Irish Film Institute -TOKYO-GA

TOKYO-GA

Director: WIM WENDERS

W. GERMANY-U.S.A. • 1985 • COLOUR • DIGITAL VIDEO • 92 MIN


BETWEEN FEATURES, WENDERS HAS MADE A WHOLE SERIES OF FILM DIARIES OR SKETCHES, MOST OF THEM REFLECTING ON THE STATE OF FILM-MAKING BUT ALSO COMMENTING ON MORE GENERAL CULTURAL TRADITIONS AND TRENDS. Tokyo-ga is ostensibly a tribute to the great Japanese film-maker Yasujiro Ozu, whose rigorous style and compassionate studies of family life struck a chord with Wenders. ‘If anything is holy in the world of cinema,’ Wenders says at the start, ‘it must be the work of Ozu’; and the film documents not a pilgrimage, as he hastens to add, but a search for the Tokyo of the Japanese master who died in 1963. The Tokyo Wenders finds in the mid-1980s is a world of neon lights and Disneyland, of Coca-Cola and baseball-playing rock ‘n’ roll teenagers. Ozu’s world seems to have died with him, as the moving interviews with his colleagues Chishu Ryu (star of Tokyo Story and of fifty other Ozu movies) and Yuharu Atsuta (Ozu’s cinematographer) reveal. This absorbing essay is essential viewing for fans of Ozu and Wenders.

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