Ozu, the late great Japanese director, is a sort of Oriental
Chekhov. His films, extending from the '20's to the early '60's,
are almost always domestic panoramas - if you don't like family,
Ozu is not for you. Slow and frequently plotless, melancholy but
with a humorous forbearance, full of superficially commonplace
characters and wanly philosophical observations, a camera that
rarely pans (Ozu seems to have invented the stationary low-angle
shot), these works have one distinctive flavor: an absolute
veracity. For whether or not we like Ozu (and many find him
incredibly boring), watching Tokyo Story or The End of Summer or An
Autumn Afternoon, it would be hard to question the reality of what
we see or hear. Who, after all, can quarrel with a mother who says:
"You know, when you come down to it, a son is best. Girls are no
use." Or a father who replies: "Boy or girl, it's all the same.
They all go off sooner or later." This is the sort of wisdom that
makes children run away from home. And yet how wonderfully well it
flourishes in the world of Ozu, where the antinomies are the
traditional and the modern, the old and the young. And though his
heart goes out to the provincial elders, and the forgotten values,
Ozu is not unsympathetic to change. In an Ozu film, life is change,
and nothing accents that more than the long lingering glimpses of
trains and train stations which are used as 'a haunting deus ex
machina, separating people or bringing them together, the years
meeting and the years dividing. Richie's book is attentive and
illuminating, a model study, but given Ozu's inescapable
narrowness, rather too copious in its praise: "Human nature in all
its diversity and variation - this is what the Ozu film is
essentially about." A man who can make a remark like that either
has a limited conception of human nature or has led a sheltered
life. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Substantially the book that devotees of the director have been
waiting for: a full-length critical work about Ozu's life, career
and working methods, buttressed with reproductions of pages from
his notebooks and shooting scripts, numerous quotes from co-workers
and Japanese critics, a great many stills and an unusually detailed
filmography." (Sight and Sound). Yasujiro Ozu, the man whom his
kinsmen consider the most Japanese for all film directors, had but
one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme,
its dissolution. The Japanese family in dissolution figures in
every one of his fifty-three films. In his later pictures, the
whole world exists in one family, the characters are family members
rather than members of a society, and the ends of the earth seem no
more distant than the outside of the house.
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