Yasujiro Ozu’s trademark style — the low camera angles, the straight cuts, the actors talking at the camera in medium closeup — has inspired book-length studies and earned him a lofty place in the directorial pantheon. It also inspired homages such as Jun Ichikawa’s “Tokyo Kyodai (Tokyo Siblings),” but Ozu, a hermetic genius whose aesthetics were a closed system, has produced no school of disciples.
For the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2003, the Shochiku studio, where Ozu spent his entire career, planned to release a tribute film with eminent directors from around the world contributing segments. One, the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien, wanted to make a feature, not a short, however, and Shochiku, which had written and distributed several of Hou’s films agreed to finance it.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.