Ozu

"Ozu’s world is very different from that of Nagai Kafu. His best films and his most famous films were made after World War II and are largely about the Japanese upper-middle class. They’re beautiful, profound films about people coming to terms with life, and coming to terms with the limits of human existence. They are films that have been stylised to show the essence of life rather than lots of action. And I think the writer who has conveyed the style of Ozu, the beauty of his films and the cultural context of them best is Donald Richie, who has written a lot about film, and, unlike many film scholars, is a very good writer. I read his books on Japanese film before I went to Japan and before I’d seen many of them – and even then you felt you had learned a lot, not only about film but about Japan itself. The most famous one is Tokyo Story , but there are many other fine ones – Late Autumn, Early Summer . Yes, the films are set in that period. Ozu started his career in the 1920s, and his films go all the way through to the 1960s: he died in 1963. A lot of them are family dramas, Tokyo Story being one of them, made in the 1950s. They show the changes of Japanese life and Japanese family life at a time of fast economic development."