Yasujiro Ozu

Hirokazu Kore-eda has come into spotlight as one of the prominent Japanese filmmakers after his debut film <Maborosi> got awarded from the Venice International Film Festival. Since then, almost all of his films have been introduced through foremost film festivals. Kore-eda’s film is distinguishable from his fellow Japanese filmmakers with its unique stylization. All through his filmography, the subject matter has been focused in loss and mourning. The purpose of this article is to analyze Kore-eda’s way of treating his subject matter- death and emotional debris which the death has left- centering mainly on his two films, <Maborosi> and <Distance> in which the death has been used as a direct subject matter. This article explores how Kore-eda constitutes the image of ‘mourning’ in his films. First, <Maborosi> can be understood as a modern appropriation of Ozu, in which it presents rather oriental aesthetics through mis-en-scene completed by static shots and immaculate composition. Especially the filmic elements such as marginal shot, static mis-en-scene and the circulating view of the world and his concentration on aftermath of an torturing incident rather than the incident itself reveals that his cinematic language is deeply rooted from oriental philosophy. Secondly, there is this documentary-intimate attitude throughout his filmography. His films are mostly driven from true stories. Also the non-fictional form of experiment he delivers throughout the films- such as camera works, natural lighting, exclusion of artificiality in acting - places his film at unique position and prevents the mourning from being fallen into melancholy. The consistency of Kore-eda world is laid here that he doesn’t show interest in the moment where the fascination arises and the materiality of incident bursts like magma. Instead his cautious glance is directed towards the aftermath of the incidents, towards the way how life continues itself. This is the way how Kore-eda gives us consolation through his films.

How do cinematic portrayals of the weather reflect and affect our experience of the world? While weatherly predictability and surprise can impact our daily experience, the history of cinema attests to the stylistic and narrative significance of snow, rain, wind, sunshine, clouds, and skies. Through analysis of films ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from Citizen Kane to In the Mood for Love, Kristi McKim calls our attention to the ways that we read our atmospheres both within and beyond the movies.

Building upon meteorological definitions of weather's dynamism and volatility, this book shows how film weather can reveal character interiority, accelerate plot development, inspire stylistic innovation, comprise a momentary attraction, convey the passage of time, and idealize the world at its greatest meaning-making capacity (unlike our weather, film weather always happens on time, whether for tumultuous, romantic, violent, suspenseful, or melodramatic ends).

Akin to cinema's structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic control over what is fleeting, contingent, wildly environmental, and beyond human capacity to tame. This first book-length study of such a meteorological and cinematic affinity casts film weather as a means of artfully and mechanically conquering contingency through contingency, of taming weather through a medium itself ephemeral and enduring.

Using film theory, history, formalist/phenomenological analysis, and eco-criticism, this book casts cinema as weather, insofar as our skies and screens become readable through our interpretation of changing phenomena.

Este ensaio tem duas partes. Na primeira parte, tentamos ler a obra bastante conhecida de Yazujiro Ozu através do conceito do neutro de forma que o cotidiano e os seus personagens comuns possam ser uma forma de definir uma dramaturgia distinta, alternativa à tradição melodramática, hegemônica nas novelas e nos filmes hollywoodianos. Na segunda parte, tentamos pensar Ozu a partir de filmes contemporâneos e tributos que foram feitos a sua obra por Wim Wenders, Kiarostami e Hou Hsiao-hsien.

This course offers an introduction to one of the world’s most innovative and productive film industries from its earliest days to the contemporary moment. Japanese film directors experimented with and improved upon cinema and their work has been influential throughout the world.  From early silent movies to anime (Japanese animation), this course considers both critically acclaimed and globally popular films.  We pay close attention to the languages and styles of films as well as the film-historical and socio-cultural contexts. The primary goal of this course is to learn how to read formal and historical aspects of films and develop ability to talk about films in critical terms. We will also gain a familiarity with and appreciation of Japanese films and culture, and learn the basic history of Japanese cinema, including major directors and movements.  This includes considering the history, genres, and cultural and social contexts. Through critical analyses, reflections, and interpretations of cinema, this class provides its participants an understanding of Japanese visual culture, examining issues of globalization, visual simulation, nature and technologies, spectators’ subjectivity, and representation of gender and sexuality.

In this paper, I shall re-evaluate the diachronic, evolutionist model that establishes the Second World War as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analysing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1954), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a supposed ‘slow modernity’. By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi, I hope to demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a ‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on Bazin’s prophetic insight of ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on the confluence of film and theatre in these Mizoguchi and Ozu films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey, some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and the long shot are sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether ‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace of capitalism.

The Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu’s so-called “Noriko trilogy” is comprised of three films (Late Spring, 1949; Early Summer, 1951; Tokyo Story, 1953) in which the celebrated actress Setsuko Hara plays a woman named Noriko. The three Noriko’s personalities and circumstances differ considerably, but all three of them share one important characteristic: they experience pressure from family members to marry, which they resist. Those who read Ozu as a champion of traditionalism and Japanese conservatism tend to focus on Late Spring’s Noriko, who eventually succumbs to family pressure, while those who read him as a radical feminist argue that Tokyo Story’s Noriko, who successfully resists the pressure to marry, is exemplary. In this paper, drawing on feminist theories of relational autonomy, I take up the middle Noriko of Early Summer (whose resistance is only partially successful) as an alternative ideal, as an example of an autonomous subject acting under conditions of oppression during a period of rapid social change.

Tokyo Story (1953) inscribes plenty of vignettes from everyday life of Japanese homes. Whereas various home visits, daily conversations, and household chores paint the surface of the film, the roiling emotions and transient relations, underneath this surface, give cue to how home environment is shaped from and out of the embodied relations with things. This research takes a phenomenological lens to look at the embodied relations that are mostly unconscious, contextual, and omnipresent. The paper, firstly, demonstrates the frame-shaping techniques of Tokyo Story entailing associations with the context of dwelling experience. It then investigates themes within the framed relations that imply temporariness and transience. The research hence signifies the atmospheric quality of home by articulating what dissociates from it. That includes dwindling relations with the dwelling, as well as capturing the absences and particular placements that haul out of the home environment. More generally, this research also aims to showcase the strength of film studies in examining how spaces are actually lived and what constitutes the atmosphere of home.

This article examines an instance in which Ozu Yasujiro ̄’s famous self-restricting cinema was refashioned into a genre not widely known for its restraint: the softcore pornographic ‘pink’ film. I consider how Director Suō Masayuki’s film Abnormal Family: My Brother’s Wife (1984) appropriates and incorporates Ozu’s thematics and stylistics into a generic pinku eiga/porn film and to what end. With this film, Suō simultaneously manages to flex his credentials as a debuting pink film director and as an astute Ozu critic who studied under leading Ozu scholar Hasumi Shigehiko. Suō was not only forcing a rereading of Ozu’s films and criticism, but also pointedly commenting on the state of the Japanese film industry itself. Tellingly, Suō invokes a paterfamilias of Japanese cinema in a genre-based commercialized film at a time when the financial crisis for the domestic film industry left few avenues for new directors other than pornographic productions. In so doing, Suō suggests the intersections and tensions between market and auteurist demands that existed not only in the mid-1980s, but even back in the golden days of Ozu.

Growing global interconnections in contemporary society makes the ability to pin films to their national identity increasingly difficult, and instead allows viewers to expand beyond purely culturalist understandings of what they are watching. These developments are made apparent in both Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) and Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro (1988). Various Western critics have described both of these films as “very Japanese,” typifying elements of nipponic identity despite their vast differences in tone, genre and style. Contra to these critics, in this essay I will argue that placing a definitive national label on either film is reductive to both the film and the director, who, in each case represent the transnational world. Tokyo Story, in its understanding and subsequent inversion of Hollywood conventions, and My Neighbour Totoro, by nature of being an animated film, and depicting a universal utopia

In his two-volume study of the cinema, Deleuze presents a unique understanding of film as a space of thinking productive of its own cinematic thoughts and ideas, which it thinks through the compositions of images and signs it produces. This question of what new kinds of thinking the cinema might develop underwrites Deleuze's theory of the postwar transition from the sensori-motor thought of the 'movement-image' towards an intensive 'thought without image' generated by the crystalline 'time-image'. Great directors, for Deleuze, are those who invent new intense connections of preindividual singularities and ideas in thought that disrupt the habits and clichés of ordinary perception and action, forcing us to think and feel differently. It is precisely in terms of the production of a new style of cinematic thinking, I argue, that we can frame encounters with the films of Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō, and specifically his contribution to the emergence of what we might term, following Deleuze, a cinema of contemplation rather than action. Whilst a number of scholars have recognised a certain 'contemplative' aesthetic in Ozu's films (Bordwell, 1988; Schrader, 1988), this article turns to Deleuze's discussion in Difference and Repetition to understand contemplation not as a subjective form of transcendence, but rather as an immanent event of individuation. I focus in particular on Ozu's cinematic thinking of contemplation generates new and transformative ways of thinking and perceiving the city, uncoupling urban spaces and bodies from the requirements of sensori-motor action such that they become expressive sites of indeterminate signs and unexpected intensities of affect. By dramatizing these immanent transitions and thresholds of affective and spatial becomings, I argue that Ozu's films direct us toward new possible openings of thought to a politics of the virtual.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi écrit aussi sur le cinéma. Son analyse minutieuse d'une séquence d'Eté précoce d'Ozu où Haruko Sugimura brille par sa perfection gestuelle et rythmique est issue d'un volume de ses écrits qui paraît au Japon cet été, chez Inscript.

Traduit du japonais par Mathieu Capel

Dissertation of Post-War Japan and Ozu's depiction of the everyday. Chapter 1 studies Tokyo Story (1953), the modernisation of the city, evaporation of rural tradition and the cyclic nature of life. Chapter 2 examines familial tradition and the Modan Garu in Early Summer (1951) and Late Autumn (1960). Chapter 3 analyses Ozu's final film An Autumn Afternoon (1963), consumerism in Japan, older generational anxieties and nostalgia.

Overall, the paper comments on Ozu's own attitude towards the diminishment of Japanese tradition and how he conveys the radical changes in post-war Japanese life.

TOKYO HİKAYESİ, Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story), Yasujirô Ozu, 1953 ÖZET Kırsalda en küçük kızlarıyla yaşayan Hirayama çifti diğer evlatlarını özlemiş ve onları ziyarete Tokyo'ya gitmeye karar vermiştir. İlk başta sıcak karşılanıp çocuklarıyla özlem gideren çift, Tokyo'da beklediklerini bulamazlar çünkü çocukları artık kendi ailelerine bakmakla ve işleriyle çok meşgullerdir ve anne-babaya zaman ayırabilmek onlar için imkansıza yakındır. Yaşlı çiftin Tokyo'da yaşayan çocuklarından biri mahalle doktorudur, diğeriyse güzellik salonuna sahiptir ve anne-babalarını çok sevmelerine rağmen işleri yüzünden bir türlü onlarla ilgilenemezler. Çocukları, bir süre sonra yaşlı çifti istemsiz bir şekilde yük olarak görmeye başlarlar. Onların evde sıkıldıklarını ve onları ihmal ettiklerini düşünen çocukları, Hirayama çiftini gezdirmesi için sekiz yıl önce savaşta ölen kardeşlerinin dul eşine ricada bulunurlar ve dul kadın bu isteği işi olmasına rağmen tereddütsüz kabul eder. Yaşlılara karşı çok nazik ve alakalı davranan Noriko (Setsuko Hara), anne-babanın öz evlatlarından görmediği ilgiyi onlara gösterir. Noriko'nun yaşlı çiftin öz evlatlarından daha vefakar olan bu hareketleri, kan bağının insanları birbirine bağlayan güçlü bir bağ olmadığı gerçeğini ortaya çıkarması açısından önemlidir. … Filmlerinde gerek kalmadıkça şiddete ve duygusallığa açıktan asla izin vermeyen usta yönetmen, minimalist teknikleri ile filmi gerçekçi ve duygusal açıdan derin bir hale getiriyor… Anne-babayı en azami biçimde mutlu etmenin, onlara zaman ayırmak ve ilgilenmek olduğunu unutan çocukları ebeveynlerinin mutlu olacağını düşünüp onları bir kaç günlüğüne kaplıcaya yollarlar. Fakat tatil yeri yaşlılara göre değildir ve çift bu sesli ortamdan rahatsız olur. Ertesi sabah okyanus kenarında çiftin oturduğu, terk edilme duygusunun, sahneye herhangi bir diyalog katılmaksızın açıkça ifade edildiği bir sahnede, yönetmen Ozu yaşlı bir çiftin çocuklarından ayrılma duygusunu sadece çevre görüntüsü ile verebilmeyi başarmış. Üzüntü ve terk edilme hisleri, film boyunca çok belirgindir ancak seyirciye hiçbir şekilde empoze edilmemektedir. Uzak manzara görüntüleri ve sessizlik, duyguları izleyiciye verme açısından sakin ve sevecen bir yol olarak seçilmiştir… Çift daha sonra çocuklarının yolladıkları paranın boşa gittiğini duymamaları için haber vermeden Tokyo'ya erkenden geri döner. Noriko, anne Tomi'yle(Chieko Higashiyama) ilgilenir ve onu evine alır. Baba Shukichi (Chishû Ryû) ise eski dostlarının yanına gider ve sabaha kadar içip dertleşir. Babanın arkadaşlarıyla olan sahnesi, filmde devam eden Yasujiro Ozu minimalizmini de doruk noktaya çıkartır. Kamera çekimleri açısından hareketsiz çekimleri tercih eden Ozu, seyirciye mekandaki gözlemci hissini vermeyi çok iyi başarmış. Dertleşme sahnesinde baba Shukichi'nin film boyunca hiç homurdanmamasına rağmen"sanırım mutlu olmalıyım" diyerek aslında evlatlarının mükemmel olmadığının ve daha doğru ve realist bir beklenti içine girmesi gerektiğinin farkına varması, izleyicileri konuşmaları takip eden sessiz bir kişi moduna sokuyor. Yaşadığı hayal kırıklıkları yüzünden eski alışkanlığı olan alkole dönen baba Shukichi, aşırı sarhoş bir şekilde arkadaşıyla beraber polis tarafından kızının evine getirilir. Çiftin Tokyo ziyareti bittiğinde yürekleri buruk olmalarına rağmen trene binerken dahi bu durumu çocuklarına belli etmemeleri anne-baba sevgisinin karşılıksız olduğunu izleyiciye kanıtlar niteliktedir… Alıntı:

Citation Issued Date 2012 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/180066 Rights The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works.

Abstract: This dissertation scrutinizes a corpus of films considered to be the stylistic and thematic descendants of Yasujiro Ozu, which I call " feeling of life films. " Focusing upon common themes such as female narrative and the portrayals of the quotidian, this dissertation identifies various methods used in specific films of Ozu, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and Tran Anh Hung that complicate narrative meaning and engage in the discourse of national modernity and history. The female protagonists of these films can be considered " left behind " by the narrative progression of history, serving an allegorical function that critiques standard notions of time and official history. The basis for understanding this phenomenon will be scholarly discourse primarily concerning Ozu's " Noriko Trilogy, " which marks the transitional period of postwar Japan through the narrative of a woman's path to marriage. This dissertation seeks to complicate the discourse of reading women in these films by introducing different methodologies of formalist analysis, cultural analysis, theoretic discourse, historiography, and phenomenology. In doing so, this dissertation demonstrates the cinematic importance of these films through their unique formal characteristics and their cultural and historical meanings. Abstract of dissertation entitled Left Behind by History: Complicating Narrative, Modernity in the Mundane, and Reading History through Women in " Feeling of Life Films. "

A process philosophical interpretation of Deleuze’s theories of time encounters problems when formulating an account of Deleuze’s portrayal of temporality in The Time-Image, where time is understood as having the structure of instantaneity and simultaneity. I remedy this shortcoming of process philosophical readings by formulating a phenomenological interpretation of Deleuze’s second synthesis of time. By employing Deleuze’s logic of affirmative synthetic disjunction in combination with his differential calculus interpretation of Spinoza’s and Bergson’s duration, this phenomenological interpretation portrays time as given to our awareness in immediacy rather than through a continuous process of unfolding. The viability of this alternate approach calls into question the claims that Deleuze is strictly a process philosopher and anti-phenomenologist.

Le pari de ce livre est de former le regard au montage aussi bien pour l'analyse que pour la création, d'explorer les pratiques et les théories du montage, enfin d'en expérimenter quelques formes. À partir de nombreuses analyses de films choisis dans tous les cinémas (de toutes les nationalités, de tous les styles, de toutes les époques) et de quelques ouvres vidéographiques (clips ou installations d'artistes contemporains), on aborde les principales questions que se posent celui qui analyse comme celui qui monte : la coupe, l'ellipse, les modes de raccordements, le récit, la fiction, le rythme, le rapport image/son. Comment le montage invente-t-il l'espace filmique, comment manipule-t-il la matière-temps ? Retraçant également l'histoire du montage, cet ouvrage en rappelle les repères essentiels, tissant des filiations, pointant l'évolution de ses figures : montages alterné, parallèle, des attractions ; champ-contrechamp, raccord de regard, répétition...

O presente trabalho tem o objetivo de analisar a linguagem do filme Café Lumière, contextualizando-o quanto ao tempo e lugar onde foi feito, além de criar um comparativo do filme, e do movimento do novo cinema taiwanês, com a era de ouro do cinema japonês, principalmente ao cinema de Yasujiro Ozu e traçar paralelos entre este filme e a grande obra de Ozu Era Uma Vez Em Tóquio.
Palavras-chave: cinema de fluxo, cinema japonês, novo cinema taiwanês, minimalismo no cinema, Yasujiro Ozu, Hou Hsiao-hsien.

近年、映画脚本（シナリオ）や脚本家（シナリオライター）の仕事への学術的関心は国際 的に急増してきたが、日本のシナリオについての議論はいまだ発展していないままであ る。しかしながら日本においては、シナリオについては多数の研究文献が存在しており、 また多様な出版戦略によって、他の国の映画文化ではほとんど比類がない、シナリオを一 般読者のために提供する長い伝統もある。そこで、いわゆる日本映画第二次黄金時代であ る 1950 年代における映画製作や観客受容の全体像を把握するためには、シナリオのこと を詳細に再検する必要がある。

本論文では、まず、日本映画史編纂では、シナリオライターの役目がどれほど注目されて きたか、映画史のなかでいかに位置づけられたかを検討する。また、脚本部での職業的訓 練と「定宿」に代表されるシナリオライターに配分された独特な作業空間を論議する。最 後に、スタジオシステムという文脈のなかで明らかになるジェンダーの問題と女性脚本家 の出現を考察する。

Senza dubbio, una delle impressioni avute dalla prima lettura del testo di Rocco Ronchi, "Gilles Deleuze. Credere nel Reale", concerne l'immediatezza e il rigore dello stile, e di conseguenza la vastità del bacino di lettori cui il libro, grazie a ciò, si rivolge.

El  primer largometraje que realizara  el cineasta japonés Suo Masayuki en 1983,  Hentai kazoku : Aniki no o yome-san (Una familia anormal: La mujer de mi hermano mayor) plantea una combinación aparentemente imposible: se trata de  una atrevida parodia  de las historias familiares de Yasujiro Ozu, pero realizada bajo las convenciones del cine  pornográfico.  El resultado es insólito y transgresor: una evocación del cine de Ozu, rodado  con su  austero estilo característico,  y  con unos protagonistas que  evocan los personajes interpretados por Setsuko Hara y Chishu  Ryu, pero filmados bajo claves eróticas. Una parodia, al fin y al cabo,  tan insólita como explosiva.  El propósito de este experimento cinematográfico, que aúna mímesis e ironía, no se ve motivado tanto por el gesto iconoclasta, cuanto por el deseo de rendir un desenfadado homenaje al maestro por el que se siente veneración. El presente trabajo analiza los pormenores de tan singular película, reconociendo en ella las huellas del director de Cuentos de Tokio, al tiempo que se identifican en sus escenas los límites y las convenciones del roman poruno.

The director and scriptwriter Itami Mansaku was a major proponent of the revisionist movement in prewar Japanese period film. However, with only a handful of his screen works surviving, Itami’s reputation arises mostly from his contemporaries’ accounts and his own critical writings. Caught between the restrictions imposed by a debilitating illness and government censorship, during the war years Itami strived to stay in touch with the Japanese film world by continuing to work on scripts as well as write criticism from his sickbed. This article discusses Itami’s creative and critical efforts, which were to have a considerable impact on subsequent Japanese filmmakers. Particular attention is paid to examining Itami’s scenario reviews, serialised in the journal Japanese Cinema between 1941 and 1942, where he took an actively interventionist stance quite different from what is conventionally allowed for film criticism.

The essay describes the main features of the 'metaphysical style' of perception and representation through comparison between the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico and the movies of both Abbas Kiarostami and Yasujirō Ozu. The essay concentrates, in particular, on two aspects: the geometrization of the visual scene and the uncanny depiction of objects. In this framework, the essay proposes a close-reading of some of the most debated 'props' in the three artists' visual compositions: a glove in De Chirico's _Chant d'amour_ (1914), a vase in Ozu's _Late Spring_, and a spray can in Kiarostami's _Close-Up_ (1990).

In this article we are talking about a film on INA and Subhash Chandra Bose that was commissioned by Japan during the World War 2 and the project was being handled by none other than Yasizuro Ozu. Ozu was directing the film. But he had to stop midway as the War was nearing the end. According to him, he had destroyed the footage too. However the archival records of #Singapore present a different story. It shows that the unfinished film actually came back to India and so far as the Indian records go, the film was completed and released here in 1948. Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had played key roles in the process. 

Presentation of the book "Reorienting Ozu. A Master and His Influence" (ed. Jinhee Choi) at King's College London, to which we contributed a chapter on Ozu's use of visual humor and his influence on contemporary filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki, titled "Playing The Holes: Notes on The Ozuesque Gag".

After the Storm (dir. Kore'eda Hirokazu, 2016) is a poignant family drama guided by Kore'eda's subdued long shots. Though the film hints at redemption and hope of renewing lost family ties and self-reformation, Kore'eda does not create any hero out of traumatic experiences of divorce, solitude, and grieving. After the Storm (Japanese title: Deeper than the Ocean) is informed by a vocabulary of lost dreams (rejected "inherited" traits and unattainable dreams) and symbolism (broken umbrellas, shelter, typhoon, duct tapes, handwriting).

Dix films de Yasujiro Ozu ressortent en salle mercredi 1er août, dont les éternels Bonjour, Le Goût du saké et Le Voyage à Tokyo. À cette occasion, Mediapart a soumis quelques extraits à Mathieu Capel. Live from Tokyo, le chercheur et traducteur plaide pour une vision du cinéaste japonais en rupture avec les idées reçues.

Our approach to this interdisciplinary topic is through narrative, a subject that links aging, art, and spirituality. We will use the text Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old by William Randall and Elizabeth McKim to frame our explorations. The book suggests understanding our life as a narrative that develops over time, a story that we must learn how to read well. A narrative approach is attractive because it can shed light on important issues within aging including questions about identity, memory, meaning, wisdom, and spirituality.

This paper offers a reading of Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) focusing on its examination of the ordinary: it’s conditions, it’s structure, it’s dynamics, and it’s fragility. This reading employs a number of philosophical insights concerning the significance of the ordinary whose main source is Stanley Cavell’s work. Cavell claims that the most impressive affirmations of the task of human experience are the acceptance of human relatedness, and the acceptance of repetition; in the same vein, he stresses the role of relationships of absorbing importance in our ordinary lives, particularly their power to create and sustain a world—or, when challenged, to effect its collapse; moreover, he reminds us that to insist upon the ordinary, keep its surface and its rhythm, sets a powerful (philosophical and artistic) device that has the potential of revealing the extraordinariness of our own ordinary lives. Ozu’s Late Spring offers an exemplary cinematic investigation of each of those insights, and by so doing it also gives concrete expression to Cavell’s diagnosis of the conflict between an embodied, pre-reflexive understanding of our condition and its modern, skeptical counterpart. The film explores that conflict by focusing on the complicated transition from a traditional (Japanese) to a modern (Westernized) way of relating to the ordinary, expressed as the domestic and the familiar—or rather the familial, since at its center is a world-defining relationship between a father and a daughter. As it happens with many of Ozu’s films, Late Spring employs a number of cinematic techniques in order to familiarize us with the rhythms and the topology of the protagonists’s domestic world, and with the specific way they “animate” it—only to make us painful aware of its collapse when the daughter marries and leaves the house. The collapse of that domestic world reverberates through and is amplified by other aspects of the film’s narrative, such as its depiction of the gradual replacement of traditional Japanese practices and rituals in favor of more “modern”, Westernized counterparts. At an even more general level, as its own title attests, Late Spring is also a meditation on the cycles of life, alternatingly framing the protagonists’ plight in personal and in cosmic perspectives, thus reminding the viewer of the permanent human task of finding a balance between those stances. The cumulative effect of these nested cinematic revelations is a compelling invitation for the viewer to acknowledge the conditions and difficulties involved in the task of making oneself at home in the world, especially when faced with the ascendancy of our modern, representation-driven understanding of subjectivity.