deeply into the fiber of accepted formulas. Shochiku filmmakers were at the forefront of “Americanization,” adopting and revising Hollywood continuity principles. Like their US counterparts, directors built scenes out of a master shot followed by reverse-angle closer views of the characters. In the midst of this formulaic découpage, the director might—under the aegis of Ernst Lubitsch, then America’s most celebrated director—insert a telling close-up of an object to underscore the dramatic flow. Add an occasional tracking shot to follow a striding player or to pull us toward a significant detail, and the director’s tool kit was pretty much complete. In addition, Japanese filmmakers benefited from the katsuben or benshi, the commentator who stood by the screen narrating the action and providing the characters’ voices. By supplying ongoing narrative information, the benshi freed ambitious directors to create arresting visuals, which could heighten, or occasionally diverge from, the benshi’s patter.

Japanese directors subjected Hollywood principles to imaginative revision and variation. Characters might be shot from a severely limited array of camera positions (Hiroshi Shimizu’s Star Athlete [1937], for example) or in tight close-ups whose tempo was dictated by characters’ abrupt entrances into the shot (e.g., Mikio Naruse’s Street Without End [1934]). Space could be laid out in ambivalent ways and stretches of time skipped over unexpectedly. Because sound came gradually to the Japanese cinema (the first sound-on-film talkie wasn’t released until 1931, and silent features were produced for several years afterward), a purely pictorial approach lingered far longer there.