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One of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Yasujiro Ozu was born in 1903 and died in 1963. To mark the 120th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of his death, archives around the world are celebrating his work. Notably, Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12. In Japan the sixtieth birthday is traditionally an auspicious day-called the kanreki-marking a symbolic rebirth with the completion of the lunar/zodiac cycle and the return to the calendar sign under which one was born.
BAMPFA presents a selected retrospective spanning the course of the director’s career, from the silent era to his six crowning films made in color. At the core of Ozu’s cinema is his thoughtful examination of middle-class family life. He makes the ordinary extraordinary, in large measure because of the poetic sensibility of his cinema and the deep humanity of his characters. His stalwart actors-including Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, and Kinuyo Tanaka-give impeccable performances, and this series showcases their tremendous roles.
Also central to Ozu’s success was his long-term partnership with screenwriter Kogo Noda. Featured here are their early collaborations, That Night’s Wife and Woman of Tokyo, plus a dozen of their postwar films, from Late Spring (1949) to Ozu’s final work, An Autumn Afternoon (1962). It was not uncommon for Ozu’s cinema to use ellipses-that is, electing not to show major events in the story, presenting instead quieter, seemingly insignificant moments in his characters’ lives. This quality of simplicity, paired with Ozu’s placement of the camera low, in a fixed position-especially in his later period films-and use of the square-format academy aspect ratio, is the signature of his elegant formal style.
-Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator