“Ozu makes us feel deeply about his characters, but he does so by being honest rather than manipulating us. Hence his famous restraint: like the stories themselves, the performances avoid histrionics and melodrama. If we are enormously moved at the end of his films, it is not because anyone has pushed the right buttons but because we have seen something that strikes us as truthful.” – Geoff Andrew, “A Fond Farewell”
Yasujirô Ozu, Chishû Ryû, Shima Iwashita, Mariko Okada, Shin'ichirô Mikami and other cast and crew members on the set of Sanma no aji, from the film’s trailers
“One thing is certain: Truffaut became fully ‘Hitchcock-ified,’ literally ‘Hitchcock-ified’ stylistically, starting with The Soft Skin. There’s a scene in that film that I find both good and not so good because of how outrageously it imitates Hitchcock. It’s the scene where the provincial critics are introduced to Desailly’s character. It’s shot exactly like when the Nazi spies are introduced to Bergman in Notorious. It’s exactly the same, shot for shot. It’s exactly the same thing. To me, although it works well in Hitchcock’s film, here it seems excessive. I understand that provincial critics are terrifying, but nothing like Nazi spies! I think using the same approach was overdoing it a bit.” -- Claude Chabrol
I Vitelloni (1953)
Bette Davis in The Little Foxes (1941)
Baisers volés (1968)
François Truffaut and co-writer Bernard Revon during pre-production of Domicile conjugal, from a 1970 episode of Cinéastes de notre temps
Baisers volés (1968)
L’Atalante (1934)
Toshirô Mifune in Hakuchi (1951)
Taris, roi de l'eau (1931) | L’Atalante (1934)
"My films don’t have what is called a final scene. The story never reaches its conclusion. Why? I think it depends on what I make of my characters. It's hard to put it – but they’re a kind of electrical wire, they’re like lights that don’t change at all but show an unchanging feeling in the director from start to finish. They cannot evolve in any way; and that’s for another reason. I have no intention of moralising, yet I feel that a film is the more moral if it doesn’t offer the audience the solution found by the character whose story is told. In other words, the man who has just seen a character sorting out his problems, or becoming good when he started off bad, finds himself in a much more comfortable situation. He is going to say quietly to himself: ‘Well, all I have to do is carry on being the creep I am, betraying my wife, conning my friends, because at a given moment the right solution will turn up, just as it does in the films…’ My films, on the contrary, give the audience a very exact responsibility. For instance, they must decide what Cabiria’s end is going to be. Her fate is in the hands of each one of us. If the film has moved us, and troubled us, we must immediately begin to have new relationships with our neighbours. This must start the first time we meet our friends or our wife, since anyone may be Cabiria – that is, a victim. If films like I vitelloni, La strada and Il bidone leave the audience with this feeling, mixed with a slight uneasiness, I think they have achieved their object. I feel, and I can even say today, unhesitatingly, that whenever I think up a story it is in order to show some anxiety, some trouble, a state of friction in the relationships that ought normally to exist between people. If I were a political animal, in order to explain this I should hold meetings or join a political party; or go out barefoot and dance in the streets. If I had found a solution, and if I were able to explain it convincingly and in good faith, then of course I should not be a story-teller, or a film-maker." -- Federico Fellini
Jean-Pierre Léaud in Dialóg 20-40-60 (1968)
“Far from a Manichaean take on the oppressive power of lingering social norms, Late Spring is a hushed battlefield where no one is right or wrong. We watch the infliction roll out inexorably, wishing there were a cheesy, American-style resolution somewhere on the horizon in which all of the well-meaning characters could be happy. But that’s not Ozu. Ozu is the natural energy of Noriko’s generous grin, dispensed selflessly in all social situations, until she realizes where her life is helplessly headed—and the blood-cooling shock of seeing that resilient smile finally drop.“ -- Michael Atkinson, “Home with Ozu”
Life is brief...
"When I was in the States with her, after La strada, people didn't know whether to smile at her or kiss the hem of her garment. They saw her as someone halfway between St. Rita and Mickey Mouse." -- Federico Fellini on Giulietta Masina
