Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy re-examines cinema studies through the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, employing the multiple methodologies and indeterminacy of Ozu’s films as a model for discussions of cinema’s relationship to the world and the formation of film studies as a discipline. Centering a selection of Ozu films in each chapter, Daisuke Miyao builds a method based on the way films directed by Ozu avoid unitary perspective and allow multiple possibilities of standpoint and spectatorial position, which Miyao calls the ethics of indeterminacy. Analyzing Ozu’s use of cinematography, narrative, and color, Miyao theorizes the indeterminate in film—the seen and unseen, human and nonhuman, domestic and international—to initiate a multi-directional dialogue on the study of cinema that reaches beyond auteurism and culturalism to establish a new basis for disciplinary conversations.

Daisuke Miyao is Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author and editor of several books, including Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema, and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom, published by Duke University Press.

Preface  ix
Introduction.  Cinema and the Ethics of Indeterminacy  1
1. Cats and the Gaze of Things: Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya shinshiroku, 1947)  29
2. Coca-Cola and “Asian Cinema”: Late Spring (Bansbun, 1949)  49
3. Camera Movements and Ethics: Early Summer (Bakusbū, 1951) and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (Ochazuke no aji, 1952)  74
4. Clocks and Melodrama: Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953)  127
5. Color Environment and Red: Floating Weeds (Ukikusa, 1959)  155
Conclusion  211
Acknowledgments  219
Notes  221
Bibliography  243
Index  263