Tokyo Story
(Tokyo Monogatari)

Screening on Film

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu .
With Chishu Ryu, Chiyeko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara.
Japan, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 134 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

Ozu’s sad, simple story of generational conflict is often regarded as the filmmaker’s greatest masterpiece. In fact, in Sight and Sound’s 1992 once-a-decade poll of international film critics, it was chosen as one of the top ten films of all time, outpolled only by Citizen Kane and The Rules of the Game. An elderly couple’s visit to various busy, self-absorbed offspring in Tokyo is met with indifference and ingratitude, only serving to reveal permanent emotional chasms. Ozu’s examination of the slow fracturing of the Japanese family is filled with quiet resignation, and the realization that tradition is subject to change. Melancholic, spare and restrained, Tokyo Story is a meditation on life, love, and mortality.