Portrait: Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu’s family album

In a short essay the author evokes a basic impact of the Ozu’s films.

Family films by Ozu are dealing with the everyday situation of common people occupied with their traditional family roles. But the images that are inscribed in the viewers memory are the images of the moments caught in stasis: bare streets, neon landscapes of new Tokyo, empty interior of the periphery family homes, exquisite details from the beach, phone poles and wires, boats anchored in the port in the outskirts of the town... The static nature of the scenes are underlined by the gentle movements of the background music, sound of waves, movements of shadows on the wall, the passage of the train... By his interpolation of poetic fragments, Ozu activates the sensorial response in his viewers and achieves, by the same token, the artistic and philosophic fullness of his cinematic text, evoking the moments when the universal meets the specific, very like the Japanese haiku poems do.

Diana Nenadić