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  • Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence ed. by Jinhee Choi
  • David Desser
Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence. Edited by Jinhee Choi. Oxford University Press, 2018. 328 pages. Hardcover, £79.00/$105.00; softcover £27.99/$36.95.

Within film studies, and even in more general public discourse, the term "Felliniesque" has a fairly specific meaning centered on such things as the fantastic, the baroque, and the free expression of an exaggerated image of women. Ingmar Bergman, though less well remembered than Federico Fellini these days, nevertheless gave rise to "Bergmanesque," which describes expressions of a bleak, godless worldview. "Hitchcockian," "Wellesian," and "Altmanesque" have similarly entered the lexicon of directorial adjectives. To this list Jinhee Choi, editor of Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His influence—an indispensable collection for any scholar or student of Japanese cinema—wants to add "Ozuesque." She takes her cue from Hasumi Shigehiko, the most significant writer on Ozu Yasujirō (1903–1963) in Japanese and a man who, [End Page 322] along with Yoshida Kijū, has done much both to increase Ozu's reputation in Japan and to introduce his work to a younger generation. Yoshida, the most avant-garde of the Japanese New Wave filmmakers, has undergone a kind of conversion concerning Ozu's films, moving from rejection to admiration and appreciation (p. 37). At the same time as Choi introduces the term, she warns against the epistemic risk of applying it to any minimalist film style, especially with regard to many East Asian filmmakers who work in this mode. It is nevertheless viable, she argues, if applied historically and relationally. One of the many strengths of this collection is that it examines the concept taking into account both Ozu and his international influence.

The book features an almost dizzying array of major scholars in the field. This is especially the case in sections 1 and 2, which undertake to explicate the Ozuesque in terms of Ozu's developing reputation since the 1970s and the major critical paradigms through which his cinema has been examined; section 2 also offers further historicization of the director's style. Section 3, which tackles issues of Ozu's influence, boasts a range of similarly significant scholars. Altogether, the list of writers whom Choi has gathered almost speaks for itself as testimony of the book's merits. Contributing to section 1 are David Bordwell, Darrell W. Davis, Aaron Gerow, and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano; to section 2, Michael Raine, Daisuke Miyao, Yuki Takinami, and Junji Yoshida; and to section 3, Adam Bingham, Manuel Garin and Albert Elduque (coauthoring their contribution), Kate Taylor-Jones, Mark Betz, David Deamer, and William Brown. Full disclosure: I am acquainted—in both the real and virtual worlds—with a majority of the contributors and have worked with a number of them on anthologies of my own.

Reorienting Ozu builds upon influential older works by Donald Richie, Paul Schrader, and, to a lesser extent, Noel Burch, along with Hasumi and, of course. Bordwell, and it is interesting and revealing to note how this body of scholarship continues to impact the field. Richie's major work on Ozu appeared in 1974, while Schrader's much more modest effort came out even earlier, in 1972; Burch's formidable contribution in 1979; and Hasumi's original edition in 1983. Even Bordwell's major statement appeared some three decades ago, in 1988.1 This is to say both that the earliest commentators on Ozu have a surprising longevity given the vicissitudes of film studies and that there have been no further attempts at a totalizing vision of a director who has come to represent Japanese cinema more so than any other. By the same token, only Isolde Standish has attempted anything like a history of Japanese cinema since J. L. Anderson and Donald Richie's Japanese Film was published in 1959.2

Also haunting the book, especially in its first section, is the specter of Taiwan's master director, Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hou, of course, is most assuredly alive, yet it seems impossible here to talk about not just the Ozuesque but about Ozu himself without recourse to Hou. It is likely that his Café Lumiere of...

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