Matt Hauske: Ozu, Sound, and Style: A Cinemetrical Analysis of Four Films

Donald Richie, Ozu: His Life and Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Kristin Thompson, “Notes on the Spatial System of Ozu’s Early Films,” Wide Angle, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1977) p. 8-17; David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) pp. 19-21.

This information came from Michael Raine. I have not been able to find a direct citation of it, partly because much of the information on this period in Ozu’s life has not been translated from Japanese.

Toggle the “Color Code?” tab below the graph to ‘Yes’ and click Redraw to see the colors on the website.

Change the “degree of the trendline” tab to 6 and click Redraw to see what I mean.

Using CineMetrics, Yuri Tsivian measured City Lights, A Dog’s Life, and The Kid with an eye toward exploring Chaplin’s practice of building his films around laughs of varying intensity.

The ratio of ASL to cutting swing is emerging as a topic of interest on the CineMetrics site. Very generally, when this ratio is greater than 1, the film’s editing can be said to be more restricted than when it is less than one, which would indicate a wider variety of shot durations and a more dynamic overall editing rhythm, as we see in most Hollywood films. Tsivian

NB: Since the time of writing, later silent Chaplin films have been added, including The Kid, The Gold Rush, and A Dog’s Life.

See also the graph for Stagecoach for a paradigmatic example of classical Hollywood editing patterns, with the trendline set to 6.

See Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology (London: Starword, 1983) pp. 231-232.

Ibid. See also Charles O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

Most of Bordwell’s figures vary slightly from mine for as-yet undetermined reasons. His method is to count the shots and divide by the film’s length. CineMetrics is basically the same method, with the addition of software to measure each shot individually. Our disparity between An Inn in Tokyo and The Only Son is not very significant, but for The Story of Floating Weeds the difference is quite

Bordwell, Ozu, p. 63, draws on Richie, Ozu, pp. 15-16, for the modular nature of Ozu’s films, especially his home dramas.

Statistics like standard deviation and maximum shot length of different shot types for films measured in Advanced Mode have since been added to the website. In the case of this scene in A Story of Floating Weeds, this hypothesis is borne out by the data: the cutting swing of the pictorial shots is 2.1; that of the intertitles is two-thirds of that, 1.4.

“The action’s dramatic register is often low” in a family drama. Ibid, p. 55.

To see these shots on the graph, go to the website and change the ‘Height’ to 750 pixels.

Bordwell, p. 359, discusses the rhythmic nature of the beating of Kayo and Sumiko in Floating Weeds.

See graph and comments for a more detailed discussion of each long shot in this sequence.

The shot is either 19 seconds or about 13.2 seconds, but unfortunately my notes are not clear which shot it is on the graph. I’m pretty sure the shot is one of the two under ‘6:23’.

Charley Leary has measured several John Cassavettes films with these variables in mind, including number of figures in the frame (Shadows), camera movement (Love Streams), and content of the soundtrack (Husbands).

The influence of Hollywood film style on Ozu is well documented. Several scholars have demonstrated Ozu’s love for and extensive knowledge of contemporary Hollywood cinema. [

] Kristin Thompson quotes an article by Ozu in which he says he could only remember having seen three Japanese films by the time he applied for a job at Shochiku in 1923: his knowledge of film was almost entirely Western and, specifically, American. [

] David Bordwell identifies “three American mentors” who “had raised narrative unity to heights of finesse” that Ozu sought to emulate and that influenced his entire career: Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Harold Lloyd. [

] He goes on to cite Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (1924), and Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925) and Speedy (1928), along with the Lloyd persona in general, as major influences for Ozu, in terms of both specific films and Ozu’s overall structural approach to narrative and plot geometry. [

] Bordwell also notes Ozu’s origins in nansensu, having apprenticed under Tadamoto Okubo in that genre, which also relates to American silent cinema, particularly the combination of body-based slapstick and social satire in the Hollywood comedies of Chaplin and Lubitsch, who used overt narration to create satiric social commentary. Ozu drew his “zanier gags” from Lloyd, particularly in his silent college comedies. [

] This comic impulse did not end when Ozu abandoned nansensu and college comedies and moved into the family or home drama, but, according to Bordwell, could be felt throughout his career in the consistently “ludic, open-ended narration” exhibited in all of his films. [

]

While Bordwell’s analysis of Ozu’s Hollywood influences helps to explain the often gag-like structure of his individual films, these influences can be examined at a more fundamental structural level. Although Bordwell’s close analysis of metric editing in The Only Son and End of Summer does reveal Ozu’s attention to detail and desire to “create a subliminal norm” for the spectator and “instill a set of tacit expectations in the perceiver,”

Bordwell’s argument is persuasive: Ozu does subordinate every constituent element of his shot to its overall composition and its place in the final editing scheme. Though the conclusions he draws about Ozu’s style, illustrated by examples from The Only Son and End of Summer, are incisive and illuminating, we can do more to interrogate how and, possibly, why Ozu’s editing style did or did not change from film to film,

Before we determine what Ozu’s editing style was before he switched to sound, we must first identify a norm against which to define Ozu. Hollywood style will serve as our relative norm, for two reasons. First, other than Ozu’s films, there is no data on contemporary Japanese style: norms for Japanese films have not yet been determined, and because so few Japanese films have survived (particularly from the 1920s and

Although the specific films of Chaplin, Lubitsch, and Lloyd cited by Bordwell have not yet been measured, we do have data on several Chaplin films from the teens and a Lubitsch film from the late 20s, and we can extrapolate from these relatively early works (as well as from other early Hollywood films) the patterns that would eventually become classical Hollywood style, of which we have measurements from several canonical

Figure 1. His New Job (Charlie Chaplin, 1915)

A few notes about how to read a CineMetrics graph are in order.

1) Each shot of the film is represented by a vertical bar starting at the top and descending according to the length of the shot. The longer the duration of the shot, the lower the bar descends. The x-axis represents the duration of the film. In this film of about 30 minutes there are a total of 175 shots, for an average shot length (ASL) of 10.3 seconds. The shortest shot

2) This measurement includes both images and intertitles. Intertitles cannot be neglected when measuring a silent film, as they are an integral component of a film’s editing meter and combine with the images to create the film’s visual rhythm. Ozu was undoubtedly aware of this, as were his “American mentors.” [

] His New Job was measured for three different kinds of shots, as represented by the three different

3) The red, snaking line moving across the middle of the graph is the film’s polynomial trendline, which indicates the general tendency of the speed of the editing throughout the course of the film. The trendline can display varying degrees of sensitivity to the general editing tendencies of the film, ranging from 1 (least sensitive) to 12 (most sensitive). The trendline of the graph for His New Job has a

4) In Figure 1, the graph is slightly truncated. Several bars extend beyond the bottom of the graph because their duration is greater than 30 seconds. The entire graph can be seen on the website if the vertical resolution is set to 5 pixels/sec and the height is set to 750 pixels. Several other adjustments can be made on the website, including altering the degree of the trendline and, most important

Although the editing of His New Job is not necessarily organized around an overarching narrative logic, the trendline is typical of the classical Hollywood style in one very important respect: the radical variance in cutting speed over the course of the film. [

] The film starts a bit slow in terms of editing speed: the ASL at about 2 minutes into the film is about 12 seconds per

Though Chaplin’s His New Job, made in 1915, is a rather early film to be using in a comparison with Ozu, who made his first film in 1927, it is, unfortunately, the latest silent Chaplin film that has yet been measured using CineMetrics. [

] Even so, other more canonical American silent films do tend to follow the pattern set by His New Job, which features a wide range of

Figure 2. The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch, 1929).

Hollywood style tends to feature radical changes in ASL over the course of a single film, which includes a wide range of shot durations. [

] But, despite the influence Hollywood films unquestionably had on Ozu, the cinemetric profiles of his films do not follow a characteristically ‘Hollywood’ cinemetric pattern. Ozu’s films have remarkably flat trendlines at nearly all degrees of sensitivity, and this tendency is evident in

The Transition to Sound and the Effect on ASL

The adoption of sound in the cinema is perhaps the most radical technological change in the medium’s stylistic history. Average shot length in American films immediately doubled because of the transition to sound, for a number of very practical reasons, primarily because it became much more difficult to edit both a visual and a sound track. [

] Scenes were shot with multiple cameras simultaneously from a variety

The doubling of ASL as a result of the transition to sound was not restricted to the American cinema but appears to have been a universal phenomenon. [

] Ozu was not immune to the effect. The ASL of An Inn in Tokyo (1935, 4.5 sec ASL), Ozu’s last silent film, is half that of The Only Son (1936, 9.1 sec ASL), his first sound film. [

]

One possible explanation relates to the differences between An Inn in Tokyo and The Only Son, and deals with the absence of intertitles, which clearly affected Ozu’s films and all films in the silent era. Ozu’s intertitles carry special significance for two reasons: his genre of choice and their relation to the creation of a national cinema. Working in family dramas for most of his career, his films tend to

Though Ozu’s ASL doubled upon the conversion to sound in accordance with the universal trend, the statistical profile of his first sound film does not appear to have undergone a significant change. Statistically, The Only Son is not radically different from Ozu’s other films: the cutting swing of 7.3 is less than the ASL, indicating a relatively restricted range of shot durations, according to the “Greek Cross” idea. The film’s

Figure 4. The Only Son (1936). Trendline 6.

Of the four Ozu films measured here, The Only Son is clearly the most dynamic in terms of editing, but this dynamization of editing does not appear to have been Ozu’s ultimate intention, if the flat trendline of the later, more mature Floating Weeds is any indication (Figure 8). This dynamic trendline could also be the result of the film being Ozu’s first true foray into sound. He said of The

Figure 5. An Inn in Tokyo (1935). The Imaginary Feast.

If we compare two similar scenes from An Inn in Tokyo and The Only Son, we can see how the absence of intertitles helped cause the increase in ASL and, perhaps, how it dynamized the cinemetrical profile. In An Inn in Tokyo, Kihachi and his sons have an imaginary feast in a barren field (19:08-22:34; Figure 5). The segment lasts 3 minutes 26 seconds, divided among 35 pictorial shots and 19

Figure 6. The Only Son - Visit with Okubo.

A similar dining scene occurs in The Only Son, when Ryosuke takes his mother, Otsune, to visit Okubo, his old teacher (30:40-34:54, Figure 6). This sequence of 23 shots features three (Shots 3, 9, and 19) that are each longer than the longest shot in An Inn in Tokyo (25.3 sec). The first two shots of the sequence provide one of the false transitions discussed by Bordwell in his analysis of

The Ukigusa Story

Several examples of pictorial shots interrupted by intertitles can be found in A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), the film that immediately precedes An Inn in Tokyo in Ozu’s oeuvre. However, A Story of Floating Weeds presents a different opportunity for comparison between the silent and sound periods of Ozu’s oeuvre, in that he remade the film in 1959 in color and sound as Floating Weeds. Separated by 25 years

Figure 7. A Story of Floating Weeds.

Although Ozu made significant changes to the Ukigusa story between 1934 and 1959 on a nearly scene-by-scene basis, the basic outline remains the same, and the family relationship between the mother, father and son is the core of the story. While a full comparison of the two versions of Floating Weeds is impossible here, we can again examine matching scenes to look for differences in Ozu’s style. For instance, the

Figure 8. Floating Weeds.

Figure 9. A Story of Floating Weeds. Dissolution of the family.

At the level of individual scenes, however, a cinemetrical analysis might provide a different picture. Using the climactic confrontation between mother, father and son as an example, a drastically different editing style can be seen. The scene in A Story of Floating Weeds displays a very flat trendline and has an overall ASL of 3.7 with a cutting swing of 2.0 (Figure 9). Although the measurement differentiates between pictorial shots

1. (ms) Otsune speaking

2. Intertitle of Otsune’s words

3. (ms) Shinkichi

4. Intertitle of Otsune’s words

5. (ms) Shinkichi

6. (ms) Otsune speaking

7. Intertitle of Otsune’s words

8. (ms) Otsune speaking

9. Intertitle of Otsune’s words

10. (ms) Shinkichi

11. (ms) Otsune speaking

12. Intertitle of Otsune’s words

13. (ms) Shinkichi

14. Intertitle of Otsune’s words

15. (ms) Shinkichi

Bordwell would undoubtedly point out the stanza-like pattern of this group of shots: shots 1-5 mirror shots 11-15, with shots 6-10 slightly modifying the rhyme scheme by placing Otsune in the central shot instead of Shinkichi. However, looking at this scene in comparison to a sound film, it is clear that this juxtaposition of intertitles between medium shots of speaker and listener has the effect of overlapping dialogue. However, in

This question is of course a trap, particularly when we ask it about someone like Ozu, whose entire goal, as Bordwell argues, is to play with the viewer’s expectations, which are based on conventional cinematic style. In 1959, equipped with the tool of sound, we might expect a director to retain or even expand Oyoshi’s speech, giving the actress a scene that could demonstrate her individual skill as an artist.

Figure 10. Floating Weeds. Dissolution of the family.

No doubt, dialogue is also extremely important in the analogous scene in Floating Weeds. The film and genre are still the same, and we expect a family drama to climax with more dialogue and emotional expressions than physical action. [

] But in the confrontation scene in Floating Weeds, dynamic staging takes on the role of overt narration that Ozu’s intertitles played in the 1934 version. Oyoshi’s appeal to

Ozu and Play

For Bordwell, Ozu’s style represents a ludic engagement with the Hollywood style he admired. Ozu playfully subverts and toys with paradigmatic Hollywood devices and rules, especially the 180-degree rule and rules governing camera placement and movement, shot patterns and construction, the use of intertitles, and nearly everything having to do with classical Hollywood filmmaking practices. Bordwell writes that, “In Ozu, the principle of a ludic narration pervades the entire

Briefly, I want to propose another explanation of the effect of the regularity in Ozu’s editing, the rarity of his deviation from a small range of shot durations. Borrowing from Bordwell’s identification of a ludic principle operating in Ozu’s films, the director’s regular editing also allows for the creation of playful narrative surprises and shocks by subverting the “subliminal norms” and “tacit expectations” established by the films’ repetitive meter.

Some examples of the other technique, showing significant or extraordinary events in normally timed shots, can be found in the Ukigusa films. The first scenes in which Kihachi beats Otoki (1934) and Komajuro beats Kayo (1959) appear shocking not only because we have not seen him behave this way before, but also because the steady rhythm of Ozu’s editing tends to lull the audience into a comfortable register of spectatorship.

When more options for displaying and reading the statistics derived from CineMetrics become available, and when more films are measured, we will be able to draw more concrete conclusions from the data about the effect of the editing on the film experience and the changes Ozu made between silent and sound versions of the same story or similar scenes. Other statistical data in the films can also be measured, including

The addition of sound to Ozu’s filmmaking practice clearly had tangible effects on the way his films looked (and sounded), but it is remarkable that he was still able to find ways to maintain the regular rhythm and create the subliminal norms that characterized his desired editing style. Despite the massive increase in shot length as a result of the transition to sound, Ozu was able to maintain the regular