00:00I think there's a lot to be said about the filmmaking that was happening in Japan in the 50s.
00:07You look at the 50s, I look back at the 50s era, the decade in general, and American films were just piss poor to my opinion.
00:16This was the era of the drive-in, this was the era of the greaser, and they created some really good artistic sensibilities, aesthetic sensibilities.
00:26But not as many, like in quantity-wise, as many films that really cement to me as all-timers.
00:34We can talk all day about James Dean, but I'm talking like the 70s, 80s, 90s, we're dealing with a banger every week.
00:41But I think internationally, everyone was killing it in the 50s up until the early 60s, Ozu being maybe the most premiere of them all.
00:51Yasuhiro Ozu is just the greatest.
00:54And his whole thing was very intimate, small-scale cinema.
00:58Cinema that makes you feel like you're in the room, so to speak.
01:02Of his filmography, a collection of 54 feature films, that seems to be the common denominator.
01:09And going a step further, his other favorite thing was capturing seasons.
01:14With films like Late Spring, Early Summer, Early Spring, Late Autumn, The End of Summer, and his final film, which was An Autumn Afternoon.
01:23Early Spring is playing on TCM, and this is the one he did right after what's considered like his biggest film, his most relevant, critically assessed film, which is Tokyo Story.
01:36But what sets Early Spring apart is that it's a found family story.
01:39It's about co-workers.
01:41It's about work.
01:42He said about this movie he wanted to make a movie that accentuated the pathos of white-collar life.
01:48Pencil pushers and assistants, that sort of thing.
01:50The office space of Ozu movies.
01:52It's as much an examination of post-World War II Japan, and as much about the fragility of romance.
01:58And this is all kind of stacked on top of each other.
02:00The idea of an affair representing this sort of ending of old Japan into new Japan, and the complications that happen in the modernization, which is then fed into by the white-collar working class.
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