I had the great pleasure of providing the introduction and program notes for the Harvard Film Archive’s upcoming Yasujiro Ozu retrospective, Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro. Curated by Haden Guest and presented by the HFA with Shochiku to commemorate the 120th anniversary of Ozu’s birth, the series presents all of Ozu’s extant films in 35mm, as well as a rare 16mm short that marks his first use of sound. The series runs from June 9 to August 13, and there are other Ozu celebrations to be had around the world this year, though you could always follow along virtually.
Hou Hsiao-hsien makes the connection between Ozu and the Lumières more explicit with Café Lumière (2003), but it is important to note that Ozu does not simply replicate whatever events we might conflate together as the real. (Though the frontal shot of my favourite Lumière film, Baby’s Breakfast (1895), is perhaps Ozu-like.) The collapsing of time (days, weeks, months, connected only via tasks, events, conversations) and the compounding of layered climaxes are what distinguish Ozu’s films (if it must be asserted in such plain terms) as art. I thought about this while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notes for The Last Tycoon:
Unlike home movies, which like bricks typically come together as either a pile or a wall, the films of Ozu’s oeuvre interact with one another out of order—they reach back, they point forward, they lurch inward.
A list of my favourite Ozu films in descending order:
The End of Summer (1961)
Late Autumn (1960)
The Only Son (1936)
Equinox Flower (1958)
There Was a Father (1942)
An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
Tokyo Twilight (1957)
Tokyo Chorus (1931)
Early Spring (1956)
Good Morning (1959)
Earlier in May I screened a number of my films in Montréal alongside films by Alexandre Galmard and Isaac Goes, as well as Cannot Not Exist (1994) by Stan Brakhage, for Isiah Medina’s carte-blanche Towards a Tradition of Quantity, presented by VISIONS and La lumière collective. The night was followed by a screening of Night is Limpid at Cinéma Public. I thought a lot about what to say about these two events. Here is what I will say… it is always invigorating to be surrounded by people who live and breathe movies, whether we are comrades or enemies, speak the same language or not, alive or no longer with us and only present through a projection… I think the air feels different.
More to come in the summer. Stay warm ^.^
Yasujiro Ozu, The End of Summer, 1961.