How to treat Yasujirō Ozu's film works?

Since he joined Songzhu Company as a photography assistant at the age of twenty, he has created a complete era of black and white silent films. All the feelings of sadness and joy are slowly presented in the silent black and white light and shadow. When he turned to making his first sound film "When We Meet Again", he had made 25 silent films. In his early silent films, he basically embodied an introverted and relaxed comedy style. In Ozu's films, family affection, as an ethics similar to religion, has been repeatedly discussed. There is no female perspective in Ozu's films, and the female role is just a sigh in the father's field of vision as a daughter who is about to get married or leave. Researchers explain this lack of female perspective as Ozu's unmarried life and the lack of vision caused by living with his mother. Ozu's early films reached the highest achievement in Japan's silent film period, and his later films still adhered to the traditional style of Japanese films with its consistent style. The preservation of the traditional family structure and the sigh of lonely and frustrated life in his later years have become the affairs of Ozu's works.

Ozu's works reflect the customs and habits of modern Japanese society. People who are familiar with Japanese customs will naturally find these movies interesting and fun; But in the eyes of foreigners who are completely unfamiliar with Japanese customs, they may feel novel at first, but after all, they can't understand its subtle meaning and feel boring. The modern Japanese customs he showed were not described casually, but unified in an excellent form through film techniques. Even foreigners can easily understand the tension, hierarchy and sense of humor of this form itself. He loves life and is affectionate to the characters in the camera. His films inherited something that was forgotten by American films and developed it into a Japanese beauty.

At the same time, Ozu is an extremely contradictory director. 1963 during the Japanese director's banquet, Ozu had his own view on movies because of drunkenness. Ozu said that for him, the film "is nothing more than a prostitute wearing a straw bag standing under the bridge to solicit customers." These words touched the directors present at that time (including Masahiro Shinoda and other directors). In fact, Ozu made the film with an extreme self-esteem and a very restrained pessimism. We can feel this from the theme and style of his films. Moreover, Ozu is actually a director who pays too much attention to interests. In Tadao Sato's description, Ozu's family has no distress and shadow of life. Ozu makes friends with gentlemen who go to high-end restaurants. He attaches great importance to the elegance of style. Japanese film critics at that time also thought that Ozu's films "only focused on formal beauty". This also has an uneven significance with the sad fatalism and frustration in Ozu's films. It should be said that Ozu is not an international director. Among nearly 53 films in his life, only The Story of Tokyo has gained international attention and won the International Film Cup Award at the London Film Festival.