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OZU 120, a three-week, complete retrospective of the Japanese director and screenwriter’s extant work, commemorating both the 120th anniversary of his birth and 60th anniversary of his death, will run at Film Forum from Friday, June 9 through Thursday, June 29. Though the most honored director in his own country, Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963) achieved acclaim in the West only after his death on his 60th birthday. For most of his career, this greatest of world filmmakers worked in the uniquely Japanese shomin-geki genre: uncomplicated stories about ordinary people. His favorite themes included families, fathers, and the remembered joys of childhood and college life – little of which he experienced himself. He was separated from his own father at a very young age, and never married or went to college. Ozu’s techniques are among the most eccentric and austere in cinema history: little-to-no camera movement, straight cutting from scene to scene, the unvarying low camera angle (aka “the tatami shot,” from the eye level of someone sitting on a tatami mat), unpeopled "still life" shots bridging sequences – a deceptively simple style, yet one that no other director has been able to replicate. |