Yasujiro Ozu

An Autumn Afternoon

An Autumn Afternoon

The last film by Yasujiro Ozu was also his final masterpiece, a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignifed resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization. Though the widower Shuhei (frequent Ozu leading man Chishu Ryu) has been living comfortably for years with his grown daughter, a series of events leads him to accept and encourage her marriage and departure from their home. As elegantly composed and achingly tender as any of the Japanese master’s films, An Autumn Afternoon is one of cinema’s fondest farewells.

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Film Info

  • Japan
  • 1962
  • 113 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.37:1
  • Japanese
  • Spine #446

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Audio commentary featuring film scholar David Bordwell, author of Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema
  • Excerpts from “Yasujiro Ozu and The Taste of Sake,” a 1978 episode of the French television program Ciné regards, featuring critics Michel Ciment and Georges Perec, that looks back on Ozu’s career
  • Trailers
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: Essays by critic Geoff Andrew and scholar Donald Richie

    New cover by Michael Boland

Purchase Options

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Audio commentary featuring film scholar David Bordwell, author of Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema
  • Excerpts from “Yasujiro Ozu and The Taste of Sake,” a 1978 episode of the French television program Ciné regards, featuring critics Michel Ciment and Georges Perec, that looks back on Ozu’s career
  • Trailers
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: Essays by critic Geoff Andrew and scholar Donald Richie

    New cover by Michael Boland
An Autumn Afternoon
Cast
Chishu Ryu
Shuhei Hirayama
Shima Iwashita
Michiko Hirayama
Keiji Sada
Koichi
Mariko Okada
Akiko
Teruo Yoshida
Yutaka Miura
Noriko Maki
Fusako Taguchi
Shinichiro Mikami
Kazuo
Nobuo Nakamura
Shuzo Kawai
Eijiro Tono
Sakuma, “the Gourd”
Kuniko Miyake
Nobuko
Kyoko Kishida
The bar hostess
Michiyo Tamaki
Tamako
Ryuji Kita
Shin Horie
Toyo Takahashi
Waitress at Wakamatsu
Shinobu Asaji
Youko Sasaki
Masao Oda
Classmate
Daisuke Kato
Yoshitaro Sakamoto
Haruko Sugimura
Tomoko
Credits
Director
Yasujiro Ozu
Writers
Kogo Noda
Writers
Yasujiro Ozu
Producer
Shizuo Yamanouchi
Cinematographer
Yuharu Atsuta
Art directors
Tatsuo Hamada
Art directors
Shigeo Ogiwara
Music coordinator
Takanobu Saito
Lighting
Kenzo Ishiwatari
Editor
Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Sound editor
Ichiro Ishii
Assistant director
Kozo Tashiro

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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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