Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant

"Ozu’s highly disciplined but selfless view is deepened by cuts that are subtle jolts or shifts in space, little awakenings that underline the transparency of the moment. Each shot, enhanced by a clear and declarative cut, is transformed into a package of space with its own precise weight. The screen, in union with its subject matter, becomes a luminous square—a reflecting pool of surface tension and depth. Within this delicate structure that the characters have the freedom to be. Late Spring (1949), so continually ripe with this state of cinematic revelation, ends with a final cut to the open ocean. all the suffering of the human circumstances we have so tenderly experienced throughout the narrative are suddenly discovered into a transparent, elusive memory, just as life itself, at the moment of death, may fall from our minds like the nighttime dreams disappearing into our morning activities.” - Nathaniel Dorsky : Devotional Cinema

'Many critics and scholars have commented upon the fact that frequently Ozu, instead of transitioning directly from … one scene to another, interposes a shot or multiple shots—as many as six—of an object, or a group of objects, or a room, or a landscape, often (but not always) devoid of human figures. These units of film have been [most frequently called] “pillow shots”.

The most discussed instance of a pillow shot in any Ozu film … is the scene that takes place at an inn in Kyoto, in which a vase figures prominently … After Noriko confesses to her father that she found the thought of his own remarriage “distasteful,” she looks over to discover that he is already asleep, or seems to be. She looks up towards the ceiling and appears to smile.

There follows a six-second medium shot, in the semidarkness, of a vase on the floor in the same room, in front of a shōji screen through which the shadows of leafy branches can be seen. There is a cut back to Noriko, now looking sad and pensive, almost in tears. Then there is a ten-second shot of the same vase, identical to the earlier one, as the music on the soundtrack swells, cuing the next scene.

Abé Mark Nornes, in an essay entitled “The Riddle of the Vase: Ozu Yasujirō’s Late Spring (1949),” observes: “Nothing in all of Ozu’s films has sparked such conflicting explanations; everyone seems compelled to weigh in on this scene, invoking it as a key example in their arguments.” Nornes speculates that the reason for this is the scene’s “emotional power and its unusual construction. The vase is clearly essential to the scene. The director not only shows it twice, but he lets both shots run for what would be an inordinate amount of time by the measure of most filmmakers.”’ (x) Banshun (Yasujirō Ozu, 1949)