There Was a Director

I sometimes speak of Yasujiro Ozu when I can't think of anything else to speak about. Of all the directors who's films I love and return to time and time again, he is the one I treasure the most. It doesn't matter if I've seen one of his films before or if I'm seeing a new one for the first time, it's almost as if cinema is being born again in my eyes when I watch his work.

Yasujiro Ozu is a director I discovered in a time in my life where cinema no longer felt new, I felt I had seen it all. I was attending a film school at the time, and although I was watching many films by other directors I hadn't seen much of, I was no longer excited by film.

I had heard of one film by Ozu: "Tokyo Story", then I heard of "Floating Weeds", I was intrigued to see these films as I had heard of this concept of a low angle camera that never moved. This technique was foreign to me; all my film professors were telling me the right way to make a film, to write a script, to move a camera, to work with actors, but Ozu was the exception to the rule.

My first year in discovering Ozu, I had tried to see everything by him that was available to me, I craved more, I declared to myself that all other film was meaningless, this was the only way movies could be made, (of course I was sort of caught up in the moment). Ozu's films did something which no other director has really done since, and that was change my perception of the world. It's very powerful when art does that, or when an artist can do that.

There have been other artists such as writer's, actors, or other filmmakers who have influenced my life in some way, but Ozu was the one that renewed it for me. The way I view life and the way I view film has been different since my first Ozu experience, I have heard of other people who have been similarly effected the same way by his films. I'm not sure I can pinpoint what makes his films so special to the few of us who view them that way. I've heard criticisms of his films being cold, dry, and drawn out, I'm not sure what to say to those people, only to suggest to them that perhaps they aren't seeing the film that is there but perhaps a film they want to see, something I have been guilty of as well.

Recently I actually got a friend of mine to watch "Tokyo Story" after writing in a letter to her how it actually changed my life, I'm interested to see what her reaction of it was, I consider this a victory since she is so far the only one of my friends who has actually seen "Tokyo Story".

I recently just watched two Ozu films which have just recently been released on DVD: "The Only Son", and "There was a Father", both great films, both made by a master who I have yet to see a bad movie from, I'm starting to think he never did make one. How to put my feelings of Ozu in words has proved exceedingly difficult no matter how hard I try, perhaps it's useless to speak about him, only the films themselves can do him justice.