Food type: Japanese

Food rating: 4/10

Nearest tube: Westminster, Waterloo

Website: Ozu Restaurant Japonais

University has kicked off for me this week and I am still trying to get my head around being a final year medical student. The first two weeks involves going to a lot of monotonous lectures which just saps the life out of you. Case in point my lecture on wednesday morning which had a hypnotizing effect and managed to drive quite a few students off to slumberland. Not me though... I fought tooth and nail to keep my heavy eyelids open. However when they decided to drag in a F2 Doctor to give us another pointless lecture I was left with little choice but to do a runner along with half the class.

With classes located at St. Thomas' hospital, D and I decided to wander around the area in search for a decent place to fill our stomachs. About a stones throw away from St. Thomas' hospital was county hall which also houses the Mariott Hotel. One of the restaurants here which caught our eye was Ozu. Having nothing better to do, and a very hungry stomach to fill, we decided to give this place a try. Assuming we found it that is. You see, it was a mission unto itself to locate the restaurant. Whislt the restaurant is located along the Thames, there is no direct access to it other than through county hall itself.

The lunch menu offers lunch sets starting at £22 including options for sushi, sashimi and rice or udon. There is also the pricier a la carte menu which offers more interesting dishes marrying Japanese flavours with some French ideas. There is also a tasting menu priced at £55. As we had a session of badminton after lunch, we opted for the lighter lunch menu.

Green Salad with Yuzu Miso Dressing

We started off with a green salad consisting of rocket, lettuce and cherry tomatoes dressed in a yuzu miso dressing. I  found the balance of the dressing to be way off with too much of a salty and acidic component drowning out even the peppery rocket. (1/10)

Miso Soup

A bowl of Miso soup was much more pleasant. The bowl of soup consisted of lovely slivers of seaweed, delicate tofu and was lifted by the addition of a hint of ginger. (4/10)

Assorted Sushi

Our sushi set consisted of 7 different types of fish - Prawn, Butterfish, Salmon, Turbot, Tuna, Sea Bass and Sea Bream (kabayaki style). The fish were of good quality although the fish was quite thinly sliced and the rice slightly loose. (5/10)

Black Cod with Vegetable Millefeuille & Crispy Nori

A side order of Black Cod with Vegetable Millefeuille & Crispy Nori featured juicy, melt in your mouth cod marinated in miso which was grilled to perfection. The vegetable millefeuille consisted of different layers of carrots, cabbage and beetroot pressed together. Despite its picteresque look, the millefeuille failed to deliver in terms of taste - it was underseasoned and to be honest tasted like boiled vegetables and butter of school dinners past.  (5/10)

Vanilla Ice Cream Mochi

For dessert we had the option of either Mochi (Glutinous Rice Balls) or Chocolate Creme and naturally went for one of each. The Mochi was stuffed with Vanilla Ice cream with a drizzle of honey was unimpressive. The rice was served too cold resulting in the Mochi taking on a rather beefy texture without much spring to it. (2/10)

Chocolate Creme with Vanilla Ice Cream and Coconut Foam

The Chocolate Creme was served with Vanilla Ice Cream, Coconut Sugar Biscuit and Coconut Foam. This was a deconstructed Bounty bar which while pleasant was unspectacular. (2/10) Certainly, desserts were not the strong point of this restaurant.

Lunch here was a pleasant affair although atmosphere at this restaurant was certainly muted during the lunch service. There were only 2 other tables being served while we were there. Perhaps this had to do with the location of the restaurant which was rather difficult for us to find our way to. Service was pleasant and unobtrusive and unlike many restaurants in London, service is not included onto the final bill.

- the long take,
- ozuian style,
- karriere,
- et par filmanalyser
- mønstre i film
- fremmedgjorte figurer

analyse af Wes Andersons fortællinger

- auteur,
- fortællemønstre,
- komik,

analyse af the long take

- historisk,
- forskellig betydning,
- long take i hollywood, ex Rope og Children Of Men
- modsat continuity editing
- fordrer kamerabevægelser
- mere fokus på miljø end udtryk

"There's no point trying to copy Ozu's methods. But what I wanted to learn from him was the spirit of a movie director - protect what we believe, and to stick to what we want to speak about." Jun Ichikawa

Variety has additional details, here.

For several years on our introductory film course, we spend the first week conducting formal analyses of a couple of films, breaking down their editing patterns and shot selections. We usually give students an example of Classical Hollywood Cinema and juxtapose it with an Ozu movie. As a pair, they represent very different approaches to narrative-based continuity editing, and for teaching the basics of shot-by-shot sequence analysis, the connections between shots, as well as the composition of each of those shots, these two films always serve as excellent illustrative text. For the past few years we've used Tokyo Story, which the majority of students have found so sluggish and unengaging that they switch off from the task of tracking the passage from shot to shot (they rarely have trouble with The Big Sleep, probably because the quick pace keeps them interested, and the incoherence of its plot stops them getting toodistracted by the story). So, this year, I've switched the Ozu film to Ohayô, one of his brightest, breeziest outings. It's much shorter than Tokyo Story. And it has fart jokes.

I kind of regret bowing to majority opinion on this, but rather than trying to bend them to my view, I thought I'd try a fresh movie and see what happens. Ohayô certainly features Ozu's distinctive, idiosyncratic and endlessly fascinating visual syntax, a set of repetitive techniques which stand as one of the most recognisable in all of world cinema.

The story is simple, the nuances legion. It follows the interpersonal relationships of a group of Japanese families who share an immediate neighbourhood. The primary focus is on two boys, Minoru and his little brother Isamu, who desperately want a television. Their parents are annoyed that the pair spend much of their time rushing next door to watch TV at the home of a louche couple, around whom a fair bit of town gossip circulates (they spend the whole day in pyjamas, apparently!), when they should be studying their English homework. Railing against their parents' antipathy towards television (read it as a symbol of modernity), the boys take a vow of silence until they are given a set. The ensuing stand-off reveals much about the bifurcated worlds of adults and children, with the youngsters refusing to communicate, and the adults' communication blighted by reticence, gossip and misunderstanding. This running commentary on communication gives the film its title: "ohayô", meaning "good morning", is one example of the kind of barely sincere small talk that the boys deplore. How can their parents say that watching TV is a waste of time when they themselves spend so much time talking to people they don't like or uttering redundant phrases? Most of Ozu's abiding themes are here: tensions between duty and desire, between traditional behaviours and modern attitudes (often represented by incursions of American/Western culture into post-war Japanese society), dramatised as an inter-generational conflict.

If you're new to the close formal analysis of sequences of film, Ozu is a great place to start. Although his style develops over the course of the fifty-something features he completed in his lifetime (he lived for exactly 60 years to the day, 1903-1963), in his later work it is fully formed and comprising an immediately recognisable set of visual consistencies. His shots are always meticulously composed, with prominently placed objects, such as the kettles and other domestic implements that you'll notice peppering the frame. They're not necessarily useful props for developing narrative, but they anchor the eye and preserve the beautiful order of the set. In his colour films, you will be struck by the use of chunks of colour to adorn these compositions. See, for instance, this moment in Ohayo when two consecutive shots are connected, not spatially, but with a graphic match between two bright red objects.

Usually, these objects are not significant in themselves (though the prominence given to domestic utensils and everyday tools may be telling), but sometimes they can reveal a lot. In Tokyo Story, we learn that Noriko (Setsuko Hara) doesn't entertain guests very often in her humble home, just from the fact of her going to a neighbour's place to borrow a bottle of sake. It's a simple act that invites the inference of a great deal of private backstory that would otherwise have been elided altogether.

 

You can also see a reminder of the widowed Noriko's childlessness in the prominently placed baby (not that I would brand the little guy as an "object") if you so choose. The same can be said for this beautifully composed shot of the alleyway outside Noriko's apartment:

Even as it seems designed to convey the cramped conditions and disorder of the location, it is almost fussily arranged and perfectly lit so that the child's tricycle (connoting the family environment in which Noriko must live alone), and the large sake bottle will pop out in the composition. Finally, here's another significant object shot from Tokyo Story. The elderly couple have been sent to a tourist resort by their children (ostensibly as a treat, but really to get them out of the way), where noisy young people are cavorting and carousing late at night. The quiet simplicity of the couple, and their utter togetherness, in comparison to this youthful frippery (!), is set out definitively in this lovely shot:

OK, I could fill this whole blog with wonderful frame grabs from Ozu movies, but I suppose that would be too easy. What are we to make of these objects, even when they're not so obviously weighted with narrational baggage as those examples? Donald Richie, who wrote one of the first book-length studies of Ozu's work, considered them to be "containers of emotion", but for them to serve as "a focal point for aroused emotions" these objects "must be free of all ostensible directorial purpose. Otherwise it would not contain emotion, it would discharge it. This emotion, of course, is neither Ozu's nor that of his characters, but the emotion which has been generated in the spectator himself."

Richie cites an example from near the end of Early Spring (1949):

The image of the vase in the darkened room to which Ozu returns at the end of Late Springserves not only to bridge the transition between Setsuko Hara equitable and Setsuko Hara near tears, but also to contain and to an extent create our own emotions. Empathy is not the key here. To be sure we do imaginatively project our own consciousness onto another being, but this is perhaps a secondary effect. Primary to the experience is that in these scenes empty of all but mu [a zen term meaning "nothingness"], we suddenly apprehend what the film has been about, i.e., we suddenly apprehend life. This happens because such scenes occur when at least one important pattern in the picture has become clear. In Late Spring the daughter has seen what will happen to her: she will leave her father, she will marry. She comes to understand this precisely during the time that both we and she have been shown the vase. The vase itself means nothing, but its presence is also a space and into it pours our emotion.

I actually quite like this analysis. It seems to have an internal logic, so it's tempting to take it on board. But, aside from the fact that it assumes that the spectator (i.e. every spectator) is operated on so directly by a poetic device, I wonder if it would still work for those objects which are not also receptacles of some sort. Does Richie's idea of objects as repositories for our emotional energy only work on hollow things? Do we haveto hand over our feelings to the vase even if we don't feel like it at the time? No, it all falls down upon closer inspection. Bordwell and Thompson critique Richie's stance on Ozu in their superb article "Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu", a lucid and sensible attempt to catalogue the key facets of Ozu's style using the Classical Hollywood Cinema as a model for comparison. They refer to hypersituated objects, which are "treated in such a way that they become much more noticeable than their narrative function would seem to warrant in traditional terms." They're talking here not about the fairly prominent examples I've pictured above, but rather about the "tea kettles, neon signs, fire extinguishers, beer bottles, vases, striped towels, and similar items that are given such prominence in Ozu's mise-en-scene." These are not like the props which, under the Classical paradigm, are allowed to augment the frame only in so far as they clarify, punctuate or illustrate a narrative point. They question Richie's attempt to force the vase to appear to be contributing to narrative sense, to enhance the emotional identification required by the character's sadness. Instead, they argue that "the object's lack of function creates a second formal level alongside the narrative; its motivation is purely 'artistic' [...] Such 'inscrutable' objects (and it may be that their only signification is just this inscrutability) drive wedges into the cause/effect chain."    

Even if Ozu's films can be used in this way to contrast with the Hollywood approach, they areedited for continuity, even if it is not for the sake of building up a continuously structured procession of narrative pointers - each shot follows logically from the last and preserves a spatio-temporal relationship between them, but with some crucial differences from the kinds of continuity that you'll find as standard in Classical Hollywood movies of the same period. That is to say, the links between shots are rarely abstract or symbolic, but the spatial relationships between them are very different from that standard. In an earlier post, I outlined the 180 degree rule as a starting point for understanding the conventions of continuity editing in Hollywood. This convention depends upon the regulation of camera position in order to maintain spatial continuity. The camera stays on one side of an imaginary line and reinforces the positional relationships between characters by ensuring that, for instance, that a character's eyeline will be confirmed in a shot that matches its direction and reveals its object. In this example from The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), the characters' position in relation to one another is clarified by keeping them in the same frame, with the diagonal composition meaning that cutting from one to the other keeps some of the same background in each shot but reverses that diagonal line and stating graphically that this shot is from the opposite direction:

Continuity between shots that follow a character in motion might also preserve the direction of that motion. An actor leaving a shot through a door on the left of the frame might be seen entering the next shot through the door at the right of the frame, establishing the new space as a continuation of the previous one through a match on action. In Ozu, you will notice that different conventions apply, utilising what Bordwell and Thompson designate a "360-degree shooting space", in which one shot might cut to a view in a direction turned 90 or 180 degrees from the previous one.  

Look at the shots in this sequence from Ohayô:

When Setsuko enters the house, we cut about 180 degrees as the occupants notice her. She leaves the frame and enters the house in shot 4, which has reversed the position of the couple. Setsuko follows a horizontal trajectory out of the right hand side of the frame and appears in the next shot walking down a corridor. This cut seems to turn 90 degrees away from the previous one, but the connection between the shots is clear by the match on action from Setsuko's movement: her consistent presence in each shot is what links them rather than the spatial affinities of each composition.

When she gets to the door at the end of the corridor, marked with a big red circle, there is another 90-degree cut. We're breaking the 180-degree line with these shots, but notice that the space doesn't exactly become "incoherent". We know why these shots are following one another, even if we might be accustomed to seeing them done differently. The red circle on the door is visible at the end of the corridor in both of these last two shots (sorry if it's not clear in my frame grabs above), operating as a graphic bond between them. Finally, for my purposes at least, in these two shots there is another 90-degree cut to the other side of the door, and the reverse shot of the two boys frames them together from an angle that does not represent Setsuko's point of view (she would have to move a few steps sideways to her right and crouch down to get that perspective). It makes sure we get a good view of the boys' interaction, even as it ignores eyeline conventions, and it is a 180-degree cut:

Ozu's camera doesn't follow his characters, but rather holds its position while the actors move through it or position themselves in their alotted portion of the frame. When shooting inside a traditional Japanese house, as Ozu so often does, the camera stays at the same low height. This is not a low angle, as sometimes claimed, but a height that is lower than usual, the perfect height for shooting people kneeling to eat or converse. Notice the lack of diagonal lines in these shots. The straight lines of walls, screens or doors are perpendicular to the lines of floors, tatami mats and tables. There is so much symmetry, so much care lavished on these compositions, that the films could easily devolve into fussy formalism and indeed you might have this response because the films do not forcefully emotionalise the compositions. I'll leave you to decide what your own feelings are about Ozu's films, but I find that the apparent tidiness of Ozu's shots sensitises me to the minor variations and subtle disruptions of the formula (and of course, the superb character acting, which should not go unreported). Even if Ozu's techniques seem repetitive, it shouldn't be presumed that similar shots always carry the same meanings. Here's a particularly striking example from Tokyo Story. These two frames are from the beginning and the end of the film. The first sees the elderly couple preparing to go on holiday to visit their children. The second frame is nearly identical in its composition, but Tomi, the wife has recently died.

Rather than reframing the second shot to focus on the old man, Ozu lets the two shots echo one another, bookending the film and making the gap in the frame that was previously occupied by felt as a tangible lack. You'll notice something highly distinctive about the way Ozu shoots dialogue. Rather than the "over-the-shoulder" shots familiar from Hollywood movies, he almost invariably shoots conversations between two people in a medium shot, with the speaker almost, but not quite, looking directly into the lens, often shot from the side and turning towards the camera. Here's an example from The End of Summer (1961):

Another dialogue scene from the same film shows how Ozu might use an object to reinforce the continuity between shots:

The yellow ash tray moves to precisely the opposite position for the reverse shots, making it certain that this is the view from the other speaker's point-of-view. These dialogue scenes are quite a jolt the first time you see them. We're used to seeing this technique used for scenes of confrontation - the near-direct looks from the actors seem to come straight at you, breaking the voyeuristic comfort you usually find when watching people talk in a movie. Sometimes you can see the discomfort of the actors, as if they're being subjected to great scrutiny, but the effect is, more often than not, to focus on the performances and to create an engaging level of intimacy with the humans who drive Ozu's dramas.

At the most radical level, in presenting space empty of characters - spaces around characters, locales seen before characters arrive or after they leave, or even spaces which they never traverse - Ozu's films displace the illusion of narrative presence and plenitude. A scene in The Maltese Falconwithout Sam Spade is possible, but not a scene without any of the characters, without any causal or parallel function in the narrative. Ozu's cutaways contest the imaginary presence of "human nature" and "character psychology" in the system of narrative causality by structuring sections of the film around what the classical paradigm can only consider absences.

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Ho caricato su YouTube un video che avevo nel computer da qualche anno (scaricato tout-cort da eMule) e che mi è capitato di rivedere oggi con interesse. Si tratta di uno stralcio di Fuori Orario in cui Enrico Ghezzi offre, con una chiarezza inusuale, deglle chiavi di lettura molto interessanti su Warhol (ed altro...)

> La mia pagina di You Tube

(uma origem aqui)

Partiendo por los inventores del cine: Lumiere y su LLegada del tren.
Acá pueden ver una compilación de algunos videos de Lumiere:

Otros registros antiguos interesantes tanto de Lumiere como de Edison pueden verlos acá:

Aparece Melies que inventa el genéro fantástico, creando efectos que hasta el día de hoy son utilizados.
Aquí el film El diablo negro

Ya en exteriores, con producciones más costosas tenemos a Porter y su Asalto y robo a un tren:

El primer genio del cine: D.W. Griffith le otorga un dramatismo hasta ese entonces inpensado.
Trailer de El nacimiento de una nación:

Ya con mucho del lenguaje cinematográfico afinado aparecen 3 figuras que forman
la comedia norteamericana : Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton y Harold lloyd.

Aparecen entonces otro genio, pero en la Unión soviética: Eisenstein
Que demuestra toda su teoría del montaje y la tensión gracias a la forma de ordenar las imágenes en El acorazado de Potemkin y su clásica escena del coche cayedo por la escalera.

Asímismo siguiendo la corriente del expresionismo en la pintura, los alemanes crean varias obras con personajes sombríos que reflejan su estado de ánimo en la escenografía.
El máximo ejemplo es El gabinete del Dr Caligari de Wiene.

Aparecen también artistas en europa que no siguen los patrones estéticos ni narrativos de la industria fílmica principalmente norteamericana.
Directores importantes son:
-Luis Buñuel (El perro andaluz)
-René Clair (Entreacto)
-Jean Cocteau (La sangre de un poeta)

El director alemán Murnau crea una de las película mudas más interesantes con un despliegue técnico y creativo soberbio: Amanecer

Aparece el sonido en el cine que obliga a los creadores y a los estudios a experimentar con esta nueva herramienta.
La primera película sonora es El cantante de Jazz en 1927

Otro director importante que aparece, pero desde oriente es Ozu
Acá: Y sin embargo hemos nacido

Algo que siempre había tratado de realizarse era el color en el cine.
En un principio los fotogramas eran pintados, pero no será hasta 1938 cuando se perfeccionó el Technicolor como ahora lo conocemos.
El problema fue que era muy costoso, por lo que durante los años '30 y '40 se siguió utilizando el blanco y negro.

Aparecen si, 2 películas importantes, el musical El mago de Oz donde se puede apreciar el mágico momento de la llegada al color

y Lo que el viento se llevo donde por primera vez se utiliza el color como elemento artístico,  ayudando a realzar en el espectador los sentimientos de los personajes.

Aunque, al igual que la fotografía, la profundidad de campo era algo en que directores como Mizoguchi, Eisenstein (Ivan el terrible),  Renoir (Las reglas del juego) y John Ford (La diligencia) habían trabajado.

Fue Orson Welles, otro genio, que logró llevar al extremo el uso de la profundidad de campo para fines estéticos y sobretodo narrativos.
El ciudadano kane es una referencia importante para darse cuenta que en el año 1941 ya se podía con todos los elementos que acá se han revisado, crear una película moderna.

Próxima sesión: Historia del cine parte 2, directores influyentes

Arkada bıraktığı günlere bakıp da pişmanlık duymayacak az insan vardır. İyiler, neden daha mükemmel olmadıklarını düşünerek; kötüler de, işledikleri fenâlıkların yüzkızartıcı çirkinliklerini görerek hasret ve inkisar içinde iki büklüm olup inleyeceklerdir.

Genç kuşakları ihmâl edip nefsâniliğin karanlık lâbirentlerinde yapayalnız bırakanlar, onların hergün biraz daha azmanlaşmalarına seyirci kalanlar..

 kitleleri millî kültür ve millî düşünceden mahrum bırakanlar, çekip onları şehevânilik bataklığında çürütenler..

fenalara ve fenalıklara yahşî çekip gününü gün etmek isteyenler, ülkenin dörtbir yanına kozmopolitlik tohumlarını saçarak millî şuur ve millî mefkûreyi öldürenler..

özünden ve ruh kökünden uzaklaşmayı ma’rifet ve medeniyet sananlar, ilim yuvalarını bu cehennem zakkumunun meşcereliği1 haline getirenler..

 yıllarca can alıcı hasımlarımızı dost bilip onlara dostluk türküleri söyleyenler, göz göre göre bütün değer hükümlerimizi yerle bir edip halihazırdaki şu hazîn manzarayı hazırlayanlar..

cismânî ve bedenî hazlarını, herşeyin önüne geçirip çılgınlık ve hezeyana girenler, bunların hâline imrenip, kelebeklerin kendilerini ateşlere attıkları gibi, gidip gidip levsiyyâta gömülenler..

 medeniyet deyip, yenilik deyip çeşit çeşit yabancı düşünceye pey-çekenler, olup biten bunca şey karşısında, bir kerecik olsun, irkilmeyen ve ürpermeyenler..

It was amazing because a lot of people from different countries and a really few french people ! I know it's difficult (impossible) in France to do some communication around acohol. But to be honest the event was really well organized. Cool people like Eva Mendes. An open bar until 1.AM, a good sound, people from Smirnoff and the staff very cool.

After the show they bring all of us in car from La Cigale to the Ozu. In my car, everybody sing along Rio and Wild Boys. Just imagine a car with 50 people who sing along Duran Duran in Paris !

Some pics on my Flickr.

This seems to be on a lot of 10 Best Films of All Time lists.

I was expecting it to be worthy, but dull.

It was worthy, but not dull.

Mildly disappointing you could say. And yet the point seems to be about being disappointing, and therefore to show disappointment up in all it's sad quiet little ways; and the non-complaining acceptance of disappointment becomes then - in itself - quietly, inconspicuously, a redeeming virtue.

"Isn't life disappointing?" says younger sister to older sister Noriko.

"Yes it is. A lot of disappointments" says Noriko.

No point to wish life to be otherwise. Life is "Ah so". Is as it is - whether you like it or not. It's soaked with "so-ness", and such-ness", and you live to mop up all the so and so stuff of life, and let its sadness soak right through you without getting in the way with your selfishly self-centred Ego.

Soaking through and mopping up what is "so" disappointing; it's what the wiser, older, generation do. It's what the grandparents Mama and Papa do. They sit there in quietness, uncomplaining. They accept whatever is with benign equanimity. They passively soak and mop up the small life around them. Grandpa smiles and goes "Well" (his "hmmm" sounds like the calm contentment of a ruminating cow) Grandma submissively smiles and nods.

They aren't getting in the way of the family life around them. But the family life around them acts like they are getting in the way, that they are a "nuisance" to be got rid of. Busy life has to be busied on with. More work has to be worked. More wanting has to be wanted. (and more disappointment has to be disappointed).

Ozu's camera is about 2 foot off the ground and never moves. It doesn't spin around or track or switch POV. It stays still, sitting there. It means you can sit there too - and get quiet with how you watch, and get off of what you expect (in terms of plot and drama, and moving on towards something else)

After about an hour my head was nodding, "hmmm"...."well"...."hmmm"....

It's relaxing. In an understimulating kind of way. And safe.

"Days of calm and quiet passing," says Noriko (of the small life she is). Which neatly sums up this film (and the experience of watching it)

If you could watch "The Archers" - on dope - this would be it.

Dir: Yasujiro Ozu, Japan

7/10

This is a wonderful film I saw last weekend. I have listed below some random facts and opinions. I hope it intrigues and encourages some of you to see it and do let me know what you think.

• Brief Plot : Two elderly parents from a small seaside town in southwest Japan pay a visit to their busy children in Tokyo - a journey that, before the introduction of the bullet train, took almost a day.
• Released one year after the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan, showing the changes and transitions on the road to a modern Japan.
• "This film is the Director's masterpiece: tender, profoundly mysterious and desperately sad" (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)
• A classic of World Cinema (BBC)
• Made post World War II, released in 1953 and shot in black and white.
• One of the best 100 Films ever made (Time Magazine).
• Sight and Sound magazine called "Tokyo Story" one of the three greatest films of all time".
• The Best Film Ever Made declared in 2005 by Halliwell's Film Guide.
• Simple yet universal theme of families and how they can drift apart.
• 100% Japanese reflecting a very different culture and society values to the West.
• Many filming techniques are quite alien to those familiar with mainstream movies.
• Trademark Ozu style: slow and still, low camera angles, minimilist, static camera (as a mere observer), lack of action, uneventful plot, no upbeat ending, landscape or wide-shots are used to allow a "chill-out" and separate scenes, characters often filmed sideways allowing the viewer to feel in the middle of the conversation, scenes often filmed in profile and framed within a building.
• The Director pioneered "ellipses" where major events are discussed but not shown within a film.
• "Tokyo Story" was not released in the US until 1972.
• Ozu made 54 films (26 in his first 5 yrs), which were very popular in Japan but under-appreciated in the West.
• There is a lack of editing and scenes are often shot in one take.
• Because of this lack of manipulation the viewer slowly becomes emotionally engaged with the characters and eventually by the end of the film the cumulative effect is that it hits home with power and honesty.
• Ozu does not point fingers instead he creates more of a contemplative meditation on the transitory nature of life.
• One of the most sympathetic characters Toriko (the daughter-in-law) is played by Sesuko Haro who features in many of the Director's other films. The actress never gave interviews and refused to be photographed, she retired from making films at the height of her fame.
• The viewer is drawn towards the characters through subtle gestures, observation of Japanes social manners and conversation, tiny details echo the bigger picture with wonderful camera framing and cinematography.
• Sound plays an important part, the rhythm of journey pervades the entire film, from background steamboats to speeding trains. A ticking clock or the sounds of the city subtly compliment the major themes of the story.
• One of the Director's favourite films was Orson Welles "Citizen Kane".
• My favourite key message "the beauty of life is often found by standing still"