Thesis Summary: The Japanese House explained through the films of Yasujiro Ozu
Through the films of Yasujiro Ozu, this thesis studies the Japanese house as a support for a way of living. The Japanese understanding of space, ma, includes the creation of an ambience that transcends the physical, built object of architectural construction and becomes evident in the house that is lived in. Ozu’s films describe the radical process of transformation that Japanese society has undergone, particularly since the war, and shows the importance of the domestic world in Japan.
The study of the house and how it is described, represented and inhabited offers interpretative clues for understanding the anthropological reality of which the house forms part.
The director subjects his work to a process of stylistic purification that culminates when it reaches maturity. This process explains the particular relevance acquired by the traditional Japanese house in the scenes of his last films. This thesis focuses on five works of this final period. For each film, the plan of the house is drawn as the main stage in order to arrive at a realistic representation that does not aim to be real, but one that generates an instrumental support upon which the analyzed observations will be registered: the displacements and movements of the actors, the position of the camera, the visible axes, the position of furniture and objects…
Once the support is drawn, different scenes are analyzed. Ozu’s cinematic code highlights a series of intrinsic mechanisms of the spatial order of the Japanese house. All of these spatial mechanisms -visual permeability, connecting rooms, that which is outside the visual field, double-circulation, multiple entrances and the fourth wall- are superimposed during the film.
The construction of situations generates synergies between these spatial mechanisms that multiply the potential of the house and are sublimated into a series of attributes. When the double circulation, the multiple entrances and the connecting rooms are combined, the permeability of the plan is increased into the porous house. When the number of connecting rooms is increased, the matrix house appears. When the visual permeability is combined with the fourth wall effect, the house behaves like a telescopic device that, as it unfolds, absorbs the successive spaces into a sort of expansive house. With this method of superposition, the thesis concludes itself into a series of attributes amongst which the discontinuous house, the stratified house and the disseminated house can also be found.
Beyond Ozu’s houses, at the end of the final chapter, these differentiating attributes of the traditional Japanese house are located in a number of contemporary works. Like a kind of sampler, certain topological similarities are to be shown. Thus, interferences of contemporary Japanese architecture are introduced as transitions between the various chapters dedicated to Ozu. Firstly, the works selected are analyzed through published documentation. After visiting them on a visit to Japan, the aforementioned analysis is compared with the experience and observation of the support inhabited by the user.
All of the attributes identified in both traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture configure a neutral support that allows the inhabitant to appropriate the space. This thesis analyzes how this support suggests, but does not impose, a way of being inhabited that never infringes on the freedom of the inhabitant.