silver nitrate notes

Late Spring and Ozu's Empty Chair

23 apr 2024

Yasujirō Ozu's Late Spring (1949) is the first of the films he made with Yūharu Atsuta that established the mature Ozu style. The film is about a widowed professor (Chishū Ryū) whose adult daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) has been living with and caring for him. Their aunt decides Noriko should marry. Noriko does not want to marry. The professor, to free Noriko from her sense of duty to him, pretends he intends to remarry. Noriko agrees to marry. The professor does not remarry. The film ends with him alone.

Atsuta's photography for Ozu in this film is where the "tatami shot" becomes the default visual mode. The camera is at three feet off the ground. It does not move during shots. Scenes are cut on plain matches. Characters enter and leave the frame at conversational pace. What Ozu and Atsuta add to this baseline, and what they would refine for another fourteen years before Ozu's death in 1963, is the use of cutaway shots to objects in the room: a doorway, a vase, a hallway, an empty chair. These cutaways are not establishing shots. They do not show us anything we need to know for narrative reasons. They exist as a kind of visual rhythm.

The final sequence is the one everyone writes about. The professor returns from Noriko's wedding to his now-empty house. He sits in his living room. He peels an apple. He lowers his head. Ozu cuts to the chair Noriko used to sit in. The chair is empty. Ozu cuts to a shot of the sea at night, at low tide, with the boats visible in the distance. The film ends. Three shots, about thirty seconds total. The emotional argument is not in the father's face. It is in the empty chair and the sea.

The technique would be refined in Tokyo Story (1953) and in Ozu's subsequent films through An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Late Spring is where the method is first fully on screen. Noriko, the character, recurs in three Ozu films with different actresses and different circumstances, always played by Hara. The trilogy is sometimes called the Noriko trilogy. It is, on my personal list, the greatest set of three films by a single director in twentieth-century cinema.

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sources
[1] Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton UP, 1988.
[2] Richie, Donald. Ozu. University of California Press, 1974.
[3] Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film. University of California Press, 1972.
[4] Criterion Collection essay by Michael Atkinson, 2006.