A Story of Floating Weeds & Floating Weeds

Yasujiro Ozu started out making comedies, but in 1934, made A Story of Floating Weeds, his first film really about the dissolution of the Japanese family, which is pretty much what he made for the rest of his career. Twenty-five years later, he took a break from his longtime studio, and remade the film. It's about a traveling theater troupe who go to a small town where the leader had a son with a woman years before and now returns with a common-law wife. Both films are pretty much the same, although the earlier film was in black and white and silent, while the later film was in color and a sound film. The earlier film is also half an hour shorter, partly due to the ability to show more from a sexuality perspective, but also because of the use of dialogue allows for a more intricate plot. Not that there's that much difference. There were actual camera movements in the earlier film, though, as he still hadn't decided to remove all cinematic techniques from his bag of tricks. I somehow am not entirely sure which film is better, but they're just slightly different excellent films. Ozu came at the film from different parts of his career and life which is shown by the film being more mature, but the loss of some of the youthful energy from the earlier film is the trade-off you have to make. It's actually fairly similar to Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. And as with that one, while the later film may be more technically skilled, I maybe slightly prefer the earlier one?

Also, I wanted to point out that I've watched my third film from the Janus box set purchased last October after Ivan the Terrible, Pt 2 and Loves of a Blonde. At this rate, I will finish watching the films in around 10 years.