Chelsea the Cinéaste

In Yasujiro Ozu’s film, and as in our lived experience, the passage of time is made palpable when loss, either in the form of a severance of bonds or simply the irrevocable departure from one period to the next, is imminent. To submit to the volatile nature of time, and thus to accept that there are limits to men’s power, help mitigate our anxiety in the face of the inevitable. In Japanese culture, such is the commendable attitude when it comes to loss and death: fear and grief, as long as we are humans, may not be suppressed but may be transcended. As a lifelong exponent of Japan’s traditional ethos, Ozu, in his post-war films especially, endorses implicitly the transcendence of human emotions as the optimal response to life’s vicissitudes and, above all, the physical and psychological ravage of war. On the cusp of an immense societal change, the Japanese public did not react favourably to Ozu’s philosophy, whose emphasis on the primacy of quietude was invariably misconstrued as...

As a storyteller, Yasujiro Ozu insists on an implausibly objective stance that refrains from direct commentary or criticism; his camera customarily assumes the role of a detached observer, to whom the characters in the film, staring or talking straight to the camera, occasionally address, with an intimacy akin to that between a host and his guest, a closeness that is underpinned by a mutual recognition of the psychological distance that separates the two. The audience, whose perspective, in this case, conflates the camera’s (the director’s), an invisible character’s in the film (to whom the other characters address) and their own, is thus situated amidst this spatial complexity which, as a rule, every work of art necessarily creates. In Late Spring (1948), the camera serves in part as an underlying comment to the story, which is noted by its economy of details. A prolonged shot of a departing train, on which the father and daughter travel to the city for a one-day excursion,...