the fetishisation of chishu ryu by ozu

has anyone else noticed how in a visual sense ozu built his films around the calm beauty of ryu in the same way sternberg did with dietrich and pabst with brooks

@OP:

It’s because Ozu was gettin’ it on with Chishu Ryu. The homosexual overtones in Ozu’s work attest to this fact.

I think Blue refers to the framing techniques that give clear evidence of Ozu’s sexuality. Ozu placed the camera outside of doorways because his homosexuality turned him into an outsider in conservative Japan. Chishu Ryu was the object of his desire, and Ozu’s lifelong muse.

Chishu Ryu smiling at Ozu

Wow you learn something new everyday. I knew something was going on with them two…

Both did their best to keep it a secret, but one just has to take a look at the following picture on which Ozu asks one of his actresses for a lighter though being well aware that Chishu Ryu also got one, ignoring him because of the camera. That makes it quite obvious there’s a love affair going on…

It’s no mere accident that they both sported similar moustaches. Everyone in Japan over the age of 50 knows these two gave a whole new twist to the phrase “Japanese moustache rides.”

Poor Ryu, Probably couldn’t hold his feelings any longer :(

Everyone who says Ozu sucks is committing a hate crime.

..sigh..

Ozu and Ryu sitting in a tree …

i detect a slight note of sarcasm

is ozus sexuality really that contentious

Wow — a discussion of Ozu’s gayness and I’m late to the party!

As I have noted there were other men in his life. In fact a scndal eruped over the attention he was paying to the young actor who played the golf-obsessed son in his last film “The Taste of Autumn Mackrel” (aka. An Autumn Afternoon) Ozu died not long after that film’s realse and shortly after that the actor died. At the funeral his wife lost it and began scremaing “OZU HAS TAKEN HIM WITH HIM!!!!!”

I think someone missed the joke….

That means Setsuko Hara is lesbian? wow…

Maybe they faked their own deaths and they’re still out there somewhere?

“Maybe they faked their own deaths and they’re still out there somewhere?”

Again,

im sorry for starting this consciously left field thread and for misspelling fetishization

im sorry for starting this consciously left field thread and for misspelling fetishization

im sorry for starting this consciously left field thread and for misspelling fetishization

Yeah but I really want to know if Setsuko is lesbian or not because you know… I have….

feelings for her :O(

it was unusual for a woman to remain unmarried in such a conservative society ,far more unusual then if a man did so

Beware the Fallacy of Intentionality. I have no idea what Ozu’s personal lack of overt sexuality indicates and I doubt anyone else does either. I’m not saying any of this speculation is off base and it is certainly a fun game to play, I am only suggesting that one can see intention in others based on assumptions THEY bring with them and not what is patently visible.

Also, to maintain my standing as a psychoanalytic jargon nazi, I must point out that fetishism in that realm refers to the sexual cathexis of inanimate objects.

(SHHHH, Don’t tell anyone but I think Ozu was as gay as a Pride Parade and I am deeply suspicious of the whole Scorsese/DiCaprio relationship too)

LET THE GAMES CONTINUE!!!!

Chishu Ryu isn’t an inanimate object?

You have me there Miasma. I see a real opportunity for research here.

.

“Yasujiro Ozu’s method of filmmaking demanded a style of acting and a kind of actor at the opposite extremes from the Method school so familiar in the West. Every sequence, every shot within it, and every detail (whether of decor or gesture) within every shot, was planned by the director, his screenwriter (most often Kogo Noda), and his cinematographer (usually Yuharu Atsuya) during the evolution of the film. The actors were never asked to improvise or psychologize; instead they were expected to subordinate themselves to the overall compositional design of the film and be able to communicate the most meticulous and subtle inflections of expression and gesture under Ozu’s direction. According to Chishu Ryu, Ozu “fixed each actor into each shot,” and so one imagines that the ascetic discipline required of Ryu’s early (and abandoned) training to follow his father as a Buddhist priest had some lasting value for his acting career.

Chishu Ryu was Ozu’s lifelong friend and the most regular member of the stock company of actors he drew together. He is in Ozu’s earliest surviving film (his eighth) Wakaki hi (1929), played his first major role in Daigaku yoitoko (1936), and is in all the last 17 (and the star of many) of the director’s films. Just how consistent his contributions were in between is somewhat difficult to determine, as many of the films are lost or inaccessible. In the later works, Ryu’s appearances take on the character of a directorial trademark: if there is no star role for him, he turns up in a brief cameo, perhaps with no more than a line or two of dialogue. (Ryu’s consistent dependability was perhaps his defining quality as a professional: he was reportedly also on hand for all 45 of director Yoji Yamada’s inexplicably popular Tora-san films.)

In many of the later films the director/actor relationship becomes clearly symbiotic, in an extremely complex and fruitful way. There is no question of Ryu “playing” Ozu or being a mouthpiece for the director’s statements, yet one repeatedly senses a special sympathy between the director and the Ryu character, a sympathy which never precludes the possibility of critical distance. In Banshun and Tokyo monogatari , for example, we are made firmly aware of the character’s limitations: the film’s vision is far wider than his vision, which it contains and transcends. The limitations (and this is consistent with other late Ozu works, not necessarily starring Ryu, for example Equinox Flower ) are defined in relation to the female characters (especially those played by Setsuko Hara): Ozu’s subtle feminism has never been as acknowledged as Mizoguchi’s or Naruse’s, and Ryu’s most frequent role in Ozu’s universe as a gentle yet somewhat obtuse patriarch deserves reviewing in this light.

In his final film appearances, Ryu is an explicitly revered icon, for both his aging contemporaries (such as Kurosawa) and younger acolytes, such as Wim Wenders, whose pilgrimage to meet Ryu in Tokyo-Ga is a moving tribute to both Ozu and his favorite actor".

Robin Wood