In the third installment of our ongoing series on the films and career of Yasujiro Ozu, we find a filmmaker in transition, with Ozu finding elements of his voice and themes that will persist over the following three decades.
Part 3 in Ozu Seasons, an ongoing series
Brought to you by
- SaneBox: Stop letting your email eat you alive. Get a no-credit-card-required, 2-week free trial and $25 off your new membership when you sign up by visiting SaneBox.com/esn.
Films Covered
- 9: Fighting Friends: Japanese Style (1929)
- 10: I Graduated, But... (1929)
- 11: The Life of an Office Worker (1929)
- 12: The Knock-Down Kid (aka "A Straightforward Boy") (1929)
- 13: An Introduction to Marriage (1930)
- 14: Walk Cheerfully (1930)
- 15: I Flunked, But... (1930)
Names Worth Learning
- Kogo Noda
- screenwriter
- Tatsuo Saito
- actor, prominent in the silent period
- Choko Iida
- actress who graduates from bit mom/maid parts to break-your-heart leads
- Takeshi Sakamoto
- actor, goes on to play "Ozu's tramp" Kihachi
- Chishu Ryu
- Ozu's trademark actor collaborator
- Kinuyo Tanaka
- begins as an ingénue actress, becomes an important part of Japanese cinema history
Show Notes and Links
- Criterion Collected now has a dedicated Twitter account that will not only update and communicate about the show specifically, but also occasional bits of Criterion ephemera.
- Surviving footage from Fighting Friends: Japanese Style
- Surviving footage from "Tokkan kozo" (The Knock-Down Kid)
- Ozu-san deserves credit for being one of the longest-running sources of good Ozu info on the web for some time.
- David Bordwell's indispensible Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema is available for free as a PDF by following a link on his website.
- The vast majority of Ozu's surviving filmography is available to U.S. listeners on Criterion's Hulu channel (there's a 2008 movie mistakenly listed in the last row, ignore it).
- A current listing of Ozu's films available from Criterion, on disc and otherwise via iTunes or Hulu Plus, including the trio that make up this week's Eclipse 42: Silent Ozu - Three Crime Dramas, all of which will be covered in the coming weeks.
NEXT IN "OZU SEASONS" ON CRITERION COLLECTED
A look across the career of one of Ozu's most frequent collaborators during this period, actor Tatsuo Saito.
NEXT ON CRITERION COLLECTED
Some extras and bonus material in tribute to Janus Films co-founder William Becker. His is a name that any Criterion fan should know from the credits of every supplement and collectible booklet in the Collection.