Tokyo Story

Ozu Yasujirō’s celebrated family drama, Tokyo monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953), is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made, and regularly cited as one of the greatest films of all time in polls of leading critics and filmmakers around the world.

Telling the moving story of an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children, the film contrasts the behaviour of their children, who are too busy to pay their parents much attention, and their widowed daughter-in-law who treats them with hospitable kindness. In its complex portrait of human motivation and lively sense of social space, it offers a profound and poignant insight into the generational shifts of postwar Japan.

Professor Alastair Phillips (University of Warwick), author of a new BFI Film Classic on Tokyo Story (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), gave an extended illustrated talk on the film. The presentation combined a close analysis of the film’s key locations – the city of Tokyo and the town of Onomichi – with discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. Drawing upon Japanese and English language sources, he also situates Tokyo Story within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examines the multiple international dimensions of the film’s long after-life to understand its enormous contribution to global film culture.

Tokyo Story by Alastair Phillips is published by Bloomsbury (2022). It is available to purchase via this link.

A discount code was provided for attendees of this event.

Presentation by Alastair Phillips

A video of the talk can be found here:

 

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