Family patriarch Manbei (a delightfully mischevious Ganjiro Nakamura) has taken up with an old lover, causing much consternation among his children – particularly his prickly daughter Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama). The film focuses on the extended Kohayagawa family, who live in Kyoto and operate a family-owned sake brewery. It also works as an excellent example of the tone, subject matter and technique that he employed throughout his career. The End of Summer, released in 1961, was Ozu’s penultimate film. Their most recent poll, published in 2012, voted Ozu’s Tokyo Story the greatest feature film of all time. Sight & Sound, the BFI’s monthly film magazine, runs a periodic poll of critics and directors on the best films of all time. Critics, it must be said, have been much more forward in embracing Ozu’s work.

They, along with his subject matter, are very specifically Japanese in flavour, and that likely explains why Japanese audiences embraced him so firmly while American audiences in particularly went for the more Westernised Kurosawa. His films thus have a very specific and somewhat peculiar aesthetic to them. The much-vaunted “180 degree rule”, in which camera angles from one edit to another must generally point to the one side of a room, Ozu freely ignored. He also regularly broke his scenes up with what the critic Nöel Burch called “pillow shots”: small triptych sequences dividing moments in time that would give an abstract sense of place or emotion. Ozu also disliked excessive drama, and was known for cutting entire scenes out of his films if he felt they were making events feel too melodramatic.

The camera sits inevitably at the height of an observer sitting upon a tatami mat, giving the viewer the sense of sitting in the room and observing the action. The low angles made sense, since his films were almost universally set inside traditional Japanese homes. His films are tonally and visually distinctive, making extensive use of low static camera angles, direct address to camera, and rigid geometric editing. Between 1927 and his death in 1962 Ozu directed numerous comedies and dramas, each of which seemed to perfectly capture the changing landscape of Japanese domestic life. In Japan, however, the overwhelming consensus gives that honour to Yasujiro Ozu. For international audiences it is generally thought that Akira Kurosawa is Japan’s greatest-ever film director.

The brave one movie 1961