With the recent return of classics to theaters, two masterpieces by Japanese master film directors will be re-released next month. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story will meet domestic audiences for the first time in a 4K remastered version on the 9th of next month. Shohei Imamura’s 1997 film The Eel will be re-released on the 2nd of next month as a digitally remastered and uncut director’s cut of 134 minutes.
◆’Tokyo Story’ with its unique aesthetics
‘Tokyo Story’ is a work that condenses the unique aesthetics and deep directing of director Yasujiro Ozu. Yasujiro Ozu is considered one of the ‘Three Masters of Japanese Cinema’ along with Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. He created a unique aesthetic by expressing the everyday and simple world centered around a middle-class family with extremely restrained forms represented by the ‘tatami shot’ and elaborate and refined mise-en-scène. He was also evaluated as having created ‘the most modern film’ by capturing the essence of life and the joys and sorrows of life based on his affection for humanity.
Director Yasujiro Ozu began to become known worldwide when his masterpiece Tokyo Story, released in 1953, was screened at the 1957 London Film Festival and won the Sutherland Award from the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1958.
‘Tokyo Story’ won first place in a 2012 Sight & Sound poll of the directors who voted for the ‘Greatest Movie of All Time’, beating out ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Citizen Kane’. It was also included in the rankings of the best movies of all time by major media outlets such as the weekly news magazine Time and the British daily newspaper The Guardian.
◆Golden Palm Award Winner ‘Eel’
‘The Eel’ is the second film to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for director Shohei Imamura, following ‘Narayama Bushiko’.
The film begins with Takuro, an ordinary office worker, who witnesses his wife’s affair through an anonymous letter, brutally murders her, and then turns himself in. After being paroled as a model prisoner after eight years, he begins to adapt to the world again as an ex-convict and a wounded soul. Shohei Imamura uses his unique style to portray the power of forgiveness and the belief in the possibility of change on the screen.
Shohei Imamura, who led the Japanese New Wave era together with director Nagisa Oshima in the 1960s, began to receive attention by denying his father’s generation and shedding light on the dark shadows of postwar Japanese society from various angles. Unlike Nagisa Oshima, who was somewhat straightforward, he focused on the instincts of the lower class people who were pushed out of the mainstream.
If his directing works from the 1960s and 1970s expressed human desires and impulses, his later works, represented by ‘Eel’, persistently explore human desires while seeking words like forgiveness and hope that can break the vicious cycle of anger.
Meanwhile, director Shohei Imamura’s early masterpiece, ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’ (1979), will also be re-released in November.
Reporter Song Eun-ah sea@segye.com
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