Yasujiro Ozu

Floating Weeds

Floating Weeds

One of six sublime color masterworks that Yasujiro Ozu produced late in his career, the director’s second filming of his own 1934 silent triumph A Story of Floating Weeds represents the mature flowering of his style. Harnessing the full expressive potential of color, sound, music, and his exquisite compositional sense, he brings new depths of bittersweet feeling—tinged with an aging artist’s melancholic nostalgia—as well as a new air of expansiveness, to a story with enduring resonance.

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Film Info

  • Japan
  • 1959
  • 119 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.37:1
  • Japanese

Available In

Collector's Set

A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu

A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds

Blu-ray Box Set

1 Disc

$27.96

Collector's Set

A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu

A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds

DVD Box Set

2 Discs

$27.96

Collector's Set

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

DVD Box Set

50 Discs

$650.00

Out Of Print
Floating Weeds
Cast
Ganjiro Nakamura
Komajuro
Machiko Kyo
Sumiko
Ayako Wakao
Kayo
Hiroshi Kawaguchi
Kiyoshi
Haruko Sugimura
Oyoshi
Hitomi Nozoe
Aiko
Chishu Ryu
Theater owner
Koji (Hideo) Mitsui
Kichinosuke
Haruo Tanaka
Yatazo
Yosuke Irie
Sugiyama
Hikaru Hoshi
Kimura
Mantaro Ushio
Sentaro
Kumeko Urabe
Shige
Credits
Director
Yasujiro Ozu
Script by (based on the 1934 Ikeda script)
Yasujiro Ozu
Script by (based on the 1934 Ikeda script)
Kogo Noda
Cinematography
Kazuo Miyagawa
Art direction by
Tomoo Shimogawara
Lighting by
Sachio Ito
Music by
Kojun Saito

Related Films

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A scene from Floating Weeds

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Trailer for Floating Weeds

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Explore

Yasujiro Ozu

Writer, Director

Yasujiro Ozu
Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu has often been called the “most Japanese” of Japan’s great directors. From 1927, the year of his debut for Shochiku studios, to 1962, when, a year before his death at age sixty, he made his final film, Ozu consistently explored the rhythms and tensions of a country trying to reconcile modern and traditional values, especially as played out in relations between the generations. Though he is best known for his sobering 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, the apex of his portrayals of the changing Japanese family, Ozu began his career in the thirties, in a more comedic, though still socially astute, mode, with such films as I Was Born, But . . . and Dragnet Girl. He then gradually mastered the domestic drama during the war years and afterward, employing both physical humor, as in Good Morning, and distilled drama, as in Late Spring, Early Summer, and Floating Weeds. Though Ozu was discovered relatively late in the Western world, his trademark rigorous style—static shots, often from the vantage point of someone sitting low on a tatami mat; patient pacing; moments of transcendence as represented by the isolated beauty of everyday objects—has been enormously influential among directors seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.

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