It is difficult, without literally re-telling [An Autumn Afternoon], to convey the manner in which each scene is dependent on every other scene for its meaning. Perhaps the most illuminating comparison is with music: each sequence comes like the entry of a new subject in a sonata, which is then developed and counterpointed with the other themes already introduced….

Each time the film moves from one locale to another, the new scene is introduced by its establishing shots, so that at any point in the film one knows not only where one is but where one is going to be….

But these shots seem to have another function over and above "establishing". They are always of inanimate objects—a corridor, a block of flats, chimneys, a pile of petrol drums, a neon sign—and the first shot in an establishing sequence never contains human figures (though subsequent shots may—someone passing across the far end of the corridor, for example). The idea of the transience of human life is basic to Buddhist thought: human existence is a mere drop in the ocean of time. And herein lies, perhaps, one of the secrets of the tranquillity, the deep reconciliation, which pervades Ozu's work. Each of his scenes is introduced by an object, durable and immovable; against it, his characters live out their lives, and long after their suffering has ended, the object will endure….

The application [of the principles of haiku] to Ozu's work is obvious, both in the relationship between establishing shot and subsequent scene, and in the relationship between the scenes themselves, which, like the images of the haiku, combine to create an interlinear meaning. At the same time, though, the haiku illustrates another facet of Japanese art which is particularly relevant to Ozu's method of mise en scène [tending toward the isolation of a single, significant, visual moment]. (p. 184)

In An Autumn Afternoon, for instance, there is a breathtakingly beautiful moment which, in the context of a European film, might well be a cliché of virtuosity. The daughter has just been told that she cannot marry the man she loves…. As the father leaves, a final shot observes the girl from behind, and after a moment she slowly raises a hand to tuck a stray lock of hair into place. The gesture, surely a "significant visual moment," vividly captures the girl's grief and helpless isolation. More particularly, however, it is worth noting that because there is no dissolve or fade, there is no tapering or artificial prolongation of the emotion: it is complete in itself. Moreover, because there is no pan from one character to the other, the shot of each of them retains its purity: energy (i.e. emotional content) is not drained from one to feed the other. And the cut comes at the very last moment, with Ozu holding the shot of the father until one feels that he must cut to the girl; a dynamic relationship is thus created between the shots which allows the emotional content of each to remain quite separate, held suspended as it were, shot against shot, scene against scene, awaiting their place in the pattern of the whole. (pp. 184-85)

Twenty-seven years later, Ozu remade, or rather reworked, the theme of I Was Born, But … in the 1959 Good Morning (Ohayo). Comparison between the two films is particularly interesting, as the later one reveals a distinct change of emphasis. I Was Born, But … concentrates almost entirely on the two boys, their pains and joys as they discover society and the difficulties it presents…. [We] feel by the end that we have shared a difficult experience with the children….

In Good Morning the emphasis shifts from the boys to society in general. A whole host of characters is introduced—more parents, neighbours, a very ancient grandmother, a pedlar, a teacher—as well as certain episodes which have nothing to do with the boys at all…. The central situation still remains the same: in I Was Born, But … the boys rebel against their parents with a hunger strike because they cannot see why their father should kow-tow to anybody; in Good Morning, they rebel with a silence strike because they cannot see why they shouldn't have a television set like everybody else. But in Good Morning Ozu's concern is mainly satirical, and he uses the silence strike to spark off a series of malicious sketches about "keeping up with the Joneses" and the backbiting of neighbours who feel sure the parents have instructed the boys not to speak to them for snob reasons. Here Ozu is so little interested in his original and central theme that the boys' problems, as well as everybody else's, are solved all too simply and impermanently when their parents are finally driven to buy a television set. Good Morning is extremely funny (perhaps Ozu's funniest film), and often brilliantly sharp in its satire, but it has no real centre.

Failure of a more serious kind is illustrated by Early Spring…. Although Early Spring appears to be highly regarded in Japan, it seems to me to stray, heavily and uninspiringly.

The subject, slightly unusual for Oku, deals with a married man, bored with his wife, who embarks on an unsatisfactory affair with a free-and-easy girl; disillusioned with her, he accepts a transfer to a provincial branch of his firm; there, away from the bustle of Tokyo, he ponders his life, and is eventually reconciled to a forgiving wife. The first image of the film is one of emptiness and boredom, as the husband and wife get up in the morning to start their day; and Ozu—probably because the lasting communion of marriage is to him self-evident—never bothers to demonstrate the value of their marriage. Consequently the final reconciliation, shot in characteristically exquisite style, seems completely arbitrary. (p. 186)

Late Spring has a very similar theme to An Autumn Afternoon—a father's decision to marry off his only daughter—and is one of Ozu's most beautiful films. Late Autumn is a remake, considerably changed, in terms of a mother and daughter, and much less successful. As with Good Morning, many of the characters seem arbitrarily introduced merely to make a good scene: for example, the daughter's pert young office colleague who suddenly emerges to take a major role in the film, roundly telling off the matchmakers for their shady dealings, and rather unconvincingly becoming the mother's mainstay against loneliness by visiting her regularly after the daughter's marriage. In Late Spring, on the other hand, every character and every scene is perfectly integrated in the main theme (not a father's loneliness as in Autumn Afternoon, but rather a daughter's reconciliation to the idea of marriage), and the character of the daughter's friend is carefully established so that her final offer of friendship to the father is completely and convincingly in character.

The integration of character and incident is so exact throughout the film that is one of his great masterpieces, and the sequence in which father and daughter make a last trip together to Kyoto before her marriage is probably one of the most perfect in Ozu's work…. By comparison, the Late Autumn remake gives short change indeed, with a rather perfunctory conversation between mother and daughter on their last trip, and then, quite simply, a conventional studio photograph of bride and groom in their wedding clothes. It is as though Ozu, because it was a remake of a subject he had already explored, used bits and pieces without ever becoming involved.

Late Autumn, in fact, like Good Morning and like Early Spring, has no true centre, and therefore no dynamic growth: the sum of its scenes adds up to no more than the sum of its scenes. In the great films, on the other hand—Late Spring, Tokyo Story, An Autumn Afternoon—there is a subtle Ozu alchemy whereby the separate elements expand and coalesce to form a perfect whole. At the end of Tokyo Story, the old man mourning for his wife walks out on the terrace in the early morning. "It was a beautiful sunrise," he says quietly. "I think we're going to have another hot day." This is the point to which the entire film has been moving: it is a summation of experience. (pp. 186, 206)