Japanese cinema's visceral, kinetic thrills have traditionally been tempered with a more serene school of filmmaking - there's always been a sobering antidote to each generation's craze, whether samurai adventure, yakuza movie, Godzilla flick or anime. In the West, Akira Kurosawa remains the most familiar face of 'classic' Japanese film thanks to accessible, arresting epics like The Seven Samurai; Yasujiro Ozu's lesser-known oeuvre constitutes, in some ways, the flipside of the Kurosawa canon.

Ozu's is an exquisite, ruminative body of work that simultaneously acknowledges the beauty and poignancy of our existence with an uncommonly clear-eyed honesty. A director's director, admired by talents including Paul Schrader (who wrote a book about him) and Wim Wenders (who dedicated Wings of Desire to him), Ozu was a skilled observer of middle-class habits, solitude and familial duties and crises.

Eastern secret

His insight into the life of the ordinary Joe made Ozu an extraordinary filmmaker. Unlike Kurosawa, however, who wowed international audiences and won major festival accolades, Ozu suffered a more subdued reception overseas. Despite being lauded both critically and commercially at home, it was only after his death that classics such as 1953's Tokyo Story (his masterpiece) and Good Morning (1959) got the full exposure they deserved.

Many considered Ozu to be 'more Japanese' than his contemporaries (a consensus that damaged the distribution of his features) but with his first films the director actually paid tribute to the American movies he'd been glued to in his youth. Born in Tokyo in 1903, Ozu was a fully-fledged cinéphile by the time he entered the industry as an assistant cameraman. He was 20 and within a few years was directing films himself, proving as prolific as he was prodigious and often co-writing the screenplays or supplying storylines. After the war Ozu - rather like Eric Rohmer, decades later - turned his attentions to a series of 'seasonal' films, including Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951). He did his best work in the 1950s and was still at the height of his powers when he died in 1963.

The Ozu style

A Kubrickian commitment to the smallest detail and an uncluttered visual style incorporating static, low-angle camerawork marks Ozu's mature work; the more films he made, the more concentrated his techniques became. Likewise, throughout his later years the director examined and re-examined the same clutch of plots, themes and characters, sometimes going one step further by re-making his own earlier pictures. Good Morning, for example, is a re-tread of the 1932 comedy I Was Born, But....

Floating Weeds (1959) is another re-make, this time of a silent picture Ozu directed 25 years earlier. The storyline, in which a traveling actor - one of the titular 'floating weeds' - is reunited with a mistress who bore his son, also reverberates in his penultimate picture, The End of Summer (1961), which similarly finds its hero rekindling an old flame. Both beautifully shot, and both co-scripted with his long-term collaborator Kogo Noda, these late works see Ozu characteristically extracting harmonious, unshowy turns from his main players. Embrace the quiet wit, patient pace and all-round finesse of Ozu's filmmaking and leave the samurai antics and yakuza bullet fests for another day.

Chris Wiegand