Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu put the camera three feet off the floor, left it there, and made the same film about a family changing for thirty years. He joined Shochiku studio as an assistant cameraman at twenty-one, made comedies and student pictures through the 1930s, served in China and was held briefly in Singapore at the end of the war. The style hardened into rules he did not break: a low fixed camera at the eye level of someone kneeling, almost no camera movement, cuts to empty rooms and rooftops between scenes, actors addressing the lens directly, and no dissolves. The subject was almost always the same - a marriage that has to happen, a parent who will be left alone, a household quietly dissolving. Tokyo Story in 1953 follows an elderly couple visiting children too busy for them, and is regularly voted among the greatest films ever made, though it was thought too Japanese to export for a decade. He lived with his mother all his life and died of cancer on his sixtieth birthday. He wrote almost every script with Kogo Noda, the two of them working in a rented cottage and keeping a diary of how much sake they drank while writing. Chishu Ryu appeared in nearly all his films across four decades, playing the father at every age including ages he had not reached. Setsuko Hara played the daughter or daughter-in-law in six and retired from acting entirely the year he died, aged forty-two, never explaining why and never appearing in public again. His grave at Kita-Kamakura carries a single character meaning nothingness.

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