Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to elaborate on the transition from black and white to colour in Ozu's film career by establishing a dialogue with the "clear line", a concept originally employed to characterise Hergé's style and where colour is a major element of graphic composition and narrative significance.

Paper long abstract:

In the article "From the Art of Yasujiro Ozu", critic Tadao Sato stated that the graphic organisation in Ozu's cinema is defined by a desire to scrupulously lay out "the lines in the picture and the forms of people and things within it". After any viewing and reflection upon his last six features films, it is impossible not to consider colour as one of the elements that, together with line and form, collaborate to this meticulous arrangement, given that it is absolutely preponderant in the way the Japanese filmmaker conceived his cinematic images.

However, Ozu's embracing of colour was a late one, since the director rejected the new techniques on the grounds of their incipiency, and it was not until 1958, seven years after the first Japanese colour film, Keisuke Kinoshita's "Carmen Comes Home", that he finally abandoned black and white. Curiously (and, I argue, uncoincidentally), this chromophobic dismissal and its subsequent chromophilic impulse has a significant parallel in Franco-Belgian comics: Hergé, before integrating colour in his "Tintin" series in uncommonly creative ways, violently resisted its introduction, preferring, in the words of his biographer Pierre Assouline, to stick to his "famous black trace", "which formed the bone structure of his drawing style".

This paper proposes to discuss Yasujirô Ozu's switch from black and white to colour by situating the director's late works in the context of the clear line, a visual and narrative style first detected and theorised in the field of the European bande dessinée but with an undeniable potential for a transmedial use. In this school concerned with the art of simple and straightforward storytelling, and of which Hergé is a preeminent figure, colour is always used, according to Adelaide Russo, "'in flat stains', without shadows or gradients, in the hope of conferring a bigger 'readability' to the drawings". I will argue that Yasujirô Ozu's use of colour has the same applications and aesthetic and narrative consequences of that of the clear line comics, and therefore that the shift from a chromophobic approach to a chromophilic one forged a completely new semiotic system in the director's career.