Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo story) 1953 - The compelling contrast between the older and younger generation

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IMDB Rating: 8,3

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Main Cast: Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, So Yamamura, Setsuko Hara, Haruko Sugimura

"Tokyo Story is widely considered both the best film of Yasujiro Ozu's long career and among the finest films ever made. It paints a quiet, nostalgic view of traditions and values lost in a changing society, seen through the lens of a single family's experiences. Old virtues, such as honoring one's parents, are pushed aside in the unrelenting tumult of the modern city. Tokyo Story showcases Ozu's idiosyncratic style in its maturity. Throughout the film, he shoots through a 50 mm lens at a constant low angle, subordinates spatial continuity to the composition of a given shot, and punctuates the film with shots of empty space. Instead of using flashy cinematic devices, he focuses on the nuances of everyday life, which has the odd effect of lifting the film from mere melodrama to a meditation on the fleeting nature of human existence. Tokyo Story shows a master director at the peak of his talents, producing one of the classics of world cinema." - www.allmovie.com

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Bakushu (Early summer) 1951 - Post-war concerns with modernity, tradition and the freedom of women

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Main Cast: Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, Chikage Awashima, Kuniko Miyake

"Writer/director Yasujiro Ozu combines two of his favorite themes - the culture clashes in modern Japan and the emergence of the independent Japanese woman - in Early Summer (Bakushu). Setsuko Hara plays a young woman of the post-war era who is promised in an arranged marriage. But too much has happened in the world and in the girl's own life to allow her to agree to this union without protest.
Character types are as easily recognizable in Japan as in any country, and this commonality enhances the universal appeal of this austere film.
Though composed with Ozu's customary low, fixed camera and straight cuts, Early Summer is stylistically tied to his earlier work, which features a more mobile camera than his later films: fluidly evocative tracking shots become scene transitions, and a perpendicular crane shot following Noriko and her sister-in-law as they walk through dunes equates them visually as the world literally turns." - www.allmovie.com

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Banshun (Late spring) 1949 - Yasujiro Ozu's second postwar production

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Main Cast: Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka, Haruko Sugimura

"Elegantly shot and quietly powerful, Late Spring is considered one of Yasujiro Ozu's finest films, along with Tokyo Story (1953) and Early Summer (1951). Like those films, Spring stars beautiful, enigmatic Setsuko Hara as Noriko, a woman reluctant to abandon her widowed father for marriage. And like most Ozu films, Spring subtly details the clash between the values of traditional Japan and those of contemporary society. Either Noriko leaves her father and enters the confining yet socially sanctioned world of marriage or she stays with him and enters the alienated labor pool like her thoroughly modernized friend Aya. Yet the film could just as easily be read as a wistful elegy to lost freedom. Though Ozu shoots the film with his trademark idiosyncratic restraint - including wide and low camera angles, mismatched eyelines, and long shots of unpeopled spaces - the camera is remarkably mobile during the first half of the film. Noriko is seen enjoying herself on a bicycle ride with a handsome young man and later exulting on a train trip. As Noriko progresses towards marriage, the camera confines her, echoing her own social entrapment. By the end of the film, Noriko's presence is replaced with a wedding portrait, while her father sits alone in an empty house. Late Spring is a remarkably moving film by one of world cinema's finest masters." - www.allmovie.com

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Tokyo no korasu (Tokyo chorus) 1931 - Ozu's economic exploration of the Depression

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022485/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 7,5

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Main Cast: Tokihiko Okada, Emiko Yagumo, Hideo Sugawara, Hideko Takamine, Tatsuo Saito

"Tokyo Chorus is a dark comedy about unemployment and family in prewar Japan. The film opens with a group of young men at their school graduation. After saying goodbye to their teacher, they are off into the working world. The story follows a single man and his difficulties at his job. He cannot avoid annoying his boss, a tempestuous man, and he's summarily fired. The remainder of the movie concerns his descent into unemployment and the pressure it puts on his family. In a wonderful scene, his wife discovers that he's sold her kimonos to buy food. She approaches him crying while he's playing with their children and the children draw her into their game which dries her tears. After a series of adventures, he finds another job and calm is restored to the family and their lives.
Tokyo Chorus is famous for being the first film where Ozu consistently utilized a low-angle camera. Ozu does not hesitate to attempt to show us the realities of Great Depression unemployment. Indeed, he is more truthful than any comparable American movie of that time or ours. Ozu is willing to attempt to dig into the nexus between employment, self-identity and status that is prevalent throughout capitalist economies. This was his primary theme at the beginning of the Depression, in this movie along with his early masterpiece I Was Born, But... and Where Now are the Dreams of Youth? and Passing Fancy. In addition, Ozu also flexes his unparalleled ability with family scenes. Excellent performances from Ozu regulars Tokihiko Okada, Emiko Yagumo, Tatsuo Saito, as well as a winning child performance from future star Hideko Takamine." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/tokyo-no-gassho-v138789

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(Youtube, silent - with English, French, Hungarian, Portugese and Spanish intertitles)

Ukigusa monogatari (A story of floating weeds) 1934 - Joy and sadness in everyday life

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025929/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Main Cast: Takeshi Sakamoto, Choko Iida, Koji Mitsui, Rieko Yagumo

"Ozu's silent film, inspired by the now-obscure 1928 carnival-troupe drama The Barker, a much inferior American film on a similar theme, might seem to inevitably be swamped by sentimentality, given the plot outline. But the director's genius adroitly avoids any hint of mawkishness by grounding the film in the most mundane details of daily life as he fashions one of the most powerfully moving works of his early career. The pleasure taken by the actor in a moment of peace for a cigarette, water dropping through the roof of the rickety theater into bowls, the horny supporting actors of the troupe always on the make -- these and dozens of other carefully observed fragments of the ebb and flow of the quotidian, shot in the director's characteristically understated visual style, emphasize his belief that everything his eye falls upon has value and meaning.
Ozu was justifiably proud of this meticulous character study, in which his celebrated low-angle style began to assert itself. A quarter-century later, he remade the film as Floating Weeds, retaining the same story and characters, switching the setting to a seaside town." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/ukigusa-monogatari-v111851/

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Otona no miru ehon, umarete wa mita keredo (I was born but...) 1932 - Yasujiro Ozu's silent classic

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023634/?ref_=nv_sr_1
IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Main Cast: Tatsuo Saito, Tomio Aoki, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Hideo Sugawara

"One of the last great Japanese silent films and one of director Yasujiro Ozu's first masterpieces, I was born but... features many of the characteristics that would become common in his later works: the focus on the subtleties of familial relationships, the quiet but deeply probing approach to life, and the measured but rhythmic pace to storytelling. The first half of the film plays almost like a superior, extended Our Gang short. The focus is on comedy as two young brothers try to adjust to their new home and neighborhood. The second half of the film, which concerns the two boys' changing opinion of their father, places drama at a higher priority, and the shift in tone is handled smoothly and naturally with no disruption to the story. Ozu is one of the few directors who could make a film about the joys of childhood without wallowing in nostalgia. Many aspects of the film's story have been told before and after Ozu tells them here, but rarely with such insight and charm, as well as a natural feeling for the characters. The two boys' battles, and then games, with the local kids ring entirely true, and the performances by the children are refreshingly genuine. The strength of an Ozu film can often be found in the simplicity of his presentation even without the aid of dialogue here.
Ozu reworked this film for his 1959 opus Ohayo." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/i-was-born-but-v139534

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