During the videotaped introduction to the film, Mamoru Oshii commented that the societies of highly developed economies have fostered a certain state of arrested development where young people, accustomed to privilege, find little motivation to move on from their current situation. This sense of stasis, cultural amnesia, and immediacy also pervades the consciousness of the […]
Revisiting themes of marital complacency and mutual respect as his earlier domestic comedy What Did the Lady Forget?, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice demonstrates unusually dynamic camerawork a later period, postwar Ozu film, featuring several low angle tracking shots – often placed as interstitial scenes in lieu of his more familiar ‘pillow’ shots […]
The film follows the plight of the upper beautiful, middle-class Munekata sisters – the conservative and traditional married older sister, Setsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka) (dressed in a kimono) and the liberal minded and free-spirited younger sister Mariko (Hideko Takamine) (dressed in Western attire) – as they struggle to build a new life in postwar Tokyo away […]
A somber, bleak, and uncharacteristically violent Ozu postwar film, A Hen in the Wind follows the plight of a dressmaker named Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) who lives meagerly as a boarder in a modest house in a working class district with her young son Hiroshi. Awaiting her husband’s repatriation from Manchuria, Tokiko subsists through dressmaking and […]
A widowed high school teacher named Horikawa (Chishu Ryu) experiences a traumatic episode during a school field trip and consequently, decides to abandon his profession and move to a small town where his son, Ryohei may obtain a good education. However, unable to earn enough money to pay for Ryohei’s boarding school, Horikawa decides to […]
On the occasion of the family patriarch’s 69th birthday, the noble and privileged Toda family has assembled for a formal commemorative photograph and a dinner banquet that would prove to be their father’s last. Forced to sell the family home in order to settle their father’s unresolved, business-related debts, Mrs. Toda (Ayako Katsuragi) and the […]