Ozu, Yasujirō (1903–1963)

Yasujirō Ozu has been called the ‘most Japanese’ of all Japanese filmmakers. One of the three giants often said to represent Japanese cinema – along with Kurosawa Akira and Mizoguchi Kenji – Ozu directed a total of fifty-four films, mostly at the Shochiku studio, where he was hired in 1923 and remained until his death. Ozu’s main interest lay in portraying the contemporary family, often in dissolution. The postwar films he directed during his mature period all centre around incredibly similar stories of family matters, especially a father marrying off his daughter. His idiosyncratic attention to the formal and technical aspects of these films has been studied rigorously as marking his auteurist signature, positioning him as an ambitious modernist or transcendental cinematic poet effectively expanding the boundary of filmic art.