Just as critics and scholars such as Brian Price and Colin Burnett have radically amended our sense of Bresson’s career (even going so far as to ascribe radical leftist sympathies to a hitherto Jansenist), so too the venerated Ozu, whose international fame has long rested on a half dozen of his (mostly late) films: muted, minimalist domestic dramas esteemed for their “eternal verities” about family, death, transience, tradition, for their poignancy, Zen serenity and quiet sense of resignation (subsumed in the concept of mono no aware or “sensitivity to things”), and for their delicacy, restraint, and formal rigour.

It would be pointless to deny these qualities in Ozu’s late work: atmospherically, with their limpid, summery calm; formally, with their low-slung, symmetrical and stationary compositions, cut straight and punctuated by gorgeously extraneous “pillow shots” or disorienting ellipses; and emotionally, with their roiling undercurrents of disappointment and smiling despair. But their decorous sense of dissolution has too often been mistaken for Zen transcendentalism and probity, and in the process much of what comprises the Ozu universe has been ignored or suppressed. Booze, brats, and boxing, gangsters and prostitutes, scatology and fetishism, dragnet girls, femmes fatales and gun-wielding wives stipple Ozu’s prewar filmography, as do such seemingly antithetical genres as crime films and proto-noirs, neorealist narratives and melodramas, vulgar comedies and knockabout student satires (of the subgenre known as “erotic-grotesque-nonsense”).

Unlike the evenly lit, statically shot, and abruptly cut late films, the earlier works feature chiaroscuro, virtuoso camera movement, and fluent transitions; many are so movie-mad that their overt references to Ozu’s beloved directors (Lubitsch, Lloyd, Sternberg) make him occasionally seem like an erstwhile Godard. As the monist impulse of auteurism tends to suppress multiplicity by ignoring or explaining away variation, so Ozu’s oeuvre has often been made coherent by regress to an overarching theme — the Japanese family and its dissolution, which was also a favourite subject of Kon Ichikawa, Mikio Naruse, and many of their colleagues — and a convenient ranking of the “problematic” early films as negligible works or as intimations of incipient mastery (Ozu before he was Ozu, as it were).

However, it would be a grave mistake, as a corrective to this unified view of Ozu, to privilege the little-known early work over the famous late films, or to reject the sense of his aesthetic as austere, formalist, or rigorous. It is easily demonstrable that Ozu’s style became more singular, radical, and exacting as he proceeded: the restriction of camera position and movement, the avoidance of wipes, fades, and dissolves, the breaking of the 180-degree axis and shot/countershot rules of conventional cinema, all attest to the voiding disposition of his late work. But, as David Bordwell points out, too often these undeniable aspects of Ozu’s films have been exaggerated in order to create the impression of a stylistically seamless, wholly unified body of work: “Always the same camera position? No, the setups vary constantly, in response to quasi-geometrical principles. No camera movements? The camera tracks or pans in every Ozu film up to Equinox Flower.... Simple cutting? Far from it; [Ozu] elaborates the editing experiments of his contemporaries in extraordinary ways.”

In response to the clichéd descriptions of Ozu as “the most Japanese of directors” and a Zen elegist and tragedian, such studies as Shigehiko Hasumi’s sly reading of Ozu’s “excess of clarity” and Bordwell’s magnificent film-by-film traversal of the career have, if not overturned, certainly inflected and complicated the traditional narratives around Ozu. No longer subjugated to notions of traditional Japanese aesthetics, the director’s formalism is read in terms of international modernism, the studio system and its “rethinking [of] American découpage” (Bordwell), and of Ozu’s own peculiar, playful way with space, colour, and shapes, while the plotless “purity” of the postwar family dramas has been reconsidered to take into account their strains of satire and melodrama, their often brusque humour, and their immense debt to American cinema (Tokyo Story, it is often noted, was inspired by Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow).