A Film Canon

As Ozu's first post-war film, The Record Of A Tenement Gentleman bears the traces of its passage in a more literal, physical register than any of his subsequent efforts, albeit with sufficient obliqueness to construe it as endemic of the more general change in sensibility described in the closing scene: "Being selfish like we are now won't do...we worry too much about our own lives." In particular, Ozu replaces his characteristic focus on middle-class family dynamics with the structure of a slum, whose approximation to a family is both foregrounded and called into question by the arrival of Kohei (Hohi Aoki), an abandoned child, and which gives the pregnant, empty tableaux that he tends to place between scenes a more concrete meaning than occurs in his earlier films, infusing them with a lunar desolation that finds most perfect expression in adopted 'aunt' Tane's (Chouko Iida) search for Kohei in a district destroyed by the war. Desolation becomes desecration with the final image of Takamori Saigo's statue, which corresponds to Tane's reflections on selfishness, and is both unusually patriotic and historicised for Ozu, mitigating his abstracted present in the same way that the reduction of Kohei to a pair of eyes mitigates the abstraction of space provided by situating the camera at the level of the tatami, instead incorporating this position into a generalised point-of-view shot. The result is one of the most sentimental moments in Ozu's career which, while precluding any extended sublimity, or serenity, nevertheless sophisticates sentimentality in an analogous manner to De Sica, most beautifully in the gradual acclimatisation of Kohei and Tane to one another, encapsulated in their increasing, unconscious mirroring of each other's gestures, nuances and mannerisms.