Tag Archives: Yasujirô Ozu

TOKYO STORY

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If, in our century, something sacred still existed, if there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of Yasujiro Ozu… Never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image in which he not only recognizes himself, but from which, above all, he may learn about himself. — Wim Wenders

Ozu’s TOKYO STORY—starring the great Setsuko Hara and voted the “greatest film of all time” in a 2012 Sight & Sound poll—will screen this week at the Aero as part of the American Cinematheque’s new Tuesday Matinee series.

TOKYO STORY

Tuesday, August 20, at 1 pm.

Aero Theatre

1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica.

Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story, from top: cast; Chishû Ryû (left) and Setsuko Hara; Chieko Higashiyama and Hara; Sô Yamamura (left) and Haruko Sugimura; Hara and Ryû; cast.

OZU’S YOUTH, BORZAGE’S HEAVEN

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Before assuming his signature style—restrained domestic dramas shot with an often stationary camera set just below waist level—Yasujiro Ozu had a rich silent period made up of comedies, gangster films, and stories of Japanese family life in the twenties and thirties.

This weekend, as part of their series Hollywood and Holy Wood: Silent Connections Between Los Angeles and Japan, the UCLA Film and Television Archive presents a rare 35mm screening of Ozu’s earliest known surviving feature, the silent DAYS OF YOUTH (1929), featuring Ichirô Yûki and Tatsuo Saitô as two college students in love with the same young woman (Junko Matsui).

Cliff Retallick will provide live musical accompaniment.

Also on the bill is the earlier Hollywood production that inspired Ozu’s film—Frank Borzage‘s 7TH HEAVEN (1927), set in Paris. Starring Janet Gaynor (as a reluctant fille de joie) and Charles Farrell (playing a sewer worker who goes off to the Great War), it conveys the soft-focus sense of enchantment so typical of its director’s masterpieces.

DAYS OF YOUTH and 7TH HEAVEN

Saturday, April 15 at 7:30.

Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles.

From top: Ichirô Yûki and Tatsuo Saitô in Days of Youth (2, with 7th Heaven poster in second photo); Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in 7th Heaven (2). Images courtesy Photofest/Museum of the Moving Image.