Often called the most "Japanese" of Japanese directors, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) created films about middle-class Japanese life and familial relationships with simplicity and austerity. Known for keeping the camera three feet off the ground in order to...

Rapports de classe Comment un cinéaste qui, sur trente-cinq ans de carrière, n'a jamais reproduit le moindre événement historique et/ou politique de son pays, jamais représenté les figures politiques japonaises, jamais frayé avec un quelconque cinéma de propagande ni même formulé le moindre...

The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 01-22-1994 THE WIZARDRY OF OZU Date: 01-22-1994, Saturday Section: LIFESTYLE Edition: All Editions -- Two Star B, Two Star P, One Star Column: WHAT'S HOT Films by a master The postwar films of director Yasujiro Ozu are...

[The tension in Ozu's films] derives from confrontations between men and women who are in different sections of the pattern, between, for example, parents who have returned to Japaneseness and children who are on their way out. There is never any doubt where Ozu's essential sympathies lie in these confrontations, though as a moralist he is scrupulously fair, and for this reason some young Japanese have disliked his work, calling him old-fashioned, bourgeois, reactionary. And so he would appear...

The personal interpretation of Ozu's films has been encouraged by two misleading circumstances: one, that we simply happen to know much more about Ozu than we do about earlier traditional artists, and two, that Ozu, unlike a Zen poet or painter, must use living human beings as his raw material. The characters on screen are experiencing life…. But the characters who are emoting on screen may be no more or less representative of the film-maker than a nonhuman shot of a train or a building. The c...

Late Autumn is character as jigsaw puzzle, with tantalising missing pieces—the characters' silences, the film's empty spaces. Ozu's film concerns the mystery of the human essence, and much of it is devoted to the surmises, opinions, machinations and viewpoints of those around the mother and daughter, including Aya's friend Yuriko and three friends of her late father. As in Citizen Kane, each observation or comment presents the two women in a new, slightly different light. ...