This is Ozu's first sound film, but could you really tell if you didn't know? The minutiae of the soundscape are so masterly affixed to what we see. Indeed, this could've been filmed in the fifties and I wouldn't have had any idea if it weren't for the rather dismal quality of the available film elements (this is available on the Blu-ray/DVD edition of Late Spring from the BFI).
There's a single scene where the camera moves, and it's so understated, lasting only a few seconds, that you wouldn't perhaps even notice it's there. It's natural, subdued. Whatever antonym to "obtrusive" you may come up with likely describes it. But that's what Ozu is all about: things happen below the surface reticently, on all levels — characters' complex emotions have to be decoded from their smiles; the visual intricacies aren't revealed in the movement of the camera, instead it's the positioning of the thing that makes us go there, into that space, and notice things.
I saw Vigo's whole oeuvre again with a friend a few days ago, the four films during one evening. Especially "L'Atalante" (1934) struck me again as the most amazing film: hardly anything happens, and what happens is almost trivialized in comparison to the mood of the thing, the visual atmosphere that has been set up, and how the camera moves in that environment. Ozu is so similar, albeit setting up his eye radically differently. No matter that the camera hardly moves, it's the same kind of strong visual thinking throughout. Ozu doesn't have similar paroxysms of emotion, but the poetry is there in how nothing seems to happen while everything is happening.
There's a single scene where the camera moves, and it's so understated, lasting only a few seconds, that you wouldn't perhaps even notice it's there. It's natural, subdued. Whatever antonym to "obtrusive" you may come up with likely describes it. But that's what Ozu is all about: things happen below the surface reticently, on all levels — characters' complex emotions have to be decoded from their smiles; the visual intricacies aren't revealed in the movement of the camera, instead it's the positioning of the thing that makes us go there, into that space, and notice things.
I saw Vigo's whole oeuvre again with a friend a few days ago, the four films during one evening. Especially "L'Atalante" (1934) struck me again as the most amazing film: hardly anything happens, and what happens is almost trivialized in comparison to the mood of the thing, the visual atmosphere that has been set up, and how the camera moves in that environment. Ozu is so similar, albeit setting up his eye radically differently. No matter that the camera hardly moves, it's the same kind of strong visual thinking throughout. Ozu doesn't have similar paroxysms of emotion, but the poetry is there in how nothing seems to happen while everything is happening.