PROBLEMS OF POETICS biographical legend, as Robert Alien has argued in relation to Sunrise;5 or the artist himself can provide one through interviews, writings, and public pronouncements, as Dreyer did.6 In the latter event, the creation of a biographical legend should not be considered a cunningly contrived display; public discourse will necessarily appropriate a filmmaker's words and acts, turning them to particular ends. Ozu offers a good example. From early in his career, he wrote essays and gave interviews. Two themes seem salient in both Japanese and Western critical discourse. These have significantly affected how viewers contextualize Ozu's work. First there is Ozu the humble craftsman. If Mizoguchi was the obsessed, tormented artist - involved with a gangster's girl, bouncing from studio to studio, wreaking terror on the set - Ozu was the modest artisan, calmly making film after film according to formula. He compared himself to a carpenter, or more often, a tofu-maker. 'I just want to make a tray of good tofu. If people want something different, they should go to the restaurants and department stores.'7 The critic Tadao Sato notes that, during a party late in his life, Ozu became angry with another filmmaker for maintaining that film was an art of self-expression rather than of rule-governed form.8 The craftsman analogy can be found in many contemporary accounts eager to link Ozu to an intrinsically Japanese tradition. Here is Shimba lida: 'The sight of him huddled around a fireplace in a tiny mountain cabin in the Tateshima hills with Kogo Noda as they thrash out the scenario between them gives me the feeling of watching a true Japanese master at work.'9 Such an image easily slides into the notion of Ozu the Zen artist, the simple toiler who turns out to have the deep secret. Reinforcing the artisanal theme is the image of Ozu the stubborn conservative. He is said to have made the same film over and over. For the average art-house moviegoer, Ozu's technique is simple, perhaps 'primitive', and resistant to technological change. This is an image that Ozu cooperated in circulating. He came late to talkies because he was a perfectionist and because his cinematographer was devising his own sound-recording system. Ozu announced jokingly: 'I'm going to film the last fade-out of the silent cinema.'10 As the legend has it, he steadily eliminated dissolves, fades, and camera movements from his style. After the war, he says, people expected that all the foreign movies he saw in Singapore would have changed his work. But no: 'Look at The Record of a Tenement Gentleman for yourself: nothing has changed, the same as always. Some people say that Ozu is a really obstinate buzzard.'11 He came late to color and never adopted widescreen. 'The wide screen reminds me of a roll of toilet paper.'12 Again, critics have followed his lead and ranked him (with Dreyer and Bresson) as the cineaste of minimal means. 'Here is a man,' lida reports, 'who adamantly refuses to change his approach. His adherence to his own original method will permit no outside advice.'13 In the artisanal and conservative themes, Ozu's biographical legend - so divorced from his private life that we might rather speak of a 'temperamental' legend- functions to supply a particular 'set' or orientation to the films. In the argument of this book, this orientation plays various roles. For one thing, it will be questioned. This conservative craftsman makes bold, varied, innovative films. I shall argue that Ozu is an experimental filmmaker, quite likely the 6