Word: ozu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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OHAYO. The easy rhythm of middle-class existence in suburban Tokyo is the plot and soul of a gentle family comedy by the late Yasujiro Ozu, Japan's most celebrated film poet...
OHAYO. The easy rhythm of middle-class existence in suburban Tokyo is the plot and soul of a gentle family comedy by the late Yasujiro Ozu, Japan's most celebrated film poet...
Ohayo is Japanese for "good morning." With that greeting, day begins for the teeming inhabitants of a crowded modern housing development near Tokyo. And the lives of nearly all of them are woven into the texture of this delicate, homespun comedy by the late Yasujiro Ozu. Virtually unknown in the West, Ozu died in 1963 as Japan's most honored film maker, a man whose gentle art was eclipsed outside his homeland by the blazing, exportable genius of Kurosawa...
Nothing really happens to Ozu's characters except that they come and go, and leave unmistakable traces of humanity behind. Somehow, his austere style transforms the commonplace into a small, satisfying miracle of nature, the way a pebble makes ripples in a pond. And for earnest moviegoers, Ozu's refined camera technique is a revelation in itself, for he avoids the customary fades and dissolves, shoots every scene from a few feet above the floor, the approximate viewpoint of a neighbor kneeling on a tatami mat. It is an amiable posture, altogether appropriate for one of the world...
Eroica, made in 1957 by Polish Director Andrzej Munk, who died in a 1961 auto crash, reaches the U.S. with a reputation as a classic. But Munk's film stands up less well than Ozu's under the glare of posthumous appraisal. It looks like a roughing out of the masterwork that it was meant to be-one angry young Pole's bitter, blackly comic jeer at wartime myths of courage and honor...