Two things...

First, looking for on-line stores that specialise in Japanese and/or foreign film scores (any era) just for browsing.

Second, looking for works by Fumio Hayasaka and Toshiro Mayuzumi et al who scored for Mizoguchi and/or Ozu among others. Most interested in 40s, 50s, & 60s period of Japanese cinema and the respective composers. These can be LPs, compilations...whatever. Rochelle needs direction ---->

Ozu is my favourite director and I simply must have the music. H Rocco has already pointed out the scarcity of such works but am getting desperate.

Regards,
Rochelle

Ark Square - www.arksquare.com

AnimeNation - www.animenation.com

OK I can only think of two.
but Ark Square is all you need.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cenzo:
Hi,
OK heres where I go for Japanese CDS. Ark Square - www.arksquare.com
Cenzo

---

Hi Cenzo,

You were right. Arksquare is all you need. The range of music was fantastic. Some stuff was pricy but not for the things that I was looking for.

Among other yummy things, there was a CD compilation of music from Ozu films!!! I will order immediately as soon as I figure what else I want.

I am guessing I'll be broke for the next two weeks.

My sincere thanks to you,
Rochelle

I am also with you on Ozu. The search function is down but if it weren't you could go back and see an early posting of mine where I call Ozu the greatest just short of Hawks and maybe Lubitsch. His film, The End of Summer, with a score by Mayuzumi, may be the single best film ever made IMHO. Although most critics lean towards Tokyo Story, Late Spring, Autumn Afternoon and others.

There was a CD of music from Ozu films but I didn't pick it up so I don't even know what is on it.

As for Mayuzumi, there is an import of The Bible, the Japanese Cinema Music Series CD from Japan that has a number of cues from great scores like Tokyo Olympiad, Safari 5000, and When A Woman Ascends The Stairs. There are also a number of concert works on LP and CD, including the interesting Nirvana Symphony.

If you put Akira Ifukube into a search engine you will locate a neat site--Godzilla and Other Monster Music--which has a links section to a number of places where you can order Japanese film music on line.

Film being what it's been in the past century, more people probably know about Ozu than would have had he been a novelist (he might well never even have been translated.)

Trying to one-up Lou on the "cranky bastard" scale

P.S. Rochelle, please kindly tell us what the Ozu CD is like once you get it, and I'm sorry I could not alert you to it before. I was genuinely unaware of it -- unsurprised it exists, but obviously it flew under my radar.

NP: nothing obviously, I'm running late as it is, but ... the late Mayuzumi was one of Ifukube's prize pupils, you know! More people need to know about the truly great Mr. Ifukube

As for Ozu. I don't really want to pick a fight with the H-man or anyone else, but I'll try to explain it the best way I can.

Ozu's films are as different to classical Hollywood cinema as Godard's films are in their own way. No plots, no action, no slick camera moves, no quick cutting. Where average films try to involve you with technique, Ozu wants you to maintain a detachment and distance. Why? To create a cinema in line with the mental experience of enlightenment.

In zen they talk about the witness, the observer, experiencing the world as it is free from thinking and ego. And Ozu is actually trying to capture a sense of this on film.

Ozu's basic tool for this is the low camera angle. It provides us an "objective" perspective, one removed from our typical viewpoint both in the real world and in movies, one not quite human. Actually, it's the viewpoint of a child looking in on the adult world. But this uncommon view isn't bewildering and intimidating, instead it provides an omniscence, a god's eye view on all the behavior set before it.

Along with this different vantage point on the world comes a similar one with time. The lack of melodrama and the deliberately slow pace of Ozu's films is meant to slow you down to conform to its moment to moment flow. You have to slow yourself down to watch Ozu. Each little gesture IS the movie. If you can't slow down or break down your expectations of what a movie is, Ozu will seem incredibly boring and pointless. Take a shot in Early Summer: you see a trestle in a mountain pass, a train comes through, then it's gone and you're back to the original perspective. Sure the film has people and dialogue, but it also has scenes like this. And those scenes show how time and events occur in the world. Things happen then they are over. We're here for a little while then we're gone.

Only the world remains constant. In The Only Son, the mother and son are sitting outside in conflict, the son looks up, there's a pov shot of larks flying high in the sky. For Ozu, your own personal situation is put into perspective with a bigger picture of the world. Later the shadows cast by a sunset and sunrise are recorded on a wall--time continues no matter what happens.

Death, partings, regrets over things done, solitude--they're all here. Independence too. In Early Spring: a shot of the typing pool, close in on two girls, A says to B: So you're fooling around with your co-worker, B says: That's not your concern, A says: Well, are you coming to my picnic, B says: No, then we return to the master shot of the typing pool and that's the entire scene, like 3 shots and 4 lines of dialogue, but the point is you do as you please and walk away from anyone who'll give you flak over it.

Still, Ozu is against truly selfish behavior. From The End of Summer: "It doesn't matter how wild someone's been in the past as long as they don't develop bad character traits." Or in Tokyo Story, Setsuko Hara fanning the old couple contrasted with the selfish couple fanning themselves instead of each other. An Autumn Afternoon is completely about a Japan where people care for themselves and their gadgets more than each other.

Ozu's films are playful with technique. They are films in which the actor/characters seem to know they are in a movie and are often looking out from the screen into the audience or making asides to themselves that are intended as commentary to us. In The End of Summer: the old man sits with his side to the camera while his mistress's flighty daughter runs back and forth around the house in the background, to us/himself he says: "What a restless girl" and that tells us everything, that he's mellow, at peace, self-contained, centered, and that the girl is "busy," self-absorbed, and outside the natural flow of things.

I could go on and on and on but the main point is that Ozu's films are incredibly rich examples of eastern philosophy "in motion". And the enlightened charcters are great role models.

quote:

---

Originally posted by H Rocco:
His contemporaries did not really consider him a filmmaker

---

Hi H Rocco,

Shame you don't care much for Ozu. However, I don't buy into statements that this or that person wasn't really considered a filmmaker. That's pure prescriptivist stratagem and art should describe not prescribe.

Ozu did not 'breeze' into the industry although it may have been easier to get a directorial position post-industry pervasion. His first work was a cinematographer and a time when Shochiku administered production policies that Japanese cinema should imitate Hollywoodism.

The main problem is that many early Ozu film do not exist. Of the ones that do, some do not reflect the Ozu style that has come to be so idenitified with him. 'Dragnet Girl' being one such film. Anyway, I could go on and on but the subject is a moot point since sentiments are all subjective.

With reference to the disc - the store is out of stock. Extremely disappointing to be so close to the pot of gold. I'll keep you posted.

Regards,
Rochelle

How wonderful to have you, Cenzo, and H Rocco here as lovers of Japanese film/music.

I have a small personal collection (15 films?) of Ozu films which range from pre-war ('I Was Born But', Dragnet Girl') to post-war periods. Additionally, they are in a variety of subtitles..English, French, Japanese.

Aside from him, I like Terrence Malick and a small number of French, German, Soviet directors from the silent/talkie era.

I will look further into your above suggestions.

Regards,
Rochelle

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
Just what titles do you have?

---

Hi Lou,

Your throne is almighty...no one can displace you.

I Was Born But...(1932)
Dragnet Girl (1933)
Sory of Floating Weeds (1934)
An Inn in Tokyo (1935)
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947)
Late Spring (1949)
Early Summer (1951)
Flavour of Green Tea Over Ice (1952)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Early Spring (1956)
Equinox Flower (1958)
Floating Weeds (1959)
Good Morning (1959)
An Autumn Afternoon (1962)

Had the pleasure of seeing 'Woman of Tokyo' on the big screen as well.

Do you have a multi-standard VCR player?

Regards,
Rochelle

I've seen a lot more Ozu than is available on tape, just about everything from 1936 on. Have not seen Dragnet Girl, the silent Floating Weeds, or An Inn in Tokyo. I'd love to get Early Spring if your copy has english titles. If so, let's work something out. I'll just pay the $$$ once again. The japanese issued a large number of the films in a laser disc set but it's probably long gone now.

I had a rare opportunity to meet Donald Richie and rather than talk about any other subject I spent the whole time talking about Ozu.

I don't have 'End of Summer' so maybe we could swap.

If you are paying big bucks for conversion why don't you get a multi-standard VCR? As I undestand it, the cost of getting one is not as expensive as it use to be.

If you did get one, I could send:
Early Spring
Flavor of Green Tea Over Ice
Dragnet Girl
Floating Weeds

Under what circumstances did you meet Donald Richie and did he reveal anything on Ozu not stated in his books?

Quare Fellow???

quote:

---

Originally posted by H Rocco:
I've interviewed enough of them

---

Hi H Rocco

So Lou has conversations with Richie while you are interviewing Ozu's contemporaries?

This is all very fascinating. Do you have some interesting stories to tell? Would love to hear them.

I haven't bought a multi-region VCR because I only have the two tapes I mentioned and don't find that many Pal or other type tapes to make the purchase worthwhile.

The Quare Fellow isn't Ozu but a British film by producer Anthony Havelock-Allen. More namedropping: I met his son and he said I had to see this one and so he sent me it.

My copy of The End of Summer is French (with French subtitles) but I knew the film and French well enough to be able to view the copy.

I live in Ann Arbor, MI, home for the University of Michigan. The U has a Center for Japanese Studies (since 1947!) and a few years back they hired Richie to teach for a semester and so he was around town and I met him on a number of occasions actually (usually at movies). I visited him in his office and we talked Ozu. No revealations I'm afraid. He said he didn't like the first Ozu film he saw but got into his work after meeting the man. He said Ozu was very funny in person, but that he was tough to work for. He introduced a few Ozu films to an audience in California and they rejected the films. There's a great scene in The End of Summer where two women squat down together by a lake to talk. They squat, talk, and get up at the same time, Ozu's way of showing they are in accord. Richie said that the CA audience cracked up at this point: "Like it was Busby Berkeley."