Critical Voices

"[A Summer at Grandpa's] is his most Ozu-like film, with overtones of works like Ohayo and even of Tokyo Story. The opening scene, a prelude in which newly graduated children sing farewell to their old school, works in the same way as the emotional climax of Tokyo Story, in which the daughter glances at the watch just given her by her aunt and the sound of the children's singing carries into the next shot."

--- Alan Stanbrook

"At the end of [A Summer at Grandpa's], the quiet appearance of the grandfather and grandmother on the bridge makes one remember Ozu's Tokyo Story."

--- Chiao Hsiung-ping (1989)

"The early sequences, depicting the repatriation of the occupying Japanese after 1945, even look Japanese. The beautiful scene which is shot in the same way by an Ozu or a Mizoguchi in the 1950s. And it's not just a matter of influence. Hou has always maintained that the Ozu flavour many have found in his work is coincidental because at the time it was first remarked upon, he had never seen an Ozu film. Perhaps; but Ozu, after all, was part of the Japanese cultural heritage and for more than fifty years Taiwanese life was imbued with it. Hou may have arrived after the Japanese had left the island, but their legacy lingered on."

--- Alan Stanbrook

"[Mr. Hou's] 'Summer at Grandpa's,' ...looked as if it were the director's 'Truffaut film.' 'Daughter of the Nile' evokes the alienated mood of the early features by France's Jean-Luc Godard, while Mr. Hou's use of the camera suggests that he is an appreciative student of Japan's Yasujiro Ozu, the poet laureate of graceful resignation. Mr. Hou has studied the work of the masters and borrowed their methods and manners to express feelings that, though authentic and true, ultimately seem secondhand because his film language isn't his own."

--- Vincent Canby

"Hou Hsiao-hsien favours the use of motifs, similar to those 'punctuation marks' that are such a marked feature of Ozu's films."

--- Alan Stanbrook

Hasumi: "Your films are often said to be Ozu-like, but I disagree completely... Rather, the sensitivity of your scenes have a European, as opposed to an American or Hollywood feel. Are at all conscious of this in any way?"
Hou: "I've never thought of that. On the other hand, since I was small and in my student days, the movies I saw were, more than anything, American. For a long time, it was impossible to see European films in Taiwan. Last year there was a film festival in Taiwan, and there was an international section. At that time, I saw a comparatively large number of foreign films. So whenever that kind of thing is said, it feels strange."

--- Hasumi Shigehiko

Main Table of Contents

Ozu and Hou --- Introduction