Paper short abstract:

Paying attention to the material dimension of the cinematographic medium, my paper aims at questioning the formalist studies of Ozu's filmmaking and their emphasis on the register of mastery, arguing that it is best accounted for in terms of cinema's expressive means rendered inoperative.

Paper long abstract:

Echoing Ozu Yasujirô's undoubtedly unique filmmaking, many accounts of his cinema approach it according to a formalist point of view, describing it in terms of style and striving to identify its features. Such an approach notably informs David Bordwell's 1988 study, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema - even if it also replaces, in terms typical of the cultural turn, Ozu's production in the historical context of the emergence of a popular mediatic sphere in a modernizing Japan. Stemming from his understanding of the "rules" of cinema and their possible transgression, Bordwell's formalist description of Ozu's "poetics" conceives of his filmmaking in the voluntarist terms of "choice" and of "control" of cinema's expressive means.

My paper aims at questioning such an emphasis on the register of mastery when considering Ozu's work, especially since it derives from a focus on narrative, filmic images being regarded as vehicles, more or less skillful, for its unfolding. On the contrary, the purpose here will be to draw the consequences, for Ozu's filmmaking, of the fact that, as a medium, cinema is at once material and immaterial, both technical and aesthetic. This material and technical dimension implies that cinema should not be seen as a mere tool meant at representing the world. Films in fact proceed from a material engagement with its ways of "thinking" and "feeling," as Thomas Lamarre puts it (2009. The Anime Machine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.xxxiii), that jeopardizes any desire for complete control.

And indeed, Ozu's films offer a reflection, displayed at the very surface of their images, on the (im)powers of cinematographic creation. In Hasumi Shigehiko's words, this amounts to Ozu's attention to "the limits of cinema," his filmmaking being situated on the hinge of the pure expressive powers of cinema and their impotence. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's reflection on mannerism, I will indeed argue that, far from a depiction in terms of control, self-consciousness and transgression, Ozu's filmmaking is best accounted for in terms of the medium's capacity of expression rendered inoperative.