Reflecting Hollywood: Mobility and lightness in the early silent films of Ozu Yasujiro, 1927--1933

This dissertation examines the early silent films of Ozu Yasujiro, one of the most renowned Japanese film directors, focusing on the influence of Hollywood cinema on his works. By analyzing Ozu's films as well as drawing upon the late-1920s Japanese context of modern mass culture, in which Hollywood films were celebrated above all for their qualities of "lightness" ("American lightness") and "mobility" (that expresses lightness), I argue that the essential part of the influence of Hollywood cinema upon Ozu was in an aesthetics of mobility and lightness. As I detail, Ozu was so faithful to this Hollywood aesthetics that he often imitated the way in which his most admired directors—including Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg—treated cinematic mobility. Through his exploration of the aesthetics of mobility and lightness as well as his imitation of some Hollywood directors, Ozu developed his own film aesthetics that turned out to be—paradoxically—quite different from the original. The first goal of my dissertation is to trace Ozu's silent oeuvre in respect of his exploration of film aesthetics, particularly the elaboration of his "idiosyncratic" film styles, such as "eyeline-mismatched shot/reverse shots" and "empty shots," as well as the way in which Ozu's film acquired a sense of ephemerality, a dominant mood of his films after a certain point, from the Hollywood quality of lightness.;In addition to delineating Ozu's silent oeuvre, my dissertation situates Ozu's film practice within the local and global context of silent cinema. With numerous reviews and articles written on Ozu's films and Hollywood films in 1920s and 1930s Japan, I refer to more theoretical works of Jean Epstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Dziga Vertov, and Iwasaki Akira, all of whom envisaged mobility as the essence of cinema in the late silent period. All of these cineastes thought of cinematic mobility not just as that of the profilmic object (e.g. a running train) but also as that of the medium, a world unfolding on the screen. Arguing that Ozu shared the same notion of cinematic mobility with these contemporaries (European avant-garde film theories were translated and discussed in Japan), I articulate Ozu's film practice more clearly with reference to them. At the same time, I attend to the difference between them: while the above theorists approached cinematic mobility in terms of "directness"—whether revelation of the truth of the photographed world (Epstein and Kracauer) or direct impact upon the viewer's sensorium (Vertov and Iwasaki)—Ozu associated cinematic mobility with a sense of lightness and, furthermore, ephemerality. By comparing Ozu and his contemporaries, I illuminate the unique position of the former in the silent-cinema horizon.;The five chapters trace Ozu's oeuvre in 1927–1933 in a roughly chronological order, showing how Ozu reached his three 1933 films that I propose as the peak of Ozu's silent aesthetics. The topics I focus on in each chapter include the reception context of Hollywood cinema in late-1920s Japan, other directors at the Kamata studio (Ushihara Kiyohiko and Shimazu Yasujiro), Ozu's eyeline-mismatched shot/reverse shots, the cinematic usage of material objects, and the proletarian cinema in interwar Japan (particularly Iwasaki Akira).