FWIW, I saw two back-to-back 35mm screenings today for
Late Autumn and
The End of Summer - this is part of the traveling
Ozu 120 retrospective which is currently at Film Forum. The DCP's of this retrospective are the latest 4K restorations and I've already seen a few premiere at MoMA, so I can definitely vouch for them, but it looks like Film Forum has secured some GREAT looking 35mm prints as well. Because of this, even though I didn't want to cram in three films in a row, I actually decided to see
An Autumn Afternoon during
Late Autumn (which was half-full, a pretty good audience for a noon-time screening on a Saturday), but by the end of the film the lobby was full and I saw that
An Autumn Afternoon had managed to sell out hours before showtime. Even the afternoon screening of
The End of Summer was virtually a sell out.
FWIW, the presumably 20-year-old
Late Autumn print had a card for the
Ozu 100 celebration - the ends of the reels definitely had a lot of scratches, but otherwise the print was in great shape (no fading, no missing pieces or frames, etc.)
The End of Summer was in greater shape, but it may even be older. It had a pre-digital looking title card that said it was from the Japan Foundation's film library. (Either that or the foundation never bothered to create or update a new title card with that information.) I didn't realize this until later, but all three Ozu films that I did/try to see were screened in chronological order, and they were actually his last three films.
Michael, what you mentioned in the other thread about color seemed apparent here.
Late Autumn looked AMAZING. Most of the time it had that tan or beige quality that you'll see in the restoration used for Criterion's Blu-ray of
Good Morning, but I did notice at least one reel where the color made a slight shift to something less tan-like. With
The End of Summer, the opening night shots had a deep inky quality to them that looked fabulous, but once they cut to the interiors, I was surprised to find something like the BFI's Blu-ray of
An Autumn Afternoon where you had a more natural-looking palette that looked comparatively cooler and muted - I wondered if this was forced on the print during the color timing as the flesh tones could look a little pale and the blue daytime skies could have a subtle green or yellow hue mottled through it if you stared at it long enough. Again, two films made back-to-back, and yet you can pick up this difference - who knows what is correct? Strangely, the opening credits - both of which used a burlap fabric as the background - didn't seem to look different at all in terms of color, but perhaps I need to put those frames side-by-side (if that were feasible)?
As for the films themselves, I enjoyed
The End of Summer but
Late Autumn made a greater impression - it's magnificent. I actually found a copy of presumably the Eclipse DVD online on my phone, so I watched it on the train over, just in case I was late. (Miraculously, I got to the theater with plenty of time to spare, but on the way back, the weekend delays I feared were excruciating.) I'm glad I did because there's a substantial difference in the English translation. I want to say the 35mm print seemed to sacrifice some character (usually a dry way of putting things indirectly) in favor of clarity and directness. I don't know Japanese so it's impossible for me to say which feels more correct, but my immediate reaction was that the upload was probably better, simply on the theory that it's more likely that a reputable translator will simplify something for ease rather than inject a touch more personality into a translation.
Hope this doesn't seem like rambling, but as I watched
Late Autumn, three things came to mind that seemed applicable to the film as well as Ozu in general:
• Back in 2010, Mike Leigh presented
Another Year at the NYFF, and during the Q&A, he mentioned how his films "aspired" to be documentaries. He expanded on this, explaining that he didn't want his films to be hermetically sealed, he wanted to suggest that there was a much greater world beyond what you're seeing, hence the importance of details about a character's occupation in
Another Year, suggesting a whole lot more to his life, to the city and the rest of the world beyond what's happening at his home.
• In the foreword to
Kieslowski & Piesiewicz, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, Stanley Kubrick writes "in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to
dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the
dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart."
• Greil Marcus once quoted D A Pennebaker as saying “The one sure thing in life is that you never know what’s going on in someone’s head—that’s what the novel was invented for...You can’t point a camera at someone and find out what’s in their head. But it does the next best thing: It lets you speculate.”
All of these factors came to play as the film unfolded, and often times you got the sense that a lot was being digested by the characters at any given time - whether in moments of solitude and quiet contemplation or in conversations where they weren't simply describing everything on their mind, they often seemed to be circling around the past or what may lie ahead in the future or their own relationships with a particular person. You may not be able to tell exactly what those thoughts were, but you knew they were there.
As intensely personal as the film may be, everything's clearly placed within the social mores of that time and how that can make a world of a difference on everyone's lives. One of my favorite details about the film...
...is when one of the men constantly throws his clothes on the ground, and his wife just swoops in to take care of it. It looks kind of shocking from a modern day perspective, and while it feels organic to that time given the way it plays, you'll notice it's a behavior that isn't shared among other couples either. Combined with the fact that even the men's wives know their attraction to Akiko, it's more than reasonable that Akiko is fully aware of the aspiring suitors she once had, and one gets the feeling that her own life has profoundly shaped how she views her daughter's future. She knows the pressures that will be put on her, and she knows what it's like to be confronted with so many possible futures. It could've been her and then her daughter who's chasing after a husband who throws his shirt and jacket on the floor.
Also, I mentioned this before, but as I watch more Ozu or revisit familiar works, the impact of WWII takes on a greater presence, and the more I watch these films, the more I realize that the war profoundly changed these characters' lives - except for certain children, virtually every character in Ozu's films were alive during the war. You can't underestimate that, and I get the sense of a country that's still in the process of moving on and rebuilding after the war. (In this case, the departed husband was in the military, but it's mentioned in passing like a very old, familiar memory that everyone knows. Even the American cultural references - Coca Cola, a song based on an American folk tune, brings to mind U.S. efforts in reshaping and re-educating postwar Japan.)
And as always, the pillow shots are exquisite. Something I've found increasingly irritating in recent years is the term "branding," which is no longer used solely in advertising, having spread like a disease in all types of media discourse including film criticism. It can reflect a shallow view of film as an art form and sadly on the other side of the discussion a shallow approach to filmmaking. I bring this up because Ozu's famous for his pillow shots - they're very much characteristic of his filmmaking, but he doesn't just throw them in a movie like he's slapping a yellow "M" on a soda cup and a sleeve of french fries. Every time out, there's a lot of thought put into each shot, but not in a way that feels labored. It's a terrific and economical storytelling device, but they carry greater implications beyond moving the plot forward. One of the very first in this film even gives a brief glimpse of an elderly woman and a child that suggests a whole other complementary film that will be played out off-screen. What Leigh talks about seems especially appropriate here - they seem to convey a lot about the greater world that's being occupied by these characters, and their stories feel all the more transient.
