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

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

Footnotes

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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.

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Thompson, p. 9

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Bordwell, Ozu, pp. 151-152, 155-159.

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Ibid.

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Ibid, p. 155.

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Ibid, p. 158.

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Ibid, p. 75-76.

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Ibid, p. 76.

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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.

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Bordwell, p. 19.

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Ibid, p. 75.

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Ibid, p. 67.

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

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

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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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).

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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

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Salt, p. 282.

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Bordwell, p. 377.

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Ibid.

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Ibid.

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Bordwell, p. 67.

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Quoted in Bordwell, p. 271.

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Bordwell, pp. 271-272.

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Ibid, p. 67.

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Ibid, 56-57.

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

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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.

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See Bordwell, pp. 83-85.

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Ibid, p. 98.

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

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Ibid, p. 66.

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Ibid, 75-76.

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

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

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Ibid, p. 75.

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

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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’.

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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).

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 1930s) any norms that did exist may well be unrecoverable. Second, Ozu was heavily influence by Hollywood, as were many of his contemporary Japanese directors. Ozu was a member of the Film Science Research Group, a gathering of Japanese directors who would literally dissect American films for information on shot length and cutting patterns. [

] Bordwell writes that in Japan, “scenarists were urged to study Hollywood scripts, and cinematographers counted and timed shots as they watched American films.” [

] Ozu himself placed so much importance on editing rhythms that he had a special stopwatch built that registered both seconds and frames of film, allowing him to intricately control the duration of each shot when filming the scene and when doing the editing. [

] Fortunately, we have a large (and growing) set of data from American and Hollywood films of the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and beyond with which to establish a general set of norms and trends against which Ozu’s style can be compared and defined. Very generally, what is “typical” of Hollywood editing style?

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 shot lengths and a dynamic cutting profile that tends to either increase or decrease through the course of the film. For instance, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) feature marked decreases in ASL as they progress, even though they feature relatively small cutting swings. The Birth of a Nation begins at around 9 seconds per shot and ends up at 5, and Intolerance starts at about 7.5 and increases to 4.5. As Griffith’s style is considered prototypical for what would become classical Hollywood style, his films provide paradigmatic examples of general Hollywood tendencies that can be compared to Ozu’s style. Later silent Hollywood comedies, such as Buster Keaton’s 1927 The General, may provide a better data set against which to compare Ozu’s silent comedies. Also currently available on the CineMetrics website for comparison with Ozu is Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade (1929) (Figure 2). Although this is a sound film, made five years after the influential The Marriage Circle, it does provide a marked contrast to Ozu’s later sound films, particularly when viewed with a higher, more sensitive trendline. The marked changes in editing tempo over the course of the film are underscored by the film’s high cutting swing: with an overall ASL of 13.3 seconds (475 shots over 105 minutes 18 seconds), the cutting swing is 18.4, resulting in a wide range of durations for the majority of the film’s shots (from 0 to 31.7 seconds).

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 of angles so that some cutting within the scene could still be done, but the final cut of the image track had to correspond exactly with the single sound recording that had been made. It was more economical to shoot long takes of dialogue than continue with fast editing and shot/ reverse shot style featuring one line of dialogue per shot, a style that had been conventionalized during the silent era. A side effect of this was the rise of the musical, which could feature long takes of the film star singing. This is borne out by the measurement of The Love Parade, in which Charles O’Brien distinguishes between ‘story’ shots and ‘song’ shots: the ASL of the ‘song’ shots (20.8) is almost twice that of the ‘story’ shots (11.2). Another dialogue-related reason for the increase in ASL was the absence of intertitles. Even without shot/ reverse shot, dialogue scenes that were shot with two or more characters in one frame no longer had to be interrupted by intertitles after each actor said their line. Scenes could be played out between multiple actors for a longer time without cutting away to a reaction shot or an intertitle.

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 intertitles. Beginning with shot 21 (after the fifth intertitle), there is a long exchange between Kihachi and Zenko, who pretends serves his father sake and a meal of noodles. The action is filmed in a two-shot with Kihachi on the left facing Zenko on the right; both are seated on the ground. This exchange lasts 1 minute 36 seconds, divided by 22 cuts, alternating between pictorial shots and intertitles in a 1:1 ratio. With the intertitles, the scene fits nicely in Ozu’s overall editing rhythm. The trendline of the sequence is very even, with a cutting swing of 3; the trendline of the overall film is also very even, and has a cutting swing of 3.2. But with such a small number of shots in an individual scene, the trendline is not our focus here. Rather, I am interested in the number of intertitles that break up the feast sequence. Of the nineteen intertitles, eleven of them are inserted into the single shot in which Kihachi and Zenko mime a meal. During this exchange the camera does not move at all. Although we cannot tell for certain whether the exchange we see is comprised of a combination of several takes of the same scene or the entire scene was performed all at once, the effect is that the scene is fluid, that the camera does not move and that the action as it is depicted in shot 21 continues through shot 43. Without the intertitles, the shot would be longer than a minute, over twice as long as the longest shot in the entire film. Although a single instance of such a shot would not make a significant statistical or stylistic difference in a film composed of 1040 shots, multiple instances of similar intertitle interruptions would drastically change the look and rhythm of the film. Though a thorough measure has not been done, if we imagine the number of medium shots of speakers interrupted by intertitles that are immediately resumed after the intertitle disappears, a common practice in silent cinema, it seems obvious that a major shift in editing style and rhythm would result from the removal of these intertitles.

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 in the life and career of the director, the differences between these two films are too vast to do justice to them here. However, for the purposes of this paper, we might begin to trace out some similarities and differences between these two films using the CineMetrics tool. The graph of A Story of Floating Weeds shows the same characteristically Ozuian regularity of ASL over the course of the film (Figure 7). At trendline 1, the film exhibits a slight increase in ASL from the beginning (around 5) to the end (about 4.1), but for the most part the editing speed remains around the overall ASL of 4.6 throughout the film, only dipping below 3 toward the end. This is reflected in the cutting swing of 3.5, indicating that most of the shots in the film are between 1.1 and 8.1 seconds. The macrostructural symmetry of Ozu’s narrative discussed by Bordwell can also be seen in the graph of the entire film. [

] At Step 1, trendline 6, there are two slight humps at the beginning and end of the film, with a smaller hump exactly in the middle, at around 44-45 minutes. This symmetrical pattern is also evident in the graphs for An Inn in Tokyo and Floating Weeds. (Ozu’s “bewilderment” with true sound recording and the absence of intertitles may account for the asymmetry of the graph of The Only Son.) The [

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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 climax at the end of each film, in which the mother reveals the father’s identity to their son, provides such an example. Despite the overall flatness of Ozu’s cinemetric curves, both versions of Floating Weeds tend to crest around this moment in the narrative: that is, the editing speed of both films reaches a high point at the moment of confrontation and revelation. Before closely analyzing the climactic confrontation scenes, a few words should be said about the graphs of the overall films (Figures 7 and 8). When we initially look at the graphs using the same trendline degree (6), it is immediately clear that the line for Floating Weeds appears more dynamic (‘curvier’) than that of A Story of Floating Weeds. This could result from a few factors. First, we might assume that Ozu’s editing became more dynamic (however subtly) as he got older, and so his films had a more variable range of shot lengths used to make his narratives more expressive or more exciting. However, the raw data from the 1959 film still reveal an ASL that is greater than the cutting swing, indicating a relatively controlled and restricted range of shot durations. This statistic is a bit misleading, as the potential range of shot durations within one standard deviation of the mean in Floating Weeds (1.3 to 13.5) is far larger than that of A Story of Floating Weeds (1.1 to 8.1), but the graphs nevertheless bear out this tendency toward regularity and evenness. The trendline of Floating Weeds at degree 6 can be further flattened by adjusting the ‘Step’ function to 1 in order to show more of the shots in the graph. For Floating Weeds, making this adjustment results in a trendline that is more characteristically Ozuian and flat, indicating that perhaps his cutting style had not changed that drastically from silent to sound, or even for the 25 years between his Ukigusa films. The precipitous dip in cutting speed at the end of the film, from nearly 6 seconds per shot to about 11.5 seconds per shot in about 12 minutes of screen time is a bit puzzling, but can at least partially be explained by the 3 shots longer than 30 seconds (along with one longer than 20) within the last 10 minutes of the film. One of these lasts 50 seconds, and depicts Sumiko’s devoted, agonized attempt to light Komajuro’s cigarette.

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 her son takes place in a long shot with Komajuro seated on the left, Oyoshi standing on the right, and Kiyoshi standing exactly in the center, his back to the camera and his head cut off by the top edge of the frame, emphasizing his height and literally causing him to “stand out” in contrast to his parents. In this version, the staging expresses the characters’ relative mental states more than the dialogue: Komajuro sits dejectedly, no longer attempting to conceal his age and impotence, which have just been exposed by his own son’s manhandling of him; Oyoshi stands, her body slightly bent, fearful that she will lose both her companion and her son; and Kiyoshi faces away from the camera, his head out of the camera’s range, not even allowing the audience to attempt to penetrate the vacant stare he wears through most of the film. The eloquence of the mother’s speech in the 1934 version, in which Ozu could use intertitles to exercise his overt narration, is removed from the scene for the sound version, its overt narrative expressivity replaced by intricate staging that, if anything, represents Kayo’s point of view as silent witness to the proceedings.

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. [

] Though we might expect moments of violence to be accompanied by fast editing and brief shots, Ozu subverts our expectations in this regard, as Bordwell aptly points out: “There will be no sudden accelerations, no flurry of rapid shots; the calm pace of the cutting will match the unfolding syuzhet events.” [

] Very often, these two conditions will coincide: a significant event will be shown in a longer than average shot. The attacks on Otoki/ Kayo and Otaka/ Sumiko in the theater are timed more or less regularly, but the altercation with the son at the end in both versions occurs in a longer than average shot and, of course, marks perhaps the most significant moment in the narrative. When Kihachi/ Kiyoshi steps [

] In the 1959 version, the father/ son struggle is longer than average for the scene, but not as long relative to the average as the shot in the 1934 version. [

] Instead, the shots of Kiyoshi bringing Kayo to his mother for approval (~23.3 seconds) and of Komajuro apologizing to Kayo and asking her to look after Kiyoshi, thereby entrusting his future to her (~21 seconds), are weighted more heavily in terms of shot duration. Whether they outweigh the shot of Kiyoshi’s manhandling of Komajuro in terms of narrative significance is more a matter of interpretation.