On the surface, Allan Dwan and Yasujiro Ozu seem like they could hardly be more dissimilar as filmmakers, yet both of them had long, prolific careers stretching from the silent era to the early 60s and developed distinctive visual styles within the very different conditions of their respective film industries. They are receiving simultaneous, overlapping retrospectives at Film Forum (Ozu) and MoMA (Dwan), necessitating a lot of picking and choosing and shuttling back and forth between the two venues for the next several weeks. I have previously seen almost all of Ozu's films, which have become widely available recently via Criterion and Hulu, but I've seen only a handful of Dwan's films so far.
Dwan's early sound films (Man to Man and Chances) have been revelatory, and I look forward to many more opportunities to explore the full range of his career. Dwan is very fond of tracking shots to situate characters in relation to their locations, as was Ozu in his silent period. While Dwan generally seemed to use the tracking camera to follow his characters' progression through space, or to move from a medium shot to a closer view, Ozu, in addition to following characters' movements, often used tracks to follow a row of stationary people or objects (a coatrack or a row of students' desks), lending a bit of dynamic observation to a still setting. While Ozu continued to refine and minimize his style, reducing and finally eliminating camera movement as his career progressed, Dwan (on the evidence of just a few of his hundreds of films) seems to have maintained a fairly consistent visual rhythm across a wide variety of genres, studios and production circumstances. I'm eager to see more of Dwan's 50s color films produced by Benedict Bogeaus and photographed by John Alton. A comparison with Ozu's late color films may be instructive.
This happy accident of New York repertory programming is an opportunity, increasingly rare these days, to sample and compare a large portion of two major directors' work.
