Since the start of the year the world's major film festivals have been celebrating the 100th birthday anniversary of Japanese master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, who pioneered Japanese cinema from the 1930s to 1960s. From the Berlin Film Festival to the New York Film Festival, from the Pusan Film Festival in South Korea to the Tokyo Film Festival last month, there have been special screenings, seminars and events to pay tribute to the late artist. Taiwan, of course, is not absent from such a world-wide trend. Especially when so many Taiwanese directors have been inspired by him, starting with Hou Hsiao-hsien (
Yasujiro Ozu and Japanese Masters Film Festival (
PHOTO COURTESY OF SPOT
For movie lovers, this festival, beginning Tuesday, has a strong line-up and tickets have been selling out. The organizer has prepared a full collection of Ozu films. Thirty six of Ozu's films have been shipped to Taiwan, in addition to seven films from Ozu's colleagues Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse, that will all be screened over the next two months. The films include Ozu's most recognized masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962), which are, respectively, the opening and closing films for the festival.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SPOT
To expand the scale of the festival, Showtime Cinema (欣欣晶華影城) in Taipei and Taoyuan Performance Hall will join the list of screening places, in addition to SPOT, Hsin-chu Municipal Image Museum and Kaohsiung City Film Archive.
"In Ozu's films, he places human relations and subtly savors these human relations, aligned with a sense of time. He has an insight about the world and human feelings and notes thoroughly the ever-changing quality of human life," Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien said.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SPOT
Ozu is best known for his highly personal and rigorous visual style that is considered "most-Japanese" among directors. In his films, the camera shots are always planned meticulously and there are invariably elegant and precise compositions. He never panned, faded in or out, and employed virtually no dollies or tracking shots. Thus film critics have often labeled his film as minimalist. In Ozu's last movie, the camera did not move at all.
Another unique Ozu trait is the way he always places his camera at a lower angle, taking shots from the view of a person seated on a tatami mat, thus being symbolic of a Japanese "viewpoint."
Film scholar Stanley Kauffmann describes Ozu as "a lyric poet whose lyrics swell quietly into the epic."
Tensions between the younger and older generations and the subtle dynamics of the Japanese middle-class are the major topics of Ozu's movies. Tokyo Story is a story about an elderly couple paying a visit to their uncaring children in Tokyo. An Autumn Afternoon is a film exploring father-daughter relations and the loneliness of midle-aged father. Both films presented the melancholy situation of post-war Japan.
The festival also shows many of Ozu's pre-war movies, including I Was Born, But, a story about two kids' adventures in a new neighborhood. Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth is about college friends turning enemies and Dragnet Girl is about a vamp and her gangster boyfriend.
Recognized as one of the three great Japanese masters of film, Kenji Mizoguchi is often mentioned in the same breath as Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. He gained his reputation for grand tragic stories about geishas. The festival will showcase Mizoguchi's Sister of Gion, about two sisters both working in Kyoto's geisha region of Gion, but who express different attitudes toward their male clients. Osaka Elegy is about a woman who sells her body to raise money for her father and brothers.
There will also be five films from Mikio Naruse, who excels at depicting strong and determined modern women characters in his movies. Apart from movie screenings, there will be eight seminars on Yasujiro Ozu from Saturday, Dec 13 at SPOT.
A Chinese-language film theory book about Yasujiro Ozu will also be published during the festival. For more program information, check www.spot.org.tw.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would