Now playing at the Clark

Seasons of Ozu: The Late Films of a Japanese Master
Four Free Screenings -- Fridays at Four -- at the Clark in June

The Clark celebrated the selection of Tadao Ando as architect for its expansion some years back with a Yasujiro Ozu film series, and now is pleased to celebrate the opening of Stone Hill Center -- the first Ando-designed building on the Clark campus -- with another. Now it’s easy to see what Ozu and Ando have in common: a highly-distinctive minimalism of contemplative stillness and tranquility, in simple geometric forms of familiar materials charged with feeling, seemingly austere but deeply attuned to beauty.

The Criterion Collection has recently issued the late work of the master director, making it clear that Ozu’s immortal classic, Tokyo Story (1953), was not an isolated peak but simply the most visible summit of a Himalayan career. In this film series, we see Ozu at his very steady best, quiet and controlled, yet funny and moving -- the same characters in the same situations make everything familiar yet still surprising. The actors, the settings in home, office or bar, the resolutely formal approach to filming -- all are in Ozu’s signature mode, ringing changes on a small (but big) set of themes. His professed aim is “to make people feel without resorting to drama” and his concentration of approach requires -- and amply rewards -- a special sort of attention, as one enjoys an ever-new chamber music drawn out of a few familiar notes and shadings

Late Ozu tracks the gradual emergence of Japan as a modern country from the ashes of a feudal militarism, where the beauty of traditional ways are on their way out, though their passing is comic as well as sad. Ozu is generally said to be the most Japanese of film directors, his conservative spirit summed up in the concept of mono no aware, a sad resignation to the cycles of life, a sense of “the tears of things.”

June 6: Early Summer. (1951, 125 min.) Six years after unconditional surrender, the scars of war lie mostly in memory and the American occupation is invisible, except in the subtle struggle between the old ways and the new, between traditional Japanese norms and the influx of Western modernity. The struggle is played out in the matrimonial conflicts of a 28-year-old woman who lives in a well-off seaside suburb of Tokyo, in the house of her retired father and mother, along with her doctor brother, his wife and two boys. She’s an independent-minded working girl, who is gradually succumbing to the pressure to marry, and finds she has to make up her own mind while everyone around her is relentlessly matchmaking. The film features Ozu’s usual repertory company, in particular the incomparable Setsuko Hara and stalwart Chishu Ryo.

June 13: Equinox Flower. (1958, 118 min.) Ozu’s first color film blooms, making the domestic interiors and dress even more evocative of a distinctive Japanese aesthetic. Again he uses the family as the crucible for tensions between a traditional society and liberalizing Western ways. The main character is a businessman who punishes his daughter for choosing her own mate while he advises the daughters of his friends to follow their own hearts. With quiet humor and pathos, the patriarch is oh-so-slowly brought round to self-recognition, by the deferential strategies of all the women around him.

June 20: Late Autumn. (1960, 129 min.) In this reprise of Late Spring (1949), Setsuko Hara is mother instead of daughter -- a young widow who must convince her daughter to marry and leave her to live alone -- but still sublime. Social mores have changed, as emphasized in the parallel story of three comical old gents and the brash young woman who sets them straight in matters of the heart.

June 27: The End of Summer. (1961, 103 min.) As always obsessed with the economic and emotional task of making a good marriage -- like Jane Austen -- Ozu ends his relatively rowdy penultimate film with a funeral instead of a wedding, perhaps aware of his own impending death. The retired patriarch of a family of three daughters leaves management of his Osaka sake brewery to his son-in-law, while more involved in his own hanky-panky than properly marrying off his eldest, widowed daughter (Hara again) or his youngest (Yoko Tsukasa, Hara’s daughter in the previous film but now her sister.)