From a row of hats on hooks on an office wall, one pops off as though a poltergeist were at play; this fedora is light, whereas the others are dark. Recalling Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927), an overhead shot of workers from this office depart for the day, their stark shadows competing with […]

Although Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning certainly, if obliquely, refers to it, Good Morning isn’t a remake of Ozu’s silent I Was Born, But . . . (1932) in the way that his Floating Weeds (1959) is a remake of his silent Story of Floating Weeds (1934). In the Ozu œuvre it isn’t much of anything […]

Inferior to his 1934 version, which is shorter, silent and in black and white, Yasujiro Ozu’s Ukigusa is nevertheless a spirited, lovely film. I am doomed for the rest of my life to see it rarely because my normal preference will always be to revisit the original. However, Ozu’s greatest decade, the 1950s, included the […]

“All great men have beards!” Kiichi Okajima declares, citing Charles Darwin and Karl Marx; but bearded, traditionally garbed Kiichi was born in the twentieth century, while Darwin and Marx lived and died in the preceding century—and elsewhere than in Japan. Yasujiro Ozu’s comedy Shukujo to hige charts the gradual entrance of this old-fashioned young man […]