FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Yasujiro Ozu - A Story Of Floating Weeds (engl. subt.) 

The darn 13th year in which I'm a video store owner at the Filmkunstbar Fitzcarraldo (formerly called Filmkunstbar Fitzcarraldo): I'm lending out the films of Yasujiro Ozu. I think everyone knows this experience: We lend the book to our friends, which we could never forget. Let them share it with us! That's exactly why sooner or later everyone who loves movies and is a customer of ours gets an Ozu movie from me. Ozu is the friendliest and calmest of all filmmakers! He is the greatest humanist! His films seem cheerful, flowing, but the emotions in Ozu's work are deep and powerful. They reflect what is most important to us in life: Parents and children, sickness and death, trying to take care of each other. Ozu was born in 1903 and died in 1963, and we can roughly divide his work into a pre-war and post-war Ozu. One should imagine his work in such a way that Ozu did not have the will to constantly reinvent himself, but aspired to perfection. Every one of his pictures proves it. I always compare him to a reggae musician whose rhythm hardly varies. That goes so far that he simply staged Floating Weeds twice. This version is from 1934, a second one he shot in 1959, we may assume that Ozu wanted to improve something. Basically, his films are still not very popular in the West. Sure, in the mid-1970s, people began to discover his work. But then the phase of the great love for cinema ended and what had Ozu already lost in the times of popcorn cinema? To this day, it remains a discovery for a few! For me, it's impossible to pinpoint his greatest film. Ozu's complete works seem to be all of a piece. It's about two generations, Ozu is doing family dramas. Only very rarely do his protagonists show what they feel. Most of it remains hidden, in the most moving scenes the emotions are not expressed. The most important decisions are only hinted at. I've seen Floating Weeds countless times. This wonderful film is as familiar to me as a song I hear over and over again. A Story Of Floating Weeds lives from its atmosphere. We are in the Japanese country during a hot, sultry summer. Not typical for Ozu that his protagonists appear in traditional dresses, even cinemas can be seen (in the famous later films his characters wear simple western dresses). It's like living together among neighbours. Everyone tries to fulfill his or her wishes and needs while arranging with the neighbours. Only the main character doesn't succeed. Everything should be done according to his will, but to his astonishment he notes that the neighbours also have their own needs. Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) is a stubborn, adorable and funny. Kihachi is the leader of a travelling theatre group that moves from place to place to perform their Kabuki plays. We have no doubt that this force is not on the right track. Their shelters are miserable, their lives at the subsistence level. Most of the weight, however, lies in Kihachi's relationship with his illegitimate son Shinkichi (Kôji Mitsui). Even after years he knows nothing about Kihachi's relationship to his mother... You could make so many things out of this material: A soap opera, a musical, a melodrama. But this story tells us this as a consequence of daily life. He loves his characters far too much to expose them to the artificial ups and downs of drama! That's why we feel that these characters are real! Ozu's scenes are an image of normality. We experience half-hearted discussions, gossip & gossip of the actors... Ozu does not aim to pass from one scene to the next. It is his pictures that hold events together. As in his late masterpieces, the camera always remains below the protagonists. She films from bottom to top, stays at eye level. Exactly by this trick the everydayness of the happening is expressed. Ozu's famous "Pillow Shots" also have an effect here - settings that interrupt the action for a few seconds to show three or four calm compositions. Details like a mighty tree in front of a black sky. Ozu's camera never moves. There are no pans. Only cuts between one composition and the next. So we retreat - into ourselves - instead of simply reacting. To break the rules of traditional narrative cinema. Sometimes we think that his protagonists don't even look at each other while they are talking. I think that's because the camera is looking over the shoulders of its protagonists, so that we take their perspective. If Ozu shows two figures that are moving in the same direction during a conversation