The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (314 page)

He worked for several years in British television before
Croupier:
he was John Ridd in a new version of
Lorna Doone
(90, Julian Nott) and he was Damon Wildeve in
The Return of the Native
(94, Jack Gold). He also got a lot of attention in two series
—Chancer
and
Sharman
, and he was “The Driver” in a series of BMW commercials for the Internet, a pretty good indication of his new iconographic potential.

Just before
Croupier
, he played a homosexual in
Bent
(97, Sean Mathias), and he made a public show of his sexual indeterminacy—all the easier to do in that every woman who saw him jumped to their own conclusions. He was in
Gosford Park
(01, Robert Altman);
The Bourne Identity
(02, Doug Liman);
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
(03, Hodges); faltering badly as
King Arthur
(04, Antoine Fuqua)—he is not made for period costume; returned to form in
Sin City
(05, Frank Miller); quite good as the fall guy in the offbeat
Derailed
(05, Mikael Hafstrom); playing with amused authority in
Inside Man
(06, Spike Lee); and outstanding in
Children of Men
(06, Alfonso Cuarón).

So why does he have to do
Shoot ’Em Up
(07, Michael Davis); Sir Walter Raleigh in
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
(07, Shekhar Kapur),
The International
or
Duplicity?

François Ozon
, b. Paris, 1967
1988:
Photo de Famille
(s);
Les Doigts dans le Ventre
(s); 1991:
Une Goutte de Sang
(s);
Le Trou Madame
(s);
Peau Contre Peau
(s);
Deux Plus Un
(s); 1992:
Thomas Reconstitué
(s); 1993:
Victor
(s); 1994:
Action Vérité
(s). 1995:
La Petite Mort
(s);
Jospin S’Éclaire
(s); 1996:
Une Robe d’Été
(s); 1997:
Regarde la Mer/See the Sea; Scènes de Lit
(s). 1998:
Sitcom; X 2000
(s). 1999:
Les Amants Criminels/Criminal Lovers; Gouttes d’Eau sur Pierres Brûlantes/Water Drops on Burning Rocks
. 2000:
Sous le Sable/Under the Sand
. 2002:
8 Femmes/8 Women
. 2003:
Swimming Pool
. 2004:
5×2
. 2005:
Le Temps que Reste / Time to Leave
. 2007:
Angel
. 2009:
Ricky
.

8 Femmes
is an all-star murder mystery, fondly old-fashioned, and likely to repeat its French success all over the world. But it would be a mistake to identify Ozon with its nostalgic style or attitude. He is a film-school kid who made movies on Super 8 as a teenager and naturally carried on in a series of short films, many of which are funny, pretty (in the best sense), and so piquant as narratives as to make one ask yet again—what happened to the short?

But there is a darker or graver Ozon, most evident so far in
See the Sea
, which builds from calm and friendship to a troubling climax; a murder story in
Criminal Lovers;
and—best of all
—Under the Sand
, in which Charlotte Rampling is a woman who “loses” her husband and has to go through mourning to whatever else may be beyond. With the eloquent image of Rampling,
Under the Sand
was a little reminiscent of Antonioni with Monica Vitti. It makes me hope that there are great films—far better than
8 Women
—to come from Ozon.

Yasujiro Ozu
(1903–63), b. Tokyo
1927:
Zange no Yaiba/The Sword of Penitence
. 1928:
Wakado no Yume/The Dreams of Youth; Nyobo Funshitsu/Wife Lost; Kabocha/Pumpkin; Hikkoshi Fufu/A Couple on the Move; Nikutai Bi/Body Beautiful
. 1929:
Takara no Yama/Treasure Mountain; Wakaki Hi/Days of Youth; Wasei Kenka Tomodachi/Fighting Friends, Japanese Style; Daigaku wa Deta Keredo/I Graduated, But…; Kaisha-in Seikatsu/The Life of an Office Worker; Tokkan Kozo/A Straightforward Boy
. 1930:
Kekkongaku Nyomon/An Introduction to Marriage; Hogaraka ni Ayume/Walk Cheerfully; Rakudai wa Shita Keredo/I Flunked, But …;
Sono Yo no Tsuma/That Night’s Wife; Erogami no Onryo/The Revengeful Spirit of Eros; Ashi ni Sawatta Koun/Lost Luck; Ojosan/Young Miss
. 1931:
Shukujoto Hige/The Lady and the Beard; Bijin Aishu/Beauty’s Sorrow; Tokyo no Gassho/Tokyo’s Chorus
. 1932:
Haru wa Gofujin Kara/Spring Comes from the Ladies; Umarete wa Mita Keredo/I Was Born, But…; Seishun no Yume Ima Izuko/Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?; Mata Au Hi Made/Until the Day We Meet Again
. 1933:
Tokyo no Onna/A Tokyo Woman; Hijosen no Onna/Dragnet Girl; Dekigokoro/Passing Fancy
. 1934:
Haha o Kowazu-Ya/A Mother Should Be Loved; Ukigusa Monogatari/A Story of Floating Weeds
. 1935:
Hakoiri Musume/An Innocent Maid; Tokyo no Tado/An Inn in Tokyo
. 1936:
Daigaku Yoi Toko/College Is a Nice Place; Hitori Musuko/The Only Son
. 1937:
Shukujo wa Nani o Wasuretaka/What Did Her Lady Forget?
1941:
Toda-ke no Kyodai/The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
. 1942:
Chichi Ariki/There Was a Father
. 1947:
Nagaya no Shinshi Roku/The Record of a Tenement Gentleman
. 1948:
Kaze no Naka no Mendori/A Hen in the Wind
. 1949:
Ban-shun/Late Spring
. 1950:
Munekata Shimai/The Munekata Sisters
. 1951:
Bakushu/Early Summer
. 1952:
Ochazuke no Aji/The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
. 1953:
Tokyo Monogatari/Tokyo Story
. 1956:
Soshun/Early Spring
. 1957:
Tokyo Boshoku/Twilight in Tokyo
. 1958:
Higanbana/ Equinox Flower
. 1959:
Ohayo/Good Morning; Ukigusa/Floating Weeds
. 1960:
Akibiyori/Late Autumn
. 1961:
Kohayagawa-ke no Aki/The End of Summer
. 1962:
Samma no Aji/An Autumn Afternoon
.

When Roger Manvell’s
Film and the Public
was published in 1955, it had not one mention of Ozu, and would not have been attacked for the omission. Penelope Houston’s
Contemporary Cinema
, published in the year of Ozu’s death, had no doubt about his significance, but still employed Ozu as an example of filmmaking too austere, slow, or quietist for large audiences.

The West caught up with Ozu only a few years before his death, when his greatest movies urged their way into European film festivals. The story is not so different from the late appreciation of Mizoguchi. But Mizoguchi’s films—especially the “monogatari”—are more eventful, more passionate, and more “moving” than Ozu’s contemplation of the seasons. There is an easy joke that no one can tell one Ozu film from another: but is that a failing or a virtue? After all, we notice a similar consistency in Hawks, Godard, Bergman, or Buñuel.

Ozu’s most important characteristic is his way of watching the world. While that attitude is modest and unassertive, it is also the source of great tenderness for people. It is as if Ozu’s one personal admission was the faith that the basis of decency and sympathy can only be sustained by the semireligious effort to observe the world in his style; in other words, contemplation calms anxious activity. As with Mizoguchi, one comes away from Ozu heartened by his humane intelligence and by the gravity we have learned.

The intensive viewing of Ozu—and such stylistic rigor encourages nothing less—makes questions of Japaneseness irrelevant. There have been attempts to explain Ozu by reference to his native culture, and it is easy to pin his mysticism to facile notions of the East. Even Ozu himself believed that his subject matter was too provincial to travel outside Japan. Some critics have tried to illuminate his films by reference to Buddhism, Japanese pottery, domestic ritual, and haiku.

All of those are worth considering. But the most useful point to make is that Ozu uses a minimal but concentrated camera style: static, a little lower than waist height, with few camera movements, dissolves, or fades. The intentness of the image, and its emotional resonance, is not only as relevant to the West as to Japan; it is a return to fundamental cinema, such as we can see in Dreyer, Bresson, Lang, and even Warhol, whose characters sit as habitually as Ozu’s. Nor is there anything limitingly Oriental in Ozu’s ability to create deep anguish or joy in the crosscutting of faces. There are similar moments in Hitchcock or Lang, when we are made to apprehend the unverbalized feelings that rush between people, and which are only defined by the constructive power of editing.

This Ozu is less difficult than demanding. When you watch him, think more of the camera than of what little we know of Japanese culture. The seeming repetition of his work—of middle-class domestic interiors, marital stories, the same actors, and abiding camera setups—is a proof of his constancy. The family relationships he describes are by no means un-Western. Ozu has a sense of pathos that travels easily, while only Mizoguchi can treat overwhelming feelings with such restraint. Ozu is worthy of attention by the highest claims of an international art; demurring from rhetorical outburst, expressive camera angles, and the turmoil of melodrama, he insists on the photographic substance in faces, interiors, and the spaces between people.

Not enough of Ozu is available; little can be seen easily, or in ideal circumstances. But these are key films to look for:
I Was Born, But…
(32), a picture of the world as seen through children’s eyes, aware of pain, but boisterous, funny, and earthy;
A Story of Floating Weeds
(34), about traveling players in the countryside, a movie filled with the chanciness of weather;
Late Spring
(49), a very delicate study of a father and a daughter both wondering about marriage, but anxious not to offend the other;
Tokyo Story
(53), the film that established Ozu in the West; and the late masterpieces, still lifes with intense movements of hope and yearning passing across the fame of the family—
Late Autumn
(60);
The End of Summer
(61); and
An Autumn Afternoon
(62).

It may be that Ozu’s greatness depends on stories about the family, and so often parents and grownup children. But something should be said about his versatility. In his rich silent period, he was often very funny—never so much as when dealing with children:
I Was Born, But …
finds enormous comic spirit in the kids.
Dragnet Girl
, from 1933, is a kind of film noir, about a gangster and his woman; equally,
That Night’s Wife
was a tribute to von Sternberg’s underworld films. Then again, in the 1930s, Ozu did several movies—like
An Inn in Tokyo
—that prefigure Italian neorealism. During the war, he made movies about stability and family dramas that ignore the state of war.

There is one crucial way in which Ozu is, if not purely Japanese, a challenge to American movie habits. The Western moviegoer will hardly be able to resist Ozu (he
is
a treasury), but there is some truth in the claim that he is resigned or conservative. The world, the family, and ordinary persistence hold firm in his pictures. For example, in
A Hen in the Wind
, a soldier returns from the war to discover that his wife has turned to prostitution in his absence. Disruption threatens. But the couple find compromise, reconciliation, and the necessary sadness of going on. In so many family pictures, the suffocation of a relationship is not escaped. Kindness may free the young to marry (as in
Late Spring
and its companion,
Late Autumn
), but marriage is only another room in the same small house. The use of the seasons in so many titles suggests the circular and impregnable round of life. Ozu
is
conservative: he does not believe in escape, and so he arranges his tales in moods of acceptance and quietism.

That disturbs some American viewers because so many American films are pledged to the energy that “breaks out.” Our stories promote the hope of escape, of beginning again, of beneficial disruptions. One can see that energy—hopeful, and often damaging, but always romantic—in films as diverse as
The Searchers, Citizen Kane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Run of the Arrow, Rebel Without a Cause, Vertigo, Bonnie and Clyde, Greed
, and
The Fountainhead
. No matter how such stories end, explosive energy is endorsed.

Those explosions are a metaphor for the light of movies and for the emphasis on indulged fantasy in American pictures. Our films are spirals of wish fulfillment, pleas for envy, the hustle to get on with the pursuit of happiness. By contrast, Ozu’s films seem to be modeled on novels or plays—Tolstoy or Chekhov—certain that there is no escape, no getting away, and no proper place for fantasy in living. Which is not to say that Ozu’s people lack energy or the habit of dreaming. But that urge is contained within the sense of fatality and certain outcome—as it is, say, in
The Earrings of Madame de …, The Shop Around the Corner, The Magnificent Ambersons, French Can Can
. So Ozu is a vital lesson to American film, and provocation to us to be wise, calm, and more demanding in what we want of our films.

P

Georg Wilhelm Pabst
(1885–1967), b. Raudnitz, Czechoslovakia
1923:
Der Schatz
. 1924:
Gräfin Donelli
. 1925:
Die Freudlose Gasse
. 1926:
Geheimnisse einer Seele; Man Spielt Nicht mit der Liebe
. 1927:
Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney
. 1928:
Abwege/Begierde; Die Büchse der Pandora/Pandora’s Box
. 1929:
Die Weisse Hölle von Piz-Palü
(codirected with Arnold Fanck);
Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen
. 1930:
Westfront 1918; Skandal um Eva
. 1931:
Die Dreigroschenoper/The Threepenny Opera; Kameradschaft
. 1932:
Die Herrin von Atlantis/L’Atlantide
. 1933:
Don Quichotte; Du Haut en Bas
. 1934:
A Modern Hero
. 1936:
Mademoiselle Docteur
. 1938:
Le Drame de Shanghai
. 1939:
Jeunes Filles en Détresse
. 1940:
Feuertaufe
(d). 1941:
Komodianten
. 1943:
Paracelsus
. 1944:
Der Fall Molander
. 1947:
Der Prozess
. 1949:
Geheimnisvolle Tiefen
. 1952:
La Voce del Silenzio
. 1953:
Cose da Pazzi
. 1954:
Das Bekenntnis der Ina Kahr
. 1955:
Der Letzte Akt; Es Geschah am 20 Juli
. 1956:
Rosen für Bettina; Durch die Walder, Durch die Auen
.