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Yasujiro Ozu

 

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 TOP 100 

  
Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
 
Robin Buss' Top 10 Directors
Chris Fujiwara's Top 10 Directors
Derek Malcolm's 5 Best Directors
David Robinson's 5 Best Directors
David Sterritt's Top 10 Directors
 
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
 
See Also
Robert Bresson
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Akira Kurosawa
Kenji Mizoguchi
Mikio Naruse
Nagisa Oshima
View video clips relating to this director at YouTube.com
Director / Screenwriter
1903 - 1963 
Born December 12, Tokyo, Japan
Key Production Country: Japan 
Key Genres: Drama, Family Drama, Comedy Drama
Key Collaborators: Chishu Ryu (Leading Character Player), Kogo Noda (Screenwriter), Tatsuo Hamada (Production Designer), Yuharu Atsuta (Cinematographer), Yoshiyasu Hamamura (Editor), Kuniko Miyake (Character Player), Haruko Sugimura (Character Player),  Setsuko Hara (Leading Player), Kojun Saito (Composer), Shin Saburi (Leading Player)
Highly Recommended: Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Tokyo Story (1953), An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
Recommended: I Was Born, But... (1932), The Only Son (1936), Floating Weeds (1959), Late Autumn (1960), Early Autumn (1961)
Links: [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [ Film Reference ] [ Masters of Cinema ] [ Strictly Film School ] [ Wikipedia ] [ International Federation of Film Critics Article ] [ Film Comment Article ] [ Rouge Article ] [ Premiere Article (2007) ] [ Midnight Eye Feature (2003) ] [ Derek Malcolm's Century of Films (2000) ]
Books: [ Ozu: His Life and Films ] [ Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema ] [ Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer
DVD's: [ Amazon ]
1,000 Greatest Films: I Was Born, But... (1932), Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Tokyo Story (1953), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
 
I Was Born, But... (1932)Late Spring (1949)The Only Son (1936)
 
     
  "His films almost invariably deal with the lives and domestic problems of the Japanese middle-class family. His style is exquisite in its simplicity. Technically, it is characterized by stationary-camera shots usually taken from a low angle...He seldom varied his camera angle and almost never resorted to such devices as fades, dissolves, pans, or tracking shots...Yet despite this laconic use of some of the basic "phrases" and punctuation marks in the language of the cinema, he turned out films of great beauty and magnetic power." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)  
     
  "Although the two men are dissimilar in almost all other respects, Ozu had something in common with Alfred Hitchcock, in that his films were worked out to the last detail, blueprints which he and his scriptwriter, Kogo Noda, would construct during late-night drinking sessions." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)  
     
  "Ozu's work remains significant not only for its extraordinary richness and emotional power but also because it suggests the extent to which a filmmaker working in popular mass-production filmmaking can cultivate a highly individual approach to film form and style." - David Bordwell (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991)  
     
  "A chronicler of Japanese society in transition, Ozu dealt with the life and problems of the young, middle-aged, and elderly in a simple, compassionate way." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
 
"I have formulated my own directing style in my head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others." - Yasujiro Ozu
 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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"A film is a petrified fountain of thought." - Jean Cocteau   "If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed." - Stanley Kubrick