Yasujirô Ozu - Tokyo Chorus (1931)

Tôkyô no kôrasu (1931)

(English title: Tokyo Chorus

1h 30min | Comedy, Drama | 15 August 1931 (Japan)

Director: Yasujirô Ozu

Writers: Komatsu Kitamura, Kôgo Noda

Stars: Tokihiko Okada, Emiko Yagumo, Hideo Sugawara

Mr. Omura, a teacher, leads a group of male students in an outdoor drill. One slight, comic young man, Shinji Okajima, has no shirt under his jacket; he scratches at fleas and makes faces behind Omura's back. Jump ahead several years, Shinji is married with three children and works for an insurance firm. Combining three prevalent genres of the day—the student comedy, the salaryman film, and the domestic drama—Ozu created this warmhearted family comedy, and demonstrated that he was truly coming into his own as a cinema craftsman. The setup is simple: Low wage–earning dad Okajima is depending on his bonus, and so are his wife and children, yet payday doesn’t exactly go as planned. Exquisite and economical, Ozu’s film alternates between brilliantly mounted comic sequences and heartrending working-class realities.

With his singular and unwavering style, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu disregarded the established rules of cinema and created a visual language all his own. Precise compositions, contemplative pacing, low camera angles, and elliptical storytelling are just some of the signature techniques the great filmmaker used to evoke a sense of melancholy and poetry in everyday existence. Now, a new video essay, called “The Depths of Simplicity” and posted to YouTube by Channel Criswell, explores the aesthetic and narrative motifs that recur across Ozu’s extensive body of work. The video, an astute seventeen-minute analysis, breaks down and illustrates Ozu’s innovative way of shooting dialogue, the temporal fractures in his narratives, his rigorous commitment to visual symmetry, and his ability to capture the intricacies of sadness—to name just a few of the topics covered. “His style managed to walk a line so narrow that it can’t be taught,” says Lewis Bond, the video’s narrator and the creator of Channel Criswell. “The best way to understand it is to feel it.”