Yasujiro Ozu

Started by cine, September 17, 2003, 02:52:57 PM

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pete

hahah I speak Japanese and Ono is wrong.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

planet_jake

I was lucky enough to see Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family in Chicago and it totally rocked my world. Anyone else have a similar expierience?

w/o horse

The Eclipse set is opening Ozu up for me in a big way.  I watched Early Spring and that was amazing, and then I watched Tokyo Twilight and realized that Early Spring was really amazing.  I find the way he paces his films stimulating and completely involved with the emotions of his characters, I find his shot selection delicate and engaging.  And his cuts:  I think Early Spring has instinctive and logical cuts, and given the restrictive atmosphere, given the suppression of conversational exoneration, they couldn't possibly be called anything but jarring and powerful.  He doesn't move the camera, but he moves around his characters, and when he moves around them he forces you to notice new things about them, consider them in this way then that way.  Watch, it's there.  Gripping is my choice adjective.  If you give yourself over I can see a whole theater crying, the way Ebert talked about and Ghostboy quoted on page one.

When I'm done with the box I'm going to revisit his Criterions.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

Reinhold

I caught I Was Born, But... today at IFC and although it's one of the better silent films I've seen, it felt completely underdeveloped, unresolved, and even boring for most of it. The opening shot was the most promising... but I just couldn't get into until the last half hour. I guess I have to assume I just missed a lot in terms of cultural context or something.  Anybody else see this?
Quote from: Pas Rap on April 23, 2010, 07:29:06 AM
Obviously what you are doing right now is called (in my upcoming book of psychology at least) validation. I think it's a normal thing to do. People will reply, say anything, and then you're gonna do what you were subconsciently thinking of doing all along.

matt35mm

I saw it a while ago with a new live score.  I remember being charmed by it.  I don't really remember much of a story to it, so a lot of it was just seeing simple Japanese life through the eyes of children, and it was pretty funny at times.  Like I said, I don't remember the story, but that might be because there wasn't really much of one?  I don't think anything really happens, and the stuff that happens is fairly inconsequential, but the details and atmosphere were palpable and felt so lived-in.  So perhaps development and resolution were not really important.  Right now it's in my mind as more of a portrait of a time and place and attitude, especially from the children's point of view.

Reinhold

i saw it with a recorded piano score that really didn't fit the film very well. there was a little bit of mickey mousing here and there but in terms of tone, it brought/changed nothing to the film. it felt very tacked on.
Quote from: Pas Rap on April 23, 2010, 07:29:06 AM
Obviously what you are doing right now is called (in my upcoming book of psychology at least) validation. I think it's a normal thing to do. People will reply, say anything, and then you're gonna do what you were subconsciently thinking of doing all along.

Lottery

I was just watching The End of Summer again and I've really come to feel that the final third of the film is really, really unsettling and ominous.

Anyway, I wish Ozu could have done more colour stuff.

wilder



I've never been particularly interested in Ozu, but this excerpt from the beginning of Ebert's Criterion commentary got me excited about him without much knowledge so I figure it's a decent entry point into his work. I've never seen an Ozu movie and admittedly have a difficult time getting into Asian cinema in general (exceptions: I'm a big fan of Masahiro Shinoda's 'Pale Flower', Nagisa Oshima's 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence', and the Koreyoshi Kurahara films packaged in Criterion's Eclipse set, most notably 'The Warped Ones',  but these director's films seem to be stylistic exceptions to the majority of the Japanese films I've seen) but the compositions in the opening of Floating Weeds above have me really stoked on seeing it and Good Morning, which also looks incredible visually.

Screenshots from the UK blu-ray release of Floating Weeds (1959)

Screenshots from the UK blu-ray release of Good Morning (1959)

jenkins

funny, at the paragraph's beginning was going to mention good morning! you already did, lol. is really enjoyable imo. ozu is an emotional and narrative master, with a famous inclusion of japanese perspective, although maybe not visual (cinematic) appeal. idk

in la right now, shion sono is considered like, japan's unmissable. not sure how to describe the vision of him as unavoidable. appreciation mainly based on love exposure

i'd recommend many on my own, if i thought a conversation might be started. not fully believing so, just want to smile and say yasuzo masumura, seijun suzuki (famous, but thinking of youth of the beast, and fighting elegy), kihachi okamoto, and many more but i won't mention. love japan basically

but good start to conversation, good morning wilderesque :))

wilder

#39
I've seen Youth of the Beast, which I liked, and a couple other Sezuki's. I respect what he does but it's something I might have been into more if I got deeper into it several years ago, it's just not really my thing now. Might try Fighting Elegy on your recommendation and also Gate of Flesh, which I've been putting off for godknowshowlong.

I've heard of Yasuzo Masumura and actually have The Blue Sky Maiden (1957) sitting here to watch, but it doesn't have subtitles. Its compositions look great though, and I'm interested in his stuff for similar reasons as Ozu, so I might give it a go without understanding a goddamn thing. Some screencaps from Blue Sky Maiden:







and one from another of Masumura's movies, The Hot Little Girl (1970)



I haven't seen anything by Okamoto. All that Feudal Japan stuff kind of turns me off. I like Kurosawa's High and Low, the more contemporary set films. The old setting strips that level of relatability for me. Maybe I'll try them out despite this.

jenkins

oh hello! :)

guess most of your replies are based on your personal preferences, which are of course more up to you than others :)

exciting screencaps! masumura's movies are pretty wild, it's true

i might say kinda the same thing about historical japanese perspectives as you did (related to okamoto). the same kinda thing about wwii movies, time perspectives, thematic bases, the aging of people, etc. i def think about the same kinds of things. seems like a difficult battle, between self and society and history and all other things. know what you mean, is what i'm saying. like with america's movies, some japanese movies aren't so much about the past as about other human questions related through events. and the time detail is a crazy abstraction. i'm delighted by sub-surface mystery, and enjoy encountering them. i have in other historical japanese movies, and most of all valued the strange emphasis in okamoto's movies. btw :)

fun talking with you :))

Lottery

Quote from: Lottery on March 15, 2013, 08:22:23 AM
Anyway, I wish Ozu could have done more colour stuff.

Doubly stand by this because upon rewatching, Floating Weeds has some of the most fantastic use of colour ever (the composition is special too). Can I make a thread about most striking/memorable cinematography? Not necessarily favourite...hell, I'll just see if there's an old thread I can use.

Anyway, instead of watching his talky stuff again and again, does anyone have any opinions on his silent work? I've never really delved much into silent film overall. Help me out?

jenkins

Quote from: Lottery on April 07, 2014, 10:30:35 AM
Anyway, instead of watching his talky stuff again and again, does anyone have any opinions on his silent work? I've never really delved much into silent film overall. Help me out?

with some silent movies i can see the ingredients that continue to constitute the basis for cooking a movie. for example, griffith's orphans of the storm has the major elements of popular action movies today, in that it frames the story within a historical problem, it uses people as symbols, and there's a conclusive chase scene

there's an ozu example: i was born, but... ('32), which he remade as good morning ('59). i adore good morning, and i appreciate being able to register similarities/differences between the two. floating weeds itself has a story of floating weeds ('34). relationships between the movies help build interests, because sometimes silent movies are hard to watch for people. a few of my movie friends like all kinds of movies, but for one reason or another they can't stand silents. so these are the obvious ozu silents to mention

how do you watch them -- do you have a region free player? my personal favorite silent japanese movie is hiroshi shimizu's japanese girls at the harbor, which i think plays itself as a wonderful cinematic narrative, with readable and digestible emotions. that's cinema so good you gotta write that shit down. eclipse put it out, but idk how that's helpful news for non-region1


Find Your Magali

I have, in my late 40s, come to absolutely love the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu.
I've worked my way through many of his most notable post-war films in the past three years.

I jumped right in with Tokyo Story, because I didn't want to be influenced by already understanding Ozu's style. I wanted to see if the film would come to me, and it absolutely did. Looking forward to rewatches, because I'm not sure if I'll ultimately end up ranking it as my #1 Ozu. But it's surely a masterpiece.

After that I  have watched, in this order:

-- Good Morning
-- Late Spring
-- Floating Weeds
-- Early Summer
-- An Autumn Afternoon

All wonderful, in their own rights. Funny, sad, playful, devastating, all in turn.

Looking forward to watching more Ozu. For me, there's something about the pace of the films that's so comforting in these stressful times; even acknowledging that he's showing a world of post-war Japan that was not without its own pressures and problems.