New book on Ozu

[Aaron Gerow]

KineJapan member Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano has sent me this notice 
about a new book he has published in Spanish on Ozu:

I'd would like to inform all the list of a new book originating from my 
doctoral thesis. The title is: Primavera tard?ade Yasujiro Ozu: cine 
cl?sico y po?tica Zen (ISBN: 84-95917-24-6). It is in Spanish and the 
title translation would be something like "Ozu Yasujiro's Late Spring: 
Classic Cinema and Zen Poetics."

In summary, it's a deep textual analisys of Banshun, sequence by 
sequence, with the idea of searching out a common field between 
American Classical Cinema and a so-called Japanese Classical Cinema. 
This common field doesn't originate from the production of the editing, 
camerawork, etc., but from the narrative and the symbolic path of the 
Hero. On this point, the Zen poetics becomes quite important, because 
it would be in the aesthetic, philosophical and human fields that such 
different kinds of production (Classical American/Japanese) would find 
each other. In this sense, although Zen poetics makes Ozu's films look 
so different from? a classical Hollywood movie, it is the symbolic 
structure that makes Banshun so similar in narrative, for example, to a 
melodrama like Stella Dallas.

I therefore stray from Bordwell's opinion about Ozu's modernism and try 
to deepen the theories put forward by Schrader and Burch theories, but 
while moving away from metaphysical positions and, thus, trying to 
materialize my thesis from the very images of the film.

I hope it will interest all of you.