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Ozu's Anti-Cinema. By YOSHIDA KIJU. Translated by DAISUKE MIYAO and KYOKO HIRANO. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, no. 49. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003. xx, 178 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper).
Just when one imagines that the films of Ozu Yasujiro could not attract any new analytical approaches, a new publication such as Yoshida Kiju's (Yoshishige's) Ozu's Anti-Cinema appears. The fascinating term "anti-cinema" refers to Ozu's refusal to indulge in the glamour of movie making and his refusal to fill the viewer's world with "useless and gratuitous gazes" (p. 35).
Yoshida (b. 1933) follows a distinguished group of writers who have attempted to explicate Ozu's deceptively simple cinematic universe-writers such as Donald Richie (Ozu [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974]), David Bordwell (Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema [London: BFI; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988]), and Hasumi Shigehiko (Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro [Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1983]), among others. Paul Schrader's (Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer [University of California Press, 1972]) description of "transcendental qualities" in films focused on three directors: Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. In To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (University of California Press; London: Scolar Press, 1979), Noël Burch decided that Ozu's style represents a rejection of Western representational illusionism and codes of realism. As film scholar Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro suggests, there have been three main viewpoints from which to judge Ozu's films: the perspective of traditional aesthetics, as exemplars...