Early Spring (1956) by Yasujiro Ozu
Sunday, October 9, 1983, 7:30 pm
Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring
Uncharacteristically modern, this film opens with an extraordinary montage of Tokyo suburbanites waking in the morning and traveling to work. We see life as it is in 1956, the conditions of our civilization and the state of our society. We move forward through this rather grim story of an office worker bored with his job and restless in his marriage, but we are not moving through time as such. We feel the profound transparency of all that is thought solid. Ozu’s cinema has the rare quality of merging a strong and compassionate point of view with an equally strong and compassionate subject matter rather than simply one or the other. Shots and cuts are the marrow of the filmmaking. This joining of opposites is the marriage of heaven and earth which gives birth to transcendent vision. We are asked to touch ground and begin again. —Nathaniel Dorsky.