Change, Horizon, and Event in Ozu's Late Spring

Film-Philosophy, Volume 20 Issue 2-3, Page 283-302 Many commentators on the films of Ozu Yasujirō have insisted on the importance of the observation and evocation of change in the director's work. Change may be understood in this regard as personal, social, or cosmic: as a transformation that characters and their relationships undergo, as the giving way of traditional norms and adoption of new modes of living, or as an ephemerality that characterises all existence, human or otherwise. In this article, I will offer a reading of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) inspired by Gilles Deleuze's brief consideration of Ozu's work in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). In doing so, I will situate Deleuze's claims about Ozu both in relation to some of his other philosophical writings, and to various claims made by scholars, theorists, and critics in considering Ozu's work, particularly Late Spring. The first section will use a number of these writers to establish Ozu's engagement with social change, as well as the fact that such engagement is linked to both a considerable involvement in the lives of his characters and a metaphysical outlook that emerges through the relations binding style and narration. Like many of Ozu's best critics, Deleuze emphasises the films' observation of social change, but he also clearly recognises an affinity to his own philosophy in the metaphysical vision refracted in the filmmaker's work. Ozu is for him ‘the greatest critic of daily life’, whose films after the Second World War observe the ‘mutation of an Americanized Japan’ (1985/2005, p. 18–9), but these films also, Deleuze claims, establish a perspective in which ‘one and the same horizon links the cosmic to the everyday, the durable to the changing’ (p. 17). It is above all in his analysis of the famous images of a vase set before a shoji screen in Late Spring that Deleuze's view of Ozu's work crystallises, and it is by way of this crystallisation that I ultimately argue for the importance of linking change to questions of horizon and event.