Referencia: Centeno Martín, Marcos P. “Method Directors. Susumu Hani and Yasujirǀ Ozu: a Comparative Approach across Paradigms” in Andreas Becker (ed.) (2017). Yasujiro Ozu and the Aesthetics of his Time, Darmstadt, Buchner (accepted 30/05/017). This version of the manuscript is devoid of footnotes and list of references. ϭ Method Directors. Susumu Hani and Yasujirō Ozu: a Comparative Approach across Paradigms Marcos P. Centeno Martín /H1/ introduction This text seeks to assess Yasujirǀ Ozu’s filmmaking method in relation to that of Susumu Hani, which was theorized and put into practice through documentary films during the fifties. The reader may be surprised by this unusual proposal. These filmmakers belonged to different generations and while Ozu, staring his career in the 1920s, has been recognized as the early master of Japanese classicism (Bock 1978; Desser 2006), Hani is considered a leading figure of the New Wave beginning in the sixties (Müller/Tomasi 1990, Nagib 1993, Jacoby 2008, Tsutsui 2012). Ozu and Hani have never been object of any scholarly comparative analysis to date as they have been linked to different periods of Japanese cinema. However, the fact that they were contemporaries between 1951 and 1962 has been neglected. This corresponds to the last stage of Ozu’s career, in which he released some of his masterpieces, such as Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951), Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, 1953), Good Morning (Ohayō, 1959) and Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959), and Hani’s early career as a documentary maker. During these years, Hani worked for Iwanami Eiga Studios, where he debuted as a director in People Making Navigation Charts (Kaizu wo tsukuru hitobito, 1951) and made his renowned Children in the Classroom (Kyōshitsu no kodomotachi, 1954) and Children Who Draw (E wo kaku kodomotachi, 1956), which as Tadao Satǀ noted, anticipated the renewal of the cinematic language of the sixties (Satǀ 1970: 6–9; 1997: 3–12). Unlike film theorist’s and historians’ tendency to explore Ozu’s films launching gazes to the past, and assessing his style in relation to the Japanese aesthetic and cultural tradition, I propose to interrogate Ozu with his present time and thus, to establish a dialogue with the filmmaking method simultaneously developed by Hani. Studying the aesthetics of the time that Ozu and Hani shared as filmmakers deliberately aims to defy old historical and theoretical categorizations, into which Japanese cinema has usually