It just so happens that Ozu’s Zen-infused sensibility translates on film to something like the art form’s nascent formal beauty: patiently watching little happen, and the meditative moments around the nonhappening, until it becomes crashingly apparent that lives are at stake and the whole world is struggling to be reborn.The low-intensity but painful clash between domestic Japanese traditionalism and modernism and feminism—between the insecure old and the restless young—is Ozu’s range to patrol, and here it is realigned after wartime and complicated implicitly by signs of encroaching Americanization.
Eminent Ozu players Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara command this poignant tale of love and loss in postwar Japan, which remains as potent today as ever, and a strong justification for its maker’s inclusion in the pantheon of cinema’s greatest directors.One of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, LATE SPRING (BANSHUN) tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his beloved only daughter. Posted by Noel Megahey Published . Late Spring is perhaps the defining film of Yasujiro Ozu’s latter period depictions of family life, set during the post-war years in Japan when the traditional family unit had to undergo great changes. What would be the best path for her to follow? Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1949 • Japan Starring Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka One of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, LATE SPRING (BANSHUN) tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his beloved only daughter. Early Spring Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1956 • Japan In his first film after the commercial and critical success of Tokyo Story, Ozu examines life in postwar Japan through the eyes of a young salaryman, dissatisfied with career and marriage, who begins an affair with a flirtatious co-worker. What he depicts in this, his inaugural seasonal film, the first ideogram in a dozen-year exploration of parent-child relationships, is an altogether subtler dilemma. Late Spring can be seen as Ozu’s first absolutely crucial work, a step toward understanding the ripple effects of the postwar age among ordinary citizens—or, if that’s not possible, then at least capturing them in compassionate amber. (Was Ozu the first filmmaker to use the Coca-Cola logo as a symbol for rampaging Yankee capitalism?
Despite Noriko’s self-reliance—an Ozu earmark from the thirties that became an axiom in But can it? Classics and discoveries from around the world, thematically programmed with special features, on a streaming service brought to you by the Criterion Collection. Sold by westcoastmedia and ships from Amazon Fulfillment. Indeed, postwar society (suggested further by discussions of treated anemias and glimpses of the Still, Ozu’s scenario isn’t a generational throw-down. FREE Shipping.
0 minute read. It is something more fundamental—a quintessential aspect of the medium, a breath-catching nexus of time elapsed and empathies shared. While Criterion went to great lengths to preserve and present the best possible image, Late Spring is a film that is over 50 years old. Eminent Ozu players Chishu...This audio commentary, recorded in New York in 2004, features Richard Peña, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and an associate professor at Columbia University.On the streets of Tokyo and in meetings with some of Yasujiro Ozu’s legendary collaborators, renowned director Wim Wenders (PARIS, TEXAS) explores the world of Ozu, whom Wenders considers “a sacred treasure of cinema.” Like many original films that spawn sequels, Late Spring may in fact be the best. His focus on the society’s transitional struggles, quotidian living spaces, and enjoyable norms was not only unflagging (more than fifty films in a thirty-five-year career) but embodied in the very shape of his compositions and in the reasoning behind his cuts. An enormous amount of literature has been generated about Ozu’s work, but a few line items need to be reaffirmed: He is one of the very few cinema giants you could never accuse of pretension (Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and Robert Bresson are the others). Far from a Manichaean take on the oppressive power of lingering social norms, Justly praised for his temperate, rigorous form, Ozu is actually something of a calculating whammy master, and The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, Abbas Kiarostami’s tale of one man’s despair leaves the question of whether life is worth living unanswered.Hollywood has never produced a comedy more acutely witty, more sexually playful, or more unexpectedly moving than this flawlessly engineered masterpiece by Preston Sturges.With his grace, power, and purpose, the martial artist turned himself into a global pop-culture icon, showing audiences what it takes to advance through the everyday labor of life.The first and most influential film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s sci-fi classic, this brilliantly imagined vision of apocalypse captured American anxieties at the height of the Cold War.Get info about new releases, essays and interviews on the Current, Top 10 lists, and sales. In Stock. Each film is a raw lesson—nearly perfect and resounding, if not terribly different from twenty others—intended to realign in our hearts what cinema is good for.It’s a cliché now to posit Ozu as the “most Japanese” of that nation’s great directors, but it still seems true.
It’s not Japaneseness per se that draws us, though; why would it, after all? Picture 6/10. Criterion upgrades their DVD edition of Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring to Blu-ray, presenting the film again in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on a dual-layer disc in a new 1080p/24hz transfer.. Like a lot of Ozu’s older films (and most films I’ve come across from the Shochiku library) the source materials are a limiting factor in the presentation. He certainly beat Jean-Luc Godard and Billy Wilder to the punch.) One of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, LATE SPRING (BANSHUN) tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his beloved only daughter. (The matter of the father’s caretaker-requiring “eccentricity” is mostly taken for granted, although his capabilities as a scholar seem under question when he confuses Franz Liszt with economist Friedrich List.)