Ozu in Color (Every Frame a Painting)

For TCM, Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou tell us how legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu made the transition to color filmmaking. His first color film was Equinox Flower in 1958 and it took a couple of films for Ozu to work out how to best employ color.

When you watch later Ozu films, you’re struck by how similar two people can be. How often one place resembles another, how life itself is cyclical and Ozu used color as another way to build these patterns.

In the recent post about the supersonic trebuchet, I wrote that if I’d had access to engineering process videos like that when I was a kid, I would have grown up to be an engineer. Well, same thing for Every Frame a Painting: 12-year-old Jason had zero idea how filmmaking worked and videos like theirs would have fired me up to try my hand at it (no idea where I would have gotten a camera though…) Maybe it’s best that I grew up to do what I’m doing, where I can learn a little bit about all of these different fascinating things. 🤷‍♂️

• color
• film school
• movies
• Taylor Ramos
• Tony Zhou
• video
• Yasujiro Ozu