Category: 1962

An Autumn Afternoon (1962)

Yasujirō Ozu | 1hr 53min

Given how notoriously private Yasujirō Ozu was as a public figure, it is impossible to speculate with any certainty the reason why he never married. Considering that he was supposedly expelled from his boarding school for writing love letters to another boy, it is conceivable that he was a queer man living in conservative times. Alternatively, perhaps he simply valued his relationship with his mother over any romantic attachment, seeing as how he lived with her throughout his adulthood. His films never featured any surrogate characters explicitly representing him, and yet they were nevertheless a medium through which he deeply pondered those cultural Japanese traditions that he simultaneously was at odds with and adored.

With this context in mind, An Autumn Afternoon becomes all the more fascinating as Ozu’s last film in an incredibly vast career – not that he necessarily knew it would be at the time. His decline from throat cancer was sudden, seeing him pass away only a few months after his mother on his sixtieth birthday, leaving this as his final testament to the enduring purpose, duties, and conflicts of family and marriage. In its observations of a widowed father’s reluctant attempts to marry off his daughter Michiko, Late Spring’s narrative is specifically recaptured here, though the updated setting to 1960s also reveals Ozu’s complex relationship with the advance of Western modernity into Japanese civilisation.

Commercial indulgences are an irrevocable part of these characters’ lives, filling Shūhei and his companions with alcohol to the point of excess.
Ozu’s camera adores the colourful nightlife of the urban setting in An Autumn Afternoon, recognising the shift to Westernised market capitalism with flashing signs and vibrant graphics arranged in superb compositions.
Visual storytelling in the mise-en-scène details – a set of golf clubs referenced in an earlier argument appear in this corridor, subtly tying off this subplot.

The pillow shots that herald the restaurant where Shūhei drinks with his friends consistently bathe in flashing signs and vibrant graphics that light up storefronts, poignantly recognising the shift to market capitalism that has been imported from America and Europe. Commercial indulgences are an irrevocable part of these characters’ lives, filling Shūhei’s companions with alcohol to the point of excess, and sparking arguments in his son Kōichi’s marriage over a set of golf clubs he desperately desires. Later, those same clubs are integrated into one of Ozu’s trademark hallway shots among other perfectly arranged household items, economically tying off this subplot and signalling a broader shift towards consumerism.

Towards the end of Ozu’s career he began plastering his sets with patterned wallpaper, injecting his mise-en-scène with lively detail and colour.

Above all else though, the colour cinematography which Ozu had begun using four years prior in Equinox Flower may be the strongest stylistic decision made in An Autumn Afternoon, vividly accentuating the organised patterns and contrasts that he had already mastered in black-and-white. While the interior architecture is handsomely captured with patterned wallpaper around shoji doors and geometric frames, it is more frequently the small props and ornaments which inject bursts of primary colours into his muted scenery, each set with absolute precision. At the restaurant, mid-shots of Shūhei and his friends are lined along the bottom with a full rainbow assortment of ceramic cups and saucers, while an impeccably composed wide shot leads a line of yellow bar stools towards an alleyway washed in neon red lighting. Even when there are no humans in sight, every vivid detail points to their presence, quietly littering pillow shots as beautifully simple as embroidered rugs draped over apartment balconies and empty slippers laying outside closed doors.

A simple frame that scatters brown, green, yellow, and blue hues along the bottom with ceramic cups and saucers.
Subtle colour schemes developed in shots like these, mirroring the red across the giant lantern outside the window and the slippers, and blue through the slippers and walls.
An impeccably composed wide shot leads a line of yellow bar stools towards an alleyway washed in neon red lighting – after many decades of working in black-and-white, Ozu also proved his hand at colour photography.
Ozu’s pillow shots are never simply thrown away, contrasting multiple patterns across beautifully embroidered rugs over these balconies.

Most crucially, it is Ozu’s pairing of red and white which suggests a uniformity between Japanese tradition and industry in An Autumn Afternoon, mirrored between the striped smokestacks and steel drums of the very first shot. This palette continues to punctuate the mise-en-scène in sweaters, lanterns, and signs, before boldly arriving in Michiko’s elaborate white wedding gown and headdress accented with notes of crimson.

Perfect formal harmony in Ozu’s colours, with the red-and-white steel drums matching the red-and-white smokestacks. As the pillow shots take us inside an office building, still he continues that palette with the walls and decor.
A white wedding dress with flecks of red, continuing to develop Ozu’s striking colour palette.

Visual patterns such as these are important to connecting the public and private lives of Ozu’s characters, further revealing the unity of the two in pillow shots that steadily cut between several frames associated with a new scene, and gradually edge closer to its characters. Quite significantly, this approach maintains a soothing, consistent flow in the editing, rather than falling back on the sort of establishing shots that a more conventional director might turn to. As a result, Ozu can recall these compositions as shorthand whenever he returns to a familiar location – the smokestacks viewed from Shūhei’s office window for example, or the surrounding restaurants outside Tory’s Bar.

After initially introducing Tory’s Bar through pillow shots, Ozu simply refers to this frame as shorthand whenever we return there – astounding formal economy.

Narratively, this formal poetry is also reflected through multiple characters who signal some shift in the status quo, underscored by the two instances of current and former naval officers mockingly sending up patriotic military anthems. Although Japan’s national spirit was broken after losing World War II and replaced with scathing cynicism among younger generations, Shūhei continues to mourn its loss, and sorrowfully responds in private with songs about floating castles guarding the Land of the Rising Sun.

A pair of encounters in the bar confront Shūhei with the reality of Japan’s broken national spirit after its terrible losses – a poignant realisation for the former naval officer.

Through the character of the Gourd, a respected teacher who mentored Shūhei and his friends on Chinese classics, Ozu continues to reckon with Japan’s changing culture by envisioning the future that awaits our protagonist should Michiko never marry. Not only has the Gourd’s middle-aged daughter become a lonely spinster due to his desire to keep her for himself, but his own life has also fallen into disarray by limiting her prospects, condemning him to run a cheap noodle shop and suffer humiliation every day from his customers.

A noticeable shift in location when we move to the Gourd’s noodle shop in a rundown part of town, as Ozu’s pillow shots dwell on piles of debris and steel drums.

The catalyst for the second half of An Autumn Afternoon’s narrative is thus set off, spurring Shūhei to secure a husband for Michiko. The fact that Ozu only dwells on the moments when her wedding finally arrives is telling of what he truly values within these cherished relationships, as a montage moves through the vacant home to dwell on a standing mirror, Venetian blinds, and a red-cushioned stool. These are domestic items that don’t hold dramatic weight on their own, yet peacefully evoke Michiko’s absence, and disappear from view as the camera cuts to a view just outside the window.

Michiko’s marriage and departure from the family home leaves behind a wistful emptiness, as Ozu’s montage moves through the vacant home to dwell on a standing mirror, Venetian blinds, and a red-cushioned stool. These are domestic items that don’t hold dramatic weight on their own, yet peacefully evoke Michiko’s absence, and disappear from view as the camera cuts to a view just outside the window.

In the closing scene when Shūhei returns as an empty nester, Ozu frames him in a distant, wooden corridor of his last hallway shot, his back turned to the camera and slightly darkened by shadows. Ozu never inserted explicit representations of himself into his films, and yet Shūhei’s poignant resignation to change is one that this ageing director knows too well, having essentially spent the past thirty-five years recording Japan’s enormous cultural shifts on camera. If his life’s work is a cinematic suite testifying to the ongoing tension between tradition and progress, then An Autumn Afternoon makes for a tender final movement, resonating formal harmonies across generations to ultimately savour an undying faith in their shared humanity.

A mournful final shot as Ozu frames Shūhei in a distant, wooden doorway of the corridor, his back turned to the camera and slightly darkened by shadows.

An Autumn Afternoon is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to purchase on Amazon.

Knife in the Water (1962)

Roman Polanski | 1hr 41min

The moment that the mysterious, unnamed hitchhiker of Knife in the Water boards the yacht of upper-class couple Andrzej and Krystyna, Roman Polanski’s camera attaches to the switchblade he carries in his pocket. It proves its utility as a practical tool, cutting ropes when the boat ends up marooned in shallow water, and slicing up food during meals. The dangerous game the hitchhiker plays of Five Finger Fillet is surely an impressive feat of dexterity too, and although Andrzej puts an end to it with apparent concerns of ruining the deck, his competitive side soon emerges when they take turns throwing it at the wall. Going by the lingering close-ups that Polanski uses to suspensefully track the knife’s movement, it would be safe to assume that this is his Chekhov’s gun, and it indeed serves an integral role at the climax. Ultimately though, the symbolic weight that is placed in this phallic icon of masculinity far outweighs its physical danger, chillingly sinking a rocky marriage before it gets the chance to take a life.

Polanski’s phallic symbol of masculinity is wielded as a toy, a tool, and a subject of competition between the two men.

Although the hitchhiker is spontaneously invited along as a plaything for the wealthy couple, the insecurity he sparks in Andrzej transcends class boundaries, both being men vying for the attention of Krystyna. Adding to the tension as well is the suggestion that Krystyna herself may not necessarily belong in this upper stratosphere of society, having married into money rather than being born into it. The egotism of her rich husband is as plainly evident to her as the hitchhiker’s jealous desire to become him, constantly drawing them into contest over that all-important knife.

The only evidence that might hint at Knife in the Water being Polanski’s directorial debut is the clearly limited budget that confines much of his narrative to the yacht, though there are few single-location films as visually inventive and resourceful as this. No doubt this is in part due to his keen study of cinema’s greats, with his manipulation of suspense through tracking shots and editing bearing the mark of Alfred Hitchcock, and the incredible depth of field across extreme camera angles pointing to Orson Welles. Even the shrewd framing of multiple faces in close-ups delivers a hypothetical answer to the question of what a psychological thriller might look like if it were directed by Ingmar Bergman, and was grounded in social critique rather than existential horror. Quite remarkably though, Polanski’s visuals do not merely dwell in the shadow of his influences, but are given a new, distinctive shape that sits alongside some of their finest works.

Few directors have recognised the true potential of framing the human face in endless arrangements – Ingmar Bergman is among them and is clearly an influence on Polanski, though he is clearly carving out his own path too.

The yacht itself is a fascinatingly geometric set piece bound by ropes, poles, and sails, and yet Polanski prefers using his actors’ bodies as obstructions and frames in the mise-en-scène. Legs, heads, and arms are often isolated in the foreground, reflecting their fluctuating power dynamics as they take turns dominating the scenery, and disconnecting the characters from each other. Polanski intimately presses us against their bare skin from low camera positions, while high angles alternately lay their vulnerable, half-dressed bodies out on the deck, like sacrifices prepared on an altar. Being surrounded by open water, they are obviously not trapped in any physical confines, and yet within Polanski’s claustrophobic blocking they are all victims of a parasitic social environment that they have created for themselves.

In the absence of varied set pieces, Polanski’s mise-en-scène relies primarily on the bodies of his actors, segmenting them into limbs that frequently obstruct the frame.
Bodies laid out on the yacht like a sacrifice, bare and vulnerable.

After all, each passenger has something to selfishly gain from the others in this allegory of class and gender, letting us carefully scrutinise the complex web of desire and contempt that lies between them. When Andrzej first notices the hitchhiker on the road, he decides to teach him a lesson by swerving dangerously close to where he is standing, and when he invites the young man onboard, he wields his position of boat captain with smarmy authority. It is all a game to him, until he notices his dominance being undermined by the hitchhiker’s mocking jabs, minor rebellions, and flirty pursuit of Krystyna, who alternates in the middle between amusement and apprehension.

A composition loaded with tension, blocking the hitchhiker in the background between Andrzej and Krystyna as the division in their relationship.
Extreme high and low angles are woven into the power play, as both men vie for the position of captain.
Every so often, Polanski drops in these ethereal, greyscale wide shots that astound with their beauty.

Along with his nerve-wracking knife motif, Polanski skilfully uses these interactions to formally lay the groundwork of their eventual reckoning. The hitchhiker’s inability to swim is ominously underscored as a key plot point, while the fact that Andrzej has named his boat after his wife subtly marks them equally as his property, turning any competition for one into a contest for both. Andrzej fully realises the masculine power that resides in the hitchhiker’s switchblade when he steals it for himself, making a potentially deadly struggle all but inevitable when tensions eventually boil over and send his guest overboard. With no sign of him resurfacing, Andrzej immediately assumes the worst, briefly considering covering the tracks of his apparent murder before resolving to swim to shore and fetch police. As a result, a window of opportunity finally opens to the surviving hitchhiker who has secretly clung to a nearby buoy. With Andrzej out of the picture, he reboards the yacht, sleeps with Krystyna, and thus takes the rich man’s wife and boat as his own.

The hitchhiker’s revenge, subverting the artificial hierarchy through wits and sex.

Even after the boat is returned to shore and Krystyna is reunited with her husband, Polanski’s social critique doesn’t lose its savage edge. With Andrzej’s image of masculine and financial power complete damaged in his wife’s eyes, his insecurity as a weak, jealous man has also been exposed, desperately reducing women and lower-class citizens to toys so that he may wield a flimsy control over them. There is nothing left for him to say as they drive back home, nor any way he can mend the brittle foundations of this relationship. At a road intersection, he brings the car to a complete standstill, as reluctant to continue forward as he is scared to move back. Murder would be far too clean a resolution to Knife in the Water’s thrilling acute interrogation of class and marital breakdown. By the time Polanski has stripped away all pretensions of dignity in his ensemble, so too have they lost their ability to confront complex situations with decisive action, and revealed the critical emptiness of their moral character.

A bleak final frame, lingering on the car as it sits at a total standstill – there is no way forwards or backwards for this couple.

Knife in the Water is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the Blu-ray is available to purchase on Amazon.

Harakiri (1962)

Masaki Kobayashi | 2hr 13min

The corruption of cultural tradition in Harakiri has not merely unfolded through passive spiritual negligence, but rather arises from its own historical foundations, and driven by the flawed, selfish humanity hiding behind it. The respected Iyi Clan would much rather shift the blame onto those impoverished men who enter their estate, claiming their intention to commit honourable suicide by seppuku, yet secretly wishing to be sent away with alms in hand. To these samurai masters, it is an exploitation of ancient customs by peasants who have little respect for anything beyond their own immediate existence, and thereby casting suspicion on any visitors seemingly searching for a respectable death. The solution is simple but cruel – force these beggars to follow through on their promise and disembowel themselves in humiliation.

Masaki Kobayashi was well positioned in 1962 to direct a samurai film as spectacularly pessimistic as this, having just come off the back of his anti-war Human Condition trilogy which bears a similarly cynical view of authority. Tatsuya Nakadai returns as the lead here as well, but the mental resolution he carried in his previous character manifests with far greater hostility in the vengeful Tsugumo Hanshirō. Though only thirty years old during the time of filming, Nakadai is convincingly aged up as the middle-aged rōnin who refuses to let his bitter anger die with him. The sudden loss of his son-in-law, Motome, directly led to the death of his grandson Kingo, as well as his daughter Miho, and it is clear enough in his eyes that the blame lies squarely on those who coerced him into a reluctant suicide.

Kobayashi possesses an inventive approach to framing, designing shots here through the palace’s wooden beams and the spokes of a fan.

Set at the dawn of the Edo period in the 17th century, Harakiri is dense with cultural details which establish it as a profoundly rich Japanese text, though at the same time Kobayashi is incredibly economical with his storytelling. The warning that Saitō, the Iyi clan’s senior counsellor, delivers to Hanshirō against lying about one’s intent to commit seppuku is delivered through an extended flashback, yet this becomes more than just a cautionary tale. The man in this recount is none other than Motome, whose bluff is called from the start and is thus condemned to slice open his belly with his own sword. His switching out of real steel with blunt bamboo blades gruesomely comes back to bite him at this point, denying him a quick, dignified death, though it is the callous masters feigning ignorance to this detail who are the most morally tainted of all.

Japanese architecture encloses Hanshirō and the Iyi samurais in this courtyard, visually trapping them within centuries of rigid tradition.

Stylistic comparisons may be fairly drawn in these violent scenes to Akira Kurosawa’s own kinetic action, as Kobayashi designs each wide shot with careful attention to the detail of his stunning environments. Most of these take place within the confines of the Iyi clan’s palace, visually representing centuries of tradition through exquisite displays of Japanese architecture, though as Hanshirō moves into his version of events in a Rashomon-style perspective switch, Kobayashi relishes the expansion of his narrative’s scope. A cemetery of crowded headstones, a towering bamboo forest, and hills of long grass form picturesque settings through the lead-up to Hanshirō’s confrontation with an Iyi master, while the wind gracefully blows dust around them in dynamic counterpoint to their sharp movements.

Incredible long shots in a cemetery, bamboo forest, and upon windswept hills – Kobayashi’s widescreen aspect ratio is a canvas for stunning scenery.

Kobayashi’s obstruction of many of these frames do well to set him apart from Kurosawa though, and even more distinct to his style are those canted angles which previously appeared in The Human Condition, and are once again used here as signifiers of chaos. The balance of the entire world is thrown off in these compositions, inducing anxious terror as Motome is forced to slice his own belly open, and awe as Hanshirō and his opponents raise their swords against each other. Crash zooms also bring jolts of kinetic energy to these scenes, disrupting static shots to narrow in on dramatic narrative developments, and originating a creative visual technique that would be popularised in many Asian action films in decades to come.

Kobayashi continues the canted angles from The Human Condition trilogy in Harakiri, chaotically throwing off the order of a world rooted in tradition and structure when swords are drawn.

Emphasising this anarchic imagery even further is the contrast it strikes next to the rest of Kobayashi’s immaculate staging, ordering characters in rigorous formations throughout the elaborate palace. In the courtyard where Hanshirō sits to perform his harakiri, armoured men evenly line the edges holding spears, while Saitō looks down from a raised platform upon the vulnerable rōnin. When the camera moves, it often dollies in straight, unyielding lines, traversing a world defined by tradition and structure, yet which cannot stand up to the corrupt impulses of man. The minimalist score consisting of an aggressively strummed biwa captures both ends of the spectrum too, as composer Tōru Takemitsu plays atonal fragments of music on this thousand-year-old Japanese instrument like an ancient outcry of fresh, wounded anger.

The source of Hanshirō’s emotional pain is abundantly clear from his backstory, though the cynical new philosophy he has drawn from it is most succinctly captured in a single, accusatory line.

“This thing we call samurai honour is ultimately nothing but a facade.”

Remarkable detail in Kobayashi’s visual composition, aiming spears towards a vulnerable Hanshirō in the background white Saitō holds the power a level above everyone else.
Rigorous blocking and a crisp depth of field – everything has its order in Kobayashi’s world of samurai.

For men who claim to be models of respect, righteousness, and consistency, their indirect murder of Japan’s most underprivileged civilians is antithetical to everything they stand for. They place little value in anything that doesn’t prop up their own bloated egos, and now as Hanshirō lashes out and engages hordes of these samurai in combat, that hypocrisy is fully exposed. He is a far more talented swordsman than any of these pompous men, cutting down eight of them before committing harakiri. Though the act is filled with deep bitterness rather than peaceful reverence, this is not a significant perversion of tradition – after all, can something truly be degraded if those in control had already spoiled it long ago, turning it from a sacred ritual into a cruel punishment?

As the Iyi samurais begin to realise that they are losing the battle, they turn in their swords for guns, dispensing with their customs the moment they prove inconvenient. The ancient suit of armour that Kobayashi returns to several times throughout the film becomes symbolic of that empty glory here too, as Hanshirō disdainfully uses it as a shield before throwing it to the ground like a piece of scrap metal.

A rich symbolic motif, propped up as a monument to the Iyi clan’s empty glory.

Perhaps the most damning evidence of samurai culture’s false honour though arrives in Kobayashi’s epilogue. Before coming to the Iyi estate, Hanshirō defeated the three masters who coerced Motome into suicide, taking their top knots and forcing them to hide in shame. With their façade of respectability gone, they are now little more than a burden on the clan’s reputation, and so arrangements are made for them to commit seppuku. The official journal entries which open and close the film are saturated with stifled shame, attempting to cover up the clan’s disgrace by recording Motome and Hanshirō’s deaths as harakiri, and the three masters’ demises as mere illnesses. The clan’s surviving samurais may tidy the palace, re-erect the armour, and dispose of the three severed top knots, yet their hearts continue to rot in guilty silence, condemned to lie in graves of obscene spiritual corruption that they have spent centuries digging for themselves.

The Iyi clan’s diary opens and closes Harakiri with their own official records of its events, creating a false, more honourable version of history than what unfolded.

Harakiri is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.