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Yasujiro Ozu |
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Director / Screenwriter |
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1903 - 1963 |
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Born December 12,
Tokyo, Japan |
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Key
Production Country: Japan |
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Key Genres:
Family Drama,
Drama, Comedy Drama, Domestic Comedy |
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Key
Collaborators: Chishu Ryu (Leading
Character Player), Kogo Noda (Screenwriter), Yuharu Atsuta
(Cinematographer), Yoshiyasu Hamamura (Editor), Haruko Sugimura
(Character Player), Tatsuo Hamada (Production Designer), Kuniko Miyake (Leading Character Player), Setsuko Hara (Leading Player), Kojun Saito
(Composer), Takeshi Sakamoto (Leading Character Player) |
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Highly Recommended:
I Was Born, But... (1932)*, Late Spring (1949)*,
Early Summer (1951)*, Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Tokyo Story (1953)*, An Autumn Afternoon (1962)* |
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Recommended: The Only Son
(1936), There Was a Father (1942), Early Spring (1956), Tokyo Twilight (1957), Floating
Weeds (1959), Good Morning (1959), Late Autumn (1960)*, The End of Summer (1961)* |
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Worth a Look: Tokyo Chorus (1931), Passing
Fancy (1933), Woman of Tokyo (1933)**, Record of a Tenement Gentleman
(1947), Equinox Flower (1958) |
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* Listed in TSPDT's
1,000 Greatest Films
section; **
Listed in TSPDT's
Ain't Nobody's Blues But My Own
section. |
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Links:
[
Amazon
] [
IMDB ] [
TCMDB ] [
All-Movie
Guide ] [
Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors ] [
Film Reference ]
[
The Criterion Collection ] [
Strictly
Film School ] [
Wikipedia ] [
International
Federation of Film Critics Article ] [
Film
Comment Article ] [
Rouge
Article ] [
Boston Phoenix Article (1999) ] [
Midnight Eye Feature (2003) ] [
Derek Malcolm's Century of Films (2000) ] [
Sight &
Sound Article (2010) ] [
Time Out Article (2010) ] |
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Books: [
Ozu: His Life and Films ]
[
Ozu
and the Poetics of Cinema ] [
Transcendental
Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer ] [
Censorship of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan: The
Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa ] |
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"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) |
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"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) |
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"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)
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"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) |
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"I have formulated my own
directing style in my head, proceeding
without any unnecessary imitation of
others." -
Yasujiro Ozu
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