The Cinematheque

“One of the great artists of the 20th century in any medium and any country.”

British Film Institute

In 2023, retrospectives marking the 120th anniversary of Japanese director Ozu Yasujiro’s birth—and the 60th anniversary of his death—were held at film institutes across the globe. The Cinematheque, with the exception of commemorative screenings of An Autumn Afternoon (1962), his exquisite farewell film, didn’t partake in the milestone celebration—though the pangs of ensuing regret foretold the inevitability of an Ozu series here soon.

The delay, in a roundabout way, paid off. Earlier this year, Hasumi Shiguéhiko’s 1983 monograph Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, routinely praised as one of the seminal Japanese texts on cinema, was at long last published in English, reframing a scholarship on Ozu in the West that has, in large part, been dominated by Anglo critics and a whiff of Orientalism. (Yoshida Kiju’s Ozu’s Anti-Cinema being a notable exception.) Reigning Japanese auteur Hamaguchi Ryusuke (Drive My Car) has enthused that the book is a veritable Ozuesque work unto itself, and should be greeted with greater urgency than the digital remastering of the director’s oeuvre. It’s not hyperbole: the departure in Hasumi’s line of thought from the default reading of Ozu as a minimalist—as an artist of austerity, stillness, and subtraction—is as radical as it is, upon reflection, obvious. Ozu, he argues, is ​“dogged by rhetoric framed in negative,” by discourse preoccupied with what the director doesn’t do (camera movement or conventional spatial continuity, for instance). What Hasumi wants to liberate is an Ozu of abundance, whose formal and thematic (and thoroughly modernist) designs yield a cinema overflowing with variation, motion, and incongruity. It is excess, not absence, that defines Ozu.

“Ozu 121” invites you to experience Ozu anew. Our last major Ozu retrospective occurred in 2013, occasioned by his 110th anniversary and featuring 35mm distribution prints, some worse for wear. This 2024 series, which likewise commences on December 12 (Ozu’s birth and death date), takes its curatorial cues from Hasumi’s newly translated book and a string of high-profile restorations—both of which focus on the auteur’s postwar period. In addition to pantheonic works like Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), this collection of ten Ozu pictures includes his ravishing colour debut Equinox Flower (1958), his charming suburban satire Good Morning (1959), a 35mm presentation of his penultimate film The End of Summer (1961), and alleged outliers undergoing reappraisal, such as the savage melodrama A Hen in the Wind (1948), which productively problematize the uniformity of an Ozu style.

“Ozu 121” opening night (December 12) will feature a craft sake bar serving Artisan SakeMaker and a selection of Ozu-related objects from Japan on display.

“If there was something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of Ozu Yasujiro.” Wim Wenders

“Sooner or later, everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu … When you see his films, you feel in the arms of a serenely confident and caring master.” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Ozu is one of the greatest masters of world film … He is unrivalled in his capacity to show us our ordinary bliss and everyday tragedy.” David Thomson, The Guardian

“It’s no longer controversial to assert that Ozu Yasujiro is one of the greatest filmmakers ever … possibly the greatest of those who’ve focused on family life.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader