No. Freaking. Way. 

Ozu made a miserable neorealist film decades before miserable neorealism was even a thing in Italy, and my heart just shattered into a trillion pieces. Bazin, eat your heart out! It's neorealist to the bone —the unemployment, the homelessness, the cruel wasteland, the heart-wrenching pathos, the search for food, for shelter, for happiness, and so on. Every frame bleeds with an honest ache. Every character is inveighed against by economic forces outside their control. It's PICKPOCKET (1959) by way of BICYCLE THIEVES (1948) set in what looks like post-apocalyptic Tokyo.

A punishing industrial flatland knotted together by grimy satanic mills, smoke-belching factories, and spidery telephone poles, feels like the kind of oppressive environment Antonioni would lift 30 years…

Silent Summer

Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo exists as a piece of neorealism filled with both struggle and mundanity. It depicts a homeless man and his two sons. He looks for work while his children catch stray dogs for money. They fantasise about food and do games of pretend since they have nothing material.

Children will be children, and they will find a way to exist without realising their place in the world. Ozu understood a child's worldview like few directors did, allowing him to create adult films without hyperbolic representations of childhood. His children play and learn, they grow and smile. It is children who can always find the small happiness that let the hours pass by. Perhaps…

It's awful to be poor.

Channeling his own broke phase to make what is probably one of the first neo-realist movies to be ever made, Ozu follows the story of a single father who tries to find a job in the midst of Japan's unemployment crisis while having to take care of his two boys. The movie takes time to establish Kihachi's continuous efforts to find a job, while his sons engage in catching stray dogs to find enough sen to get one meal a day, never having the luck to set foot in a school. In the midst of this struggle, he finds another single parent, a woman in her 20s who has a child too. While the kids…

esse é um dos últimos filmes mudos realizados por ozu, e embora seja um diretor bastante reconhecido por suas obras faladas do pós-guerra, muitas técnicas que marcariam seu estilo já podem ser reconhecidas em "uma estalagem em tóquio": os "pillow shots" (planos que geralmente marcam as interrupções e quebras de cenas nas narrativas, com imagens que não necessariamente fazem parte da continuidade da história) aqui já se mostram presentes, assim como o naturalismo marcante do diretor em torno dos núcleos familiares japoneses e seus contextos.

embora eu sinta que muitos dos filmes falados de ozu se voltam mais pra evolução e movimentação dos personagens em torno das mudanças, transições, modernizações e conflitos de gerações, aqui ele parece muito mais preocupado…

The final Ozu silent (or the final extant one, at least) is perhaps the most formally precise of his pre-talkie period. The use of recurring master shots to mark each morning with subtle variations in composition hinting at the differences that seep into the characters' locked routines; the geometric precision of placement in the bar that becomes a haven for the homeless father and his sons; the don't-call-it-a-POV-shot images of wistful skygazing when Kihachi and Otaka nostalgically dream of being kids again hinting at their inner dreaming without strictly speaking being shots from their perspectives. Yet for all the compositional and editing rigor, this is narratively Ozu's most naturalistic, proto-neorealist drama, defined by episodic, nomadic variations on the same doldrum…

☆"It’s awful to be poor."☆

Like Charlie Chaplin, despite the advent of sound features Yasujirō Ozu continued to make silent films well into the 1930s, some of which are magnificent including I Was Born, But… and Tokyo Chorus. In 1935, he released his final one, Tōkyō no yado ["An Inn in Tokyo"]. (Or, at least, it's his last "extant" silent film.)

And it's excellent, what one writer called his "least seen masterwork." Maybe that's not a surprise, as it's a sad and emotional neorealist piece that comes a decade or two before all the Italian movies your film professor taught you about. You should watch it!

In the Koto district of Tokyo, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) needs to find work to…