There is, about two-thirds into Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But…, a cinematic mise-en-abyme: a triangulation of gazes between a father, his two sons, and his boss and coworkers, as they watch a home movie. In the film, a family of four moves to the suburbs as the father, Yoshii (Tatsuo Saito), takes up a new office job, and the two kids, Ryoichi (Hideo Sugawara) and Keiji (Tomio Aoki, a.k.a. Tokkan Kozo), struggle to find their place among the stratified playground world of bullies and fickle friends. Until the scene with the film-within-the-film arrives, the sons’ skirmishes with the other boys center on childish things—territorial fights, juvenile taunts, scuffles over food. But when Ryoichi and Keiji sneak into a gathering at their father’s employer’s house, they suddenly enter a world of adult inequities. The reels projected at this soirée show Yoshii currying the favor of his boss by making a fool of himself. He scowls at the camera and crosses his eyes, and the spectators laugh, while the boys look back and forth from the screen to the audience, suddenly registering what this spectacle implies about their family’s status.
The relationship between cinema and class is central to Ozu’s work. Released in 1932, I Was Born, But… was the director’s twenty-fourth movie, and it demonstrates the distinctively and artfully simple style he had started to solidify by then. The film is almost exclusively composed of the “tatami shots” that became Ozu’s signature—the camera is positioned low, evoking the perspective of someone kneeling on a tatami mat—and it was while shooting I Was Born, But… that Ozu decided to eliminate flourishes like fades and dissolves from his movies, employing only straight cuts instead. The effect, particularly of the tatami shot, is one of humble directness. Where high-angle shots convey a feeling of godly perception, and a camera that brings us eye-to-eye with the character induces a feeling of peer-ness and immersion, the tatami shot evokes curiosity and regard: the assiduously ordinary subjects of Ozu’s films, which exemplify the Japanese genre of shoshimin-eiga or the “lower-
middle-class film,” tower over us ever so gently, their petty concerns playing out like absorbing dramas on a proscenium stage.
The one moment in I Was Born, But… when the camera rises above the tatami level is within the home movie. Yoshii is framed frontally from the chest up against a dark, depthless background as he makes funny faces, flattened into something of a cartoon. The shock of this anomalous composition and its caricature effect reinforces, by contrast, the naturalistic feeling of the rest of the movie; it also makes palpable the disillusionment of Ryoichi and Keiji, who are used to looking up to their father, and now, through the intervention of the cinema, see him on eye level, no longer the big man they thought he was. If I Was Born, But… is “a picture book for grownups,” as the opening title announces, it is because, like so many of Ozu’s films, it is about the complex social dynamics of looking—about the power of surfaces and appearances in middle-class life, and how movies can expose their brittleness. In I Was Born, But…, it’s the brand-new technology of the time—16mm film—that provokes a crisis of status in the family; in Good Morning, Ozu’s 1959 color “remake” of the film, a television set becomes the bone of contention for the young protagonists.
I Was Born, But… was a major success for Ozu—it was the first of his six films to top the Japanese magazine Kinema Junpo’s annual poll, and it was declared by critics as the inaugural work of “social realism” in Japan. The movie culminated something of a trilogy that began with 1928’s I Graduated, But… (of which only ten minutes have survived) and 1930’s I Flunked, But…, both of which capture the economic turmoil faced by the Japanese middle class in the wake of the post–World War I recession, the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, and successive financial collapses in 1927 and 1929. The title of I Graduated, But… came from a popular lament in the late 1920s, when white-collar unemployment was at an all-time high. In the film, the only job offered to a new college graduate is as a receptionist, which he considers beneath him and declines, forcing his wife to take up even lowlier work as a bar hostess. In I Flunked, But…, the social order becomes even more parodic: students who fail their graduation exam realize they’re better off in school than in a world without jobs, like their more successful—and now floundering—colleagues.
I Was Born, But… brings the perspective of children to this context, exploding the insistence on striving and status as not just pointless, but even illogical. When Yoshii explains that he has to bow to his boss because the man pays him, the boys reply naïvely, “Why don’t you pay him?” Shochiku, the studio where Ozu had been working as a director since 1927, specialized in shoshimin-eiga, but Ozu’s riffs on the genre were darker than the studio’s mandate of idealistic, commercially viable films. Both I Graduated, But… and I Flunked, But… close with fairly happy endings. I Was Born, But… ends with resignation rather than resolution: Ryoichi’s declaration that he would rather not go to school—or even grow up—if his fate is to be a salaryman like his father and kowtow to his classmate, the boss’s son. Shochiku reportedly hesitated to release the movie because the studio bosses thought it was too “bleak.” It gets at something beyond just the financial instability of the modern, bourgeois family. The very institution of patriarchy starts to appear flimsy when we realize that the authority of the husband or the father is derived from wage labor—a system that is by design unfree and unstable.
However, leftist critics of the time found Ozu’s films lacking in comparison to the keiko-ega or “tendency films” made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For these critics, shoshimin—i.e., petty bourgeoisie—didn’t merely describe the subject of Ozu’s films but also the perspective of the director, whose humanist bent, penchant for humor, and focus on the domestic sphere preempted the more comprehensive social analysis of films by directors like Tomu Uchida and Kenji Mizogichu, who depicted proletarian protagonists fighting the rich and took formal cues from Soviet cinema. The scholar Yuki Takinami made a fascinating connection between Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and I Was Born, But…. Vertov’s film was released in Japan in March 1932—right when Ozu resumed shooting I Was Born, But… after an interruption of a few months because of an on-set injury. The home movie seen within I Was Born, But… evinces some key similarities with Man with a Movie Camera: sped up shots of the city streets as seen from a moving tram; high-angle shots of busy crossroads; and cuts to the projectionists as they load the reels.
It is impossible to know if Ozu had seen the film by then and was responding to it. But this hypothetical connection crystallizes the director’s unique approach that renders the home a microcosm of the city and the world. Where Vertov attempted to put into action the “Kino-Eye”—a cinematic vision of society that reveals its realities and structures in ways that naked perception cannot—Ozu makes cinema itself an element in the organization of society, a signifier of class status. The home movie, screened in a private setting, is a symbol of the boss’s ownership of all that it contains, including Yoshii and the other employees’ spare time. What is revelatory in I Was Born, But… is not what the camera sees, but how it sees—from which vantage point, and for whose pleasure—and what gets overturned when we decide to see differently. Call it Boss with a Movie Camera.
The 2024 San Francisco Silent Film Festival Award for commitment to the preservation and exhibition of silent film was presented to Hisashi Okajima of the National Film Archive of Japan at this screening.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Utsav Lal