Rites of passage in the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu

Abstract

Yasujiro Ozu develops the narrative of his films around transitory rites in the lives of the characters. For Ozu, the family is the core of sustenance of the home and it is its stability that is called into question. The present article intends to relate, due to the proximity to the everyday and community life of Ozu’s characters, the threats to the stability of the family home with the rites of passage identified by the French ethnologist Arnold van Gennep. Van Gennep defines rites of passage as the ceremonies that accompany an individual’s life crises. And also, especially in the films around the daughters’ marriages, to the state of liminality or margin developed by the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner. In these, the main conflict is centred on the character’s struggle to change, because of a ritual that is not accomplished or that will, in the face of society and the values of an epoch, be belatedly fulfilled. It is the tension between modernity and tradition that places the characters in a liminal state, giving rise to a sense of slow separation, of non-status and of late. In these films (Late Spring, Early Summer, Late Autumn, An Autumn Afternoon) Ozu illustrates an avowed desire to portray the cycle of life or mutability rather than the action itself.