Film Nitrate

Days of Youth is the earliest film by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu to survive, though in fact he had made a number of silent films in the two years before this was released. As he worked his way up to becoming a director at the Shochiku film studios, he found himself responsible for producing the studios' 'student comedy' films, which featured no big-name actors, and were modelled on similar movies being made in Hollywood and playing to enthusiastic audiences in Japan. This resulted in a very productive period in which he made 26 films in the 5 year period from 1927-32. Of these, only 8 survive in complete form. Though he would make his most critically successful work in the 1950s with films such as Tokyo Story and Early Summer , it's always interesting to look at a director's early work for signs and references that they would return to in later work, and though Ozu was turning these films around at a frenetic pace, it's encouraging to see that the quality...