I’m haunted by a film poster. It’s the one that accompanied the recent theatrical re-release of Jacques Demy’s Lola. Although the poster itself is beautiful, with an iconic shot from the film against a very Demy-esque lavender background, 
it’s not so much the poster itself that I can’t stop thinking of, it’s a quote that appears on it. The quote is from an anonymous film critic for Time Out: “Lola remains a vibrant reminder of all that cinema has lost in the last thirty years.” Actually, I usually remember the quote as “all that we have lost in the last thirty years” since I can’t help but think that the changes in film over time mirror those in society at large. In both, there is a fetishization of technology, speed, power, and winning at the expense of human stories. And, as Walter Benjamin reminds us in his masterful essay “The Storyteller,” stories, in their authentic form, have an irreducible complexity that means that they will always have something important to say to us, though they will never be useful in the contemporary sense.
All of this can make extended viewing of older films akin to looking in on a lost world. Such an opportunity was recently available at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver, British Columbia, where they screened most of the work of Yasujiro Ozu in honor of the centennial of Ozu’s birth. I’ve gone to see as many of these as I could--not easy, considering Vancouver is about 60 miles away from me, and separated by an international border. It was an effort well worth making, however. This essay represents my initial reflections on seeing several Ozu films. I will write a follow up addressing further films in a future issue of Habits of Waste.
Ozu was the director of over 50 films stretching from the 1920s to the early 60s, of which about 35 survive. Only a relative few are at all well known in this country and so this retrospective, which showed 33 films, offered a rare opportunity--once in a lifetime, really--to see most of these works. Parts of the same retrospective have been touring North America for some months--keep your eyes open for possible screenings in your area. There is something very powerful in being able to see the work of a single director in a concentrated period of time. You not only see films, you inhabit a world: not “Japan” at a certain historical moment, but “cinema,” a 20th century art form.
I like to imagine that my nostalgia for cinema is something that Ozu would poke fun at. While Ozu’s films gracefully explore 
the tensions between tradition and a modernizing Japan, they manage to do so without resorting to cant. Ozu’s films are sympathetic without being sentimental. And yet, while watching them, it’s hard not to be sentimental over the state of our world-cultural heritage of film. The prints shown in Vancouver were almost all restored 35mm prints, and presumably represent the best-available copies. But, while watching Tokyo Story, I was struck by how rough it looked, and how deteriorated the print had become. I experienced a similar shock when I went to see the restored Rear Window when that made its theatrical rounds a few years ago. Yes, it looked good, but I thought, if this is the best that could be made of the film, then how close we must have come to losing it altogether.
Next page: Parents and children
