GREAT SCENES
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949) 

“That’s the order of human life and history: to expect such immediate happiness is a mistake. Happiness isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you create yourself. Happiness comes only through effort.”

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Born today — 12 December: Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (小津 安二郎), who, despite never marrying, captured gentle, profound portraits of families through the lens of marriage, death and generational differences in postwar Japan.

After a protracted battle with cancer, Ozu passed away in his hometown of Tokyo on his birthday in 1963. He was 60.

Ozu’s signature style — static visual compositions and austere, contemplative frames — has gone on to influence a generation of contemporary filmmakers, among them Jia Zhangke, Mike Leigh, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Wim Wenders, who once called Ozu his “only master.”

Happy birthday, Martin Scorsese

The illustrious American filmmaker turns 69 today.

David Liu | 17 November 2011

“Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.”

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“To me this movie does to genre filmmaking what L’Avventura did to narrative cinema in the 1960s, in the sense that in L’Avventura, all of a sudden, the central character disappears, and you’re just left with abstract issues of what was really going on in life around that character.

Here you have the notion that everything is in place for a classic narrative — a serial killer, the cops, a smart guy from everyday life, the ciphers. Everything should fall in place and there should be a resolution, and here you’re only left with question mark after question mark, which ultimately is what real life is about, and it’s very rarely acknowledged by cinema.

What amazed me at the time and still does is the connection with Seven, because it’s like the anti-Seven. It’s this incredible exercise in dialectics. In American cinema, I don’t see an equivalent.”

—  Filmmaker Olivier Assayas on David Fincher’s Zodiac

Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall, 21 May 1945

Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall, 21 May 1945