The Anti-Testament of Ozu Time, Finitude and Repetition in An Autumn Afternoon

Abstract

This article reconsiders Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962) as a cinematic “anti-testament”, a final film that eschews resolution, culmination, or closure in favour of subtle continuity, repetition, and quiet disappearance. Situated between the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware and Western existential philosophy, Ozu’s final work embodies an ethics of impermanence and restraint, where cinema becomes a contemplative practice rather than a narrative of finality. Through formal strategies such as the low “tatami shot,” fixed camera, and elliptical editing, the film materialises time as presence, not progression. Drawing on Heidegger’s conception of aletheia, Cavell’s ethics of acknowledgment, and Tarkovsky’s reflections on haiku, this study argues that Ozu develops a philosophy of parting grounded in repetition, care, and relationality. Rather than a monument to his oeuvre, An Autumn Afternoon offers a visual ritual of transmission, where the invisible dwells within the visible, and the act of letting go becomes cinema’s most philosophical gesture. In doing so, Ozu dissolves the notion of the cinematic testament, transforming it into a meditative cadence of impermanence.

1. Introduction

A “testament,” in its traditional sense, implies closure: a summing up, a final gesture offered before the end. In cinema, so-called testament films are frequently regarded as conscious farewells or, at least, as works shaped by a sense of mortality and the awareness of time running out. They are often interpreted as culminating expressions of a filmmaker’s vision, distilled into a final work that reflects, or refracts, the whole. Yet the category itself is not self-evident. Why should a last film be thought of as a testament at all? Does every final work bear this weight? The very notion of a testament raises questions of intentionality (what the filmmaker sought to leave behind) and of reception (how audiences and critics interpret the work in light of its finality). Moreover, every testament is shadowed by death: it is not only a last word but a gesture offered in the face of finitude. An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no Aji, 1962), Yasujiro Ozu’s final completed film, offers a subtle revision of what a cinematic testament might be. As David Bordwell notes, however, “An Autumn Afternoon is not, then, a testament. Like Ozu’s other works, it is a complex reworking of strategies derived from earlier films, as well as an attempt to try new things.” Ozu had already begun preparing notes for another project, Radishes and Carrots, which was to centre on “a man who gets cancer and who has a daughter about to get married.” Bordwell concludes that An Autumn Afternoon, “despite its concern with aging, is in form and attitude a young man’s work” (Bordwell 1988, p. 376).

This remark situates the film not as an epitaph, but as a continuation—a work of mature renewal rather than conscious closure. If there is a sense of finality here, it is retrospective, constructed by viewers who read Ozu’s death back into the image. Within the film itself, nothing suggests that it was conceived as a farewell. Ozu’s gesture is one of quiet continuity, a return of things to time: not a monumental epitaph, but a work marked by subtraction—no climax, no narrative reversal, only the slow modulation of the everyday. Events do not conclude; they dissolve.

Set in contemporary Tokyo, the film follows the aging widower Hirayama as he comes to terms with his daughter’s impending marriage and the solitude that follows. Structured around visits with old friends, quiet meals, and long pauses of reflection, it depicts the rhythms of ordinary life with Ozu’s characteristic restraint. Beneath its calm surface, however, runs a meditation on generational change, memory, and resignation—the melancholy awareness that both familial bonds and time itself are slipping away.

Rather than closing emphatically, Ozu chooses a gesture of quiet continuity, a return of things to time. This is not a monumental epitaph, but a work marked by subtraction: no climax, no narrative reversal, only the slow modulation of the everyday. Events do not conclude; they dissolve.

The film opens with a sequence of static shots of factory chimneys and urban rooftops, followed by scenes of Hirayama at his office, surrounded by clerks and the quiet rhythm of daily routine (00:02:35–00:06:20). Hirayama and a young employee casually mention that a young female worker has recently left work to get married—a fleeting remark that already anticipates the film’s central theme of parting and generational change. Moments later, Hirayama’s friend Kawai visits and suggests a potential marriage prospect for Hirayama’s own daughter, Michiko. This subtle narrative transition, from office to domestic concern, encapsulates Ozu’s art of continuity: the social and the personal flow into one another through repetition, silence, and understated irony. The following scene, in a small neighbourhood bar (00:06:48–00:13:34), extends this rhythm into the sphere of friendship and memory, as Hirayama and his old companions tease one another about Horie’s much younger wife, their laughter tinged with melancholy. Through these early sequences, Ozu establishes the film’s pulse: the quiet continuity between work, leisure, and aging; the passage of time registered not in events, but in gestures and pauses.

Within this rhythm, the end is not an event but a lingering presence. This silence, formal, rhythmic, philosophical, may be, I will argue, Ozu’s true testament.

Within the lineage of great “final films” such as The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky), Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick), Gertrud (Dreyer), or Varda par Agnès (Varda), An Autumn Afternoon stands out through its refusal of the spectacle of culmination. There is no gesture of overcoming, nor explicit existential conclusion. Ozu does not dramatise death, nor does he seek to declare a final truth. Instead, the film proposes a thought embedded within form: a meditation on impermanence embodied in the shot, in rhythm, in repetition. In this sense, it is less a testament as closure than a testament as bequest: a gift that insists not on finality but on continuity, reminding us that cinema can bear death not by representing it but by dwelling within its silent proximity.

Situated between the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware1 and modes of thought from Western existential philosophy, Ozu’s cinema outlines a singular space where the image does not illustrate concepts but embodies them. The proximity to Heidegger, Cavell, or even Montaigne does not occur through citation, but through gesture. To think of death as something to inhabit, not as something to represent. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for death and dying,” says Socrates in Phaedo 64a (Plato 2002, p. 101). Montaigne fine-tunes the same gesture: “To philosophise is to learn how to die.” Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir (Montaigne 1907, Livre I, chap. 19). In An Autumn Afternoon, this philosophical lesson is translated into form: there is no discourse about the end; there is only an aesthetics of disappearing. Time does not point towards death as a conclusion; it is always already inhabited by it, as a silent background to each gesture. Ozu, like Montaigne, offers vision, not consolation. Above all, he teaches how to sustain what withdraws. We find and inhabit, with Ozu, a shared finitude as a texture that is recognised and accepted, rather than explained or resolved. Perhaps that is why, here too, death occurs as autumn occurs in the fading of colours, in the detachment of leaves, in the prolonging of silences.

Taking all this into account, this essay will try to explore how An Autumn Afternoon bequeaths us a testament without fixation or definitive affirmation and offer instead a gesture of surrender to impermanence, where time and cinema intersect in a practice oriented by attention to detail, by the ethics of repetition, and by the awareness of finitude. It is a final modulation, discreet and silent, that extends the director’s path without offering a definitive conclusion.

2. The Aesthetics of Impermanence: Mono No Aware

Mono no aware can be defined as an emotional awareness of inevitable change and a form of love for the ephemeral, a melancholic consciousness of the impermanence of things: “The meaning of the phrase mono no aware is complex and has changed over time, but it basically refers to a “pathos” (aware) of “things” (mono), deriving from their transience” (Parkes and Loughnane 2024).

In the modern Japanese context, this idea is often associated with the contemplation of cherry blossoms (sakura). What moves the observer is not merely the beauty of the blossoms, but the very fact that they last only a few days. Their fleeting presence intensifies the experience, serving as a poignant reminder that everything in life is transient.

Donald Richie observes that Ozu does not simply illustrate this sentiment of impermanence, but structures it within the very composition of the film: objects, gestures, and silences become vessels of this awareness of the ephemeral, describing “a serene acceptance of a transient world, a gentle pleasure found in mundane pursuits soon to vanish, a content created by the knowledge that one is with the world and that leaving it is, after all, in the natural state of things” (Richie 1974, p. 52). We find ourselves within a “philosophy of acceptance” (Richie 1974, p. 51), embodied through an aesthetics of restraint that avoids emotional peaks or dramatic reversals and corresponds to a poetics of serene disappearance.

This is relatively paradoxical because this is a film composed of sovereign images, of unique visual situations, of frames marked by absolute restraint and sparse words, where everything plays out along the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible, between what is spoken and what is left unsaid, between what is shown and what is concealed, between what is expressed and what is withheld, between gesture and the immobility of bodies, and between the bodies and that which animates them. This is a constant feature of the images presented to us, in the succession of frames that unfold throughout the film, like characters entering and exiting the same stage space.

Now, this tension between appearance and concealment, between unveiling and hiding, is one of the film’s most striking features, and it carries a slight Heideggerian resonance. We find this in Heidegger’s conception of Being as Aletheia, Being as this continuous relationship of revealing/concealing—specially developed in The Origin of the Work of Art (see Heidegger 1991, 1958, 1997).

Heidegger had already reflected, in On the Way to Language (1959), on the limits of Western metaphysical thinking, including its aesthetic forms, which tend to master appearance through representation. In his fictional “Dialogue on Language” with a Japanese interlocutor, Heidegger suggests that Japanese art and thought approach language and being not as something to be possessed or unveiled, but as a field of resonance, where disclosure and withdrawal coexist. In this sense, Ozu’s cinema may be seen as enacting a distinctly non-metaphysical mode of aletheia: one that does not impose truth upon the image but allows it to emerge and vanish within the rhythm of stillness, silence, and duration. What is revealed in Ozu is never mastery over being but intimacy with its passing.

But the subtle Heideggerian resonance that we initially detect in this transitivity between the visible and the invisible extends beyond this aspect to encompass another equally fundamental point: the relationship of the visible with the present. This involves a primordial link between Being and Time, which here takes shape through a reflection on how the present contains, in potential, both the past and the future, and how it is always the present that en-forms, that is, gives meaning and visibility to “that which is.”

In Ozu’s final film, revelation, visibility, and the image are always, simultaneously, acts of concealment. A necessary concealment of other possible realities that, nonetheless, exist as potential within the present image. At the same time, the fundamental connection between past, present, and future permeates even the most banal situations, finding its highest expression in the quotidian gestures of the present moment. As Richie notes, Ozu’s films represent “the aimless, self-sufficient eternal now” (Schrader 1988, p. 31).

It is here, in gestures, in objects, in the trivial existence of things in the world, that we encounter the essence of what is most complex in the universe: Life and Death, the passage of Time, the connection to Transcendence. Everything is ordinary, everything is everyday, and it is always the Moment that one seeks to fix.

The grandmother playing with her grandson in the field in front of the house, the silent contemplation of the sea from a breakwater, the smoke rising from factory chimneys, a meal shared to the sound of incidental conversation, Ozu achieves that eternal present, that eternal moment, in the sense that every possible event in the film can be reduced to a limited, pre-determined, and precise number of shots.

In this sense, Ozu’s films are, undeniably, among the most compelling examples in the history of cinema of how form generates thought, and of how, in the relationship between cinema and philosophy, cinema does not illustrate philosophical themes, but rather creates them, and in creating them, they become absolutely inseparable from the images, the sounds, the filmic material itself. In this regard, Ozu’s mode of thinking through form stands in contrast to the dialectical and essayistic traditions exemplified by filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Godard. In Eisenstein, thought arises through conflict and montage—the collision of images producing an idea through synthesis. In Godard, thought is generated through juxtaposition and interruption, where discontinuity itself becomes reflection. Ozu, by contrast, articulates thought through stillness, rhythm, and recurrence: a meditative logic rather than a dialectical one, where meaning unfolds in duration rather than contradiction. Without a doubt, in Ozu’s work, the formal choices made in the construction of images, and in their articulation, give rise to a worldview that is itself a philosophical assertion. Let us consider how.

3. Tatami Shots and the Material Presence of Things

First and foremost, we are immediately struck by the structuring and defining choice to shoot the film in a series of shots where the camera is positioned very low, lower than the so-called ‘normal’ human eye level, at the height of a person seated in the traditional tatami style, approximately one metre above the ground, the famous “tatami shots”. It is important to highlight that they are not merely a stylistic signature, perhaps the most famous signature of Ozu, but also an ontological choice. As we shall explore in detail later, Ozu’s tatami shots ground this philosophy in a form that brings the gaze closer to the ground, to objects, to the resting body. The shot ceases to dominate the scene and instead submits to its scale. Additionally, this “visual horizontality,” enacts a form of “immanent transcendence”: it does not elevate but sustains; it does not spiritualise, but materialises the sacred in the everyday gesture. The tatami shot, by returning us to the height of the feet, does not observe separation from above, but shares in its proximity. From this perspective, transcendence is not a distant beyond but a minimal vibration of the ordinary, an immanence that rises precisely through its closeness to the ground. The camera, always low, approximates a contemplative perspective: closer to the earth than to the sky, and is associated with an immanent worldview, in which the sacred does not rise above matter but is inscribed within it. It is not the subject observing the world: it is the world observing the subject. A cinema where transcendence does not rupture the everyday but traverses it from within, silently.

This traditional perspective corresponds to the gaze in meditation, dominating a very limited visual field. As Schrader notes: “It is the position from which one sees the Noh, from which one partakes the tea ceremony. It is the aesthetic attitude; it is the passive attitude.” (Schrader 1988, p. 22). From this initial formal choice, this act of lowering the camera, everything changes: people, events, gestures, houses, and spaces are automatically cast into a new dimension, placed directly under a gaze that lies outside the human, seeking, in the register of everyday actions, traces of a non-distinction between Transcendence and Immanence. It is a low gaze, grounded, closer to the level of the earth than to the sky, and therefore more attuned to the materiality of the world, seeking, as in traditional Zen Art, an expression of transcendence not in religion, but above all in daily activities.

Indeed, with this small formal decision, Ozu enacts a profound inversion: he overturns the standard parameters of both Cinema and Philosophy. No longer are the characters, the autonomous, independent creative subject, those who look upon the world as an object placed before them. Quite the opposite: in this film, it is the objects that gaze upon the subjects. It is the materiality of the world that pierces the contemplative gaze of the subject seated in tatami position. This radical inversion corresponds to the first moment of astonishment the film provokes, followed immediately by a second: the realisation that Transcendence is to be found below, and not above, the so-called normal human gaze.

In Ozu, we encounter an art that is fulfilled in the banality of gestures and the detail of objects. Like the grandmother playing with her grandson, the smoke from chimneys, or light crossing an empty corridor: the invisible resides in the visible, and transcendence inhabits immanence. For that very reason, everything is essential. Ozu’s camera does not observe the world from a place of authority, but from the ground, literally. The tatami shot placing us at the height of lived experience, of contemplation, of the ordinary. This viewpoint is not merely technical; it is philosophical. A “low gaze” that refuses omniscience and adopts an ethics of attention.

In the same way, the omniscience that lies at the heart of the classical grammar of cinematic narrative is replaced here by a grammar of an entirely different kind, one not centred on the human viewpoint, but on the material presence of things, on the positioning of bodies, on facial expressions, on the tone and timbre of speech, on intonations, pauses, silences, and it is this that determines the shots themselves and the connections between them. This is the film’s signifying substance, and, ultimately, the raw material through which meaning is assigned by the gaze beyond the human, the low gaze of the camera. As Schrader notes: “Like the traditional Zen artist, Ozu directs silences and voids” (Schrader 1988, p. 28).

Thus, the most evident formal aspects, the consistently low camera position, the absence of camera movement, and the fixed, frontal point of view, all point in two different directions: on one hand, they evoke a kind of image primitivism that echoes traditional Japanese art, standing as a counterpoint to the constructivism and subjectivism of Western artistic approaches; on the other hand, they gesture toward a social formalism, a formalism of relations, that permeates the film and serves as the web through which everything else is intuited.

This is always, in Ozu’s cinema, a de-subjectivised vision, in which the position of the subject or author as the primary source of meaning is displaced.

So, in this film, as indeed in all of Ozu’s films, the central theme is the banality of the everyday and how it contains within itself a transcendent totality that exists solely through the physical and spatial presence of objects. (In this respect, Ozu’s realism is as close to Bazin’s spatial and material realism as it is to Kracauer’s more naturalistic realism.) It is worth recalling that for both Bazin and Kracauer, realism in cinema is not about subject matter or expression, but a realism of space, without which films do not become Cinema, and it is always grounded in an aesthetic of the material.

The reality of this Japan is the reality of the bodies and objects that inhabit it, just as the reality of this journey is that of a material, non-subjective gaze that lends it meaning: it is the reality of a journey that follows the birth of a transcendence emerging from the articulation of things in their physical and spatial presence, filtered through a gaze beyond the human, here identical to that of the camera. Transformative choices, those that would alter reality or the physical and spatial event, are rejected; subjectivity and interiority are denied.

This is perhaps the first major challenge that Ozu poses to the history of the seventh art: to find, through cinema, a new gaze, one that does not arise from a process of distancing from things, but rather the opposite. What is sought is a gaze that is born with things, literally, with the camera itself being that first “thing”. This linking of vision to the material apparatus projects the resulting image into a domain of immanence which, paradoxically, as a gaze, is also an act of meaning-making and therefore carries within it a form of transcendence. What is truly surprising in Ozu’s journey or revelation is how that transcendence never exists outside of things, gestures, bodies, or the matter of everyday life, and how Ozu is able to construct this worldview through formal means that are almost minimal.

In fact, the idea that meaning arises from the material, physical, and spatial relationships between objects is reinforced throughout the film in a variety of ways. We have already seen how this is expressed in Ozu’s formal decision to keep the camera consistently low, but it is also reinforced through other significant choices: the fixed camera and the fixed, frontal point of view. Just as it is the characters who are looked at by the spaces, and not the other way around, it is also the relationships between spaces that construct the diegetic links, rather than the plot or actions themselves. In these spatial connections, emptiness, silence, and stillness are not neutral but positive and meaningful elements. They represent presence more than the absence of something, and they incorporate emptiness as an integral part of the form.

Richie describes Ozu’s style as a combination of long shots, medium shots, and close-ups, usually in the sequence 1-2-3-2-1. These correspond typically to exterior still-life shots and interior scenes, alternating between scene and emptiness, between exteriors and interiors. These transitions, rather than diegetic cuts, form the essential passages of the film (Richie 1963–1964, p. 12)

In truth, the film’s diegetic links arise gradually from spatial and temporal relationships, and it is these that function primarily as the elements of continuity and structure for the narrative. In this sense, the narrative is subordinated to the physical and material presence of things, not the reverse.

As Gilles Deleuze observes in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Ozu developed within a Japanese context a cinematic form that inaugurates what Deleuze calls “pure optical and sound situations”—images liberated from motor action, where seeing and hearing become ends in themselves, and time is experienced directly through perception. These moments, detached from narrative causality, open cinema to a mode of thought that is immanent to the image itself, transforming vision into reflection (Deleuze 1989, pp. 13–18). As Deleuze writes, in Ozu, “daily life allows only weak sensory-motor connections to survive, and replaces the action-image by pure optical and sound images” (Deleuze 1989, p. 15).

This Zen art, this search for transcendence in immanence without drawing boundaries between the sacred and the secular, resonates in European cinema with the mystical immanentism of Tarkovsky or the essentialist austerity of Bresson, both of whom openly acknowledged their indebtedness to Japanese aesthetic refinement and its ongoing play between the visible and the invisible, between silence and speech, between what is shown and what is hidden. As Paul Schrader observes, “Like Ozu, Bresson is a formalist: ‘A film is not a spectacle, it is in the first place a style.’ … Both Ozu and Bresson are formalists in the traditional religious manner; they use form as the primary method of inducing belief” (Schrader 1988, pp. 60–61). In this sense, Bresson’s transcendental minimalism, like Ozu’s, transforms the ordinary into a space of revelation, where form itself becomes an act of contemplation.

It seems fitting, then, to conclude this brief incursion into the interplay of immanence and transcendence in Ozu’s masterpiece by recalling Tarkovsky, who, in relating Japanese haiku poetry to a certain kind of cinema, describes it in the following way:

“Haiku cultivates its images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves, and yet, because they express so much, it becomes impossible to grasp their final meaning. The more closely the image fulfils its function, the more impossible it becomes to reduce it to the clarity of an intellectual formula. The reader of a haiku must enter into it as one enters into nature; must dive into it, lose themselves in its depths as into the cosmos, where there is neither top nor bottom.”

(Tarkovsky 1998, pp. 123–24)

Tarkovsky continues:

“Japanese poets knew how to express their visions of reality in a three-line observation. They did not merely observe it, but with sublime calm sought its eternal meaning. The more precise the observation, the more it tends to be unique and, therefore, closer to being a true image. As Dostoevsky once said, with extraordinary precision: Life is more fantastic than any fantasy.”

(Tarkovsky 1998, p. 124)

It is precisely with these timely words from Dostoevsky, filtered through one of the greatest European filmmakers, through the “material transcendentalism” of Tarkovsky, that we can understand also the universal worldview of Ozu: “Life is more fantastic than any fantasy”, to which we might add the following: the invisible is within the visible.

In this sense, An Autumn Afternoon can be read as an anti-testament. Rather than gathering and affirming a body of work, the film refuses the conclusive gesture. Whereas Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964) or Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986) end with explicit affirmations—moments of transcendence that seal their authors’ worldviews—Ozu’s cinema avoids the final act. It prolongs itself in subtle rhythms where the end is indistinguishable from what remains. There is no symbolic final scene, no emotional resolution. The father’s solitude, facing his glass of sake, does not offer a lesson or an epiphany. It is a presence that remains, a man alone, a time that continues.

4. Repetition as Care

In this sense, An Autumn Afternoon revisits one of the most persistent and subtle motifs in Ozu’s cinema: the relationship between parent and child, and more specifically, the quiet, asymmetrical bond between father and daughter. Throughout his body of work, from Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), and Late Autumn (1960) to Equinox Flower (1958), There Was a Father (1942), and Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu repeatedly returns to the emotional choreography of familial parting. These films trace delicate variations on a recurring gesture: the act of letting go with restraint, of renouncing without drama, of accepting temporal passage as a quiet and continuous form of presence.

An Autumn Afternoon, therefore, is an echo of Ozu’s entire body of work, a final unfolding of gestures, relationships, and rhythms already set in motion throughout his filmography. Yet this echo does not amount to closure or testament; it is an act of continuation. What returns here is not repetition as summary, but repetition as care—a cyclical gesture that sustains life within change. His last work does not close a path; it refines it. It returns to familiar motifs: the father and daughter, the decision to marry, the melancholy of separation, social rituals as the frame of intimacy, but does so with even greater restraint, as if each repetition were already a form of farewell.

As Aaron Gerow notes in his introduction to Hasumi’s Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, many readings have reduced Ozu’s style to exercises in subtraction or austerity. In contrast, Hasumi insists that his films “are often overflowing with abundance, motion, variation, even violence—shaped not by negativity but by positivity” (Hasumi 2024, xxvi), reframing repetition not as lack or limitation but as plenitude and renewal—a logic the film itself enacts through the quiet recurrence of gestures, faces, and situations.

Midway through the film, Hirayama visits his former schoolteacher, Sakuma, nicknamed “the Gourd,” now a widower living in poverty and cared for by his unmarried daughter (00:27:30–00:30:36). This encounter mirrors Hirayama’s own situation and quietly foreshadows Michiko’s impending marriage. Ozu stages the scene with his characteristic restraint: the camera remains still as the two former students accompany their old teacher home, his drunken joviality gradually turning to embarrassment. His daughter, composed yet firm, receives them politely but cannot conceal her quiet irritation. She scolds her father gently, not out of cruelty but weary affection—the kind of authority that reverses the parent–child relation. The men, uncomfortable, lower their gaze; Hirayama senses both her burden and his own future reflected in it. The shot holds long enough for the tension to linger; compassion mixed with shame, distance with recognition.

Through the stillness of the framing and the lack of sentimentality, Ozu transforms empathy into self-recognition: the father perceives his own future in the mirror of another’s solitude. The scene crystallises the film’s logic of repetition with variation—gestures and situations that recur across generations, charged each time with new emotional weight.

This logic of repetition with variation runs throughout Ozu’s work as both an aesthetic and philosophical principle. This architecture of repetition is not merely thematic; it is a form of thought.

This logic of repetition with variation runs throughout Ozu’s work as both an aesthetic and philosophical principle. This architecture of repetition is not merely thematic; it is a form of thought. As Hasumi notes, “meals constitute a very important thematic system in Ozu… a theme that connects on a deep level with narrational structure in the films of Ozu while also supporting the unfolding of the plots” (Hasumi 2024, p. 33). What appears as simple repetition—people eating, talking, sharing space—becomes the formal ground where Ozu’s ethics of attention and care unfold.

That form is deeply rooted in a Japanese aesthetic sensibility in which the new does not impose itself as rupture, but emerges from repetition, from minimal variation, from the gesture refined over time. As in chanoyu, the tea ceremony, each movement is codified and repeated with extreme attention. Similarly, in Ozu’s films, each shot, each cut, each silence participates in an ethics of detail. The value lies not in invention, but in precision. The act of seeing becomes a ritual, and mise-en-scène a space of contemplation.

As Hasumi further observes, “one characteristic of spatial structure in the Ozu-esque film is that eating unexpectedly establishes deep connections between exteriors and interiors… rather than a connecting or a fusing, it might be better to call what happens here a destabilizing of the spatial relationship between the inside and the outside” (Hasumi 2024, p. 38). This insight resonates with Ozu’s broader aesthetics of permeability—between public and private space, social ritual and intimate gesture—where repetition becomes a way of sustaining continuity within change.

This logic of repetition extends also to the cast. Ozu worked for decades with the same actors, such as Chishū Ryū, Setsuko Hara, and Haruko Sugimura, who return in different but thematically resonant roles. Even character names are repeated, as in the case of Setsuko Hara’s Noriko in Late Spring, Early Summer, and Tokyo Story, in what has been famously called the “Noriko trilogy.” This fidelity to the same acting body is not merely a matter of style or production but participates in an ontology of continuity. Faces change function, but the gesture remains. The character reappears in a new form, in a new plot, but still carries the memory of previous roles. Like objects and rituals, the actors become figures of a life that repeats with variations, never identical, always recognisable. Through this repetition of bodies, faces, and voices, Ozu articulates a vision of life, and cinema, not as a linear biography, but as a shared continuum of intensities, where the individual subject dissolves into a chain of subtle transmissions.

Repetition becomes here literal, not as imitation but as critical return. Schrader highlights how “ritual in Oriental art is not structured around a single cathartic event (like the blinding of Oedipus, for instance), but is cyclic, with little rise and fall, revealing the timeless Oneness of man and nature” (Schrader 1988, p. 33), as if Ozu were saying: nothing repeats exactly, but everything resonates. Just as the tea master avoids any excessive gesture, Ozu removes everything that might distract from attention to the essential: time, space, relationship. Both work with almost nothing. It is in this almost nothing that an ethics is found. Repetition is not mechanical; it is care. Restraint is not absence; it is depth.

In this sense, Ozu’s practice of repetition evokes Martin Heidegger’s existential concept of Sorge (care). In Being and Time, Heidegger identifies care as the fundamental structure of Dasein, the human being as being-in-the-world. The formally existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in (-the-world) as Being-alongside (-entities-encountered-within-the-world). This Being fills in the signification of the term “care”. (Heidegger 1962, p. 237). Far from sentimentality, Sorge denotes a mode of temporal engagement: to care is to sustain involvement with the world and with others, through attention, restraint, and responsibility. It is to remain open to the unfolding of presence without seeking to master or resolve it. Ozu’s cinema, with its cycles of familial parting, repeated gestures, and silent transmissions, enacts this structure of care not thematically, but formally. Each repetition becomes a gesture of Fürsorge, a being-with that allows the other to go, to change, to disappear. As with Dasein’s relation to death, Ozu’s characters live toward parting, always within a world shared and sustained through quiet concern.

The image, like the tea bowl, is merely a place where something impermanent, fragile, human may emerge. The shot, like the tea bowl, is not just an object: it is an occasion to be. To sustain presence. To listen, in silence, to what withdraws.

Within this tradition, inspired by the aesthetics of mono no aware, as seen above, which value imperfection, the ephemeral, and the unfinished, the artistic gesture does not seek to assert itself but to disappear into what it creates. The tea ceremony is not merely an aesthetic ritual but a philosophy of attention. As Okakura Kakuzō observes in The Book of Tea (Okakura 1906), preparing and serving tea embodies ideals of simplicity, ephemerality, and silent presence. Everything in chanoyu, the way the cup is held, the interval between gestures, the relation between participants and space, constitutes a choreography of the impermanent. In the same way, Ozu constructs his films as visual ceremonies: the shot is the room, the minimal gesture the offering, the silence the shared breath.

Like in the tea ceremony, Ozu removes everything that might distract from attention to the essential: time, space, relation. In this almost nothing, an ethics is found. Repetition is not mechanical; it is care. Restraint is not absence; it is depth. The image, like the tea bowl, is less an object than an occasion, a place where something impermanent, fragile, human may emerge. To sustain presence. To listen, in silence, to what withdraws.

This perspective resonates with a Shinto and animistic sensibility deeply present in Japanese culture, where life is not the property of an individual but a shared flow among humans, ancestors, nature, and objects. The aging father who lets his daughter go does not disappear; he transmits. Gesture, silence, ritual repeat and echo. When Hirayama returns home after the wedding, the quiet rooms seems to breathe with what has just vanished, the daughter’s absence lingering in the light, reflecting a trace of her presence (01:51:33–01:52:59). Memory becomes a kind of breath prolonged in an expanded present.

As in the tea ceremony, where what matters is the manner of serving and offering, cinema here becomes a space of silent transmission. The shot, like the tea bowl, passes from hand to hand. What is offered to the spectator is above all a way of being: presence in dialogue with absence, a ritual, a stillness that continues within the flow of things.

In this sense, Ozu’s “testament” is less a farewell than a final ceremonial act: a film that does not conclude but dissolves like steam from tea, leaving in the air the memory of what was repeated and, in repetition, gracefully lost.

This cyclical logic of repetition also permeates the relational fabric of Ozu’s films. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recurring motif of intergenerational parting, especially the silent and asymmetrical bond between father and daughter. In this quiet repetition, sustained in gesture, rhythm, and form, cinema itself becomes a practice of care.

5. The Art of Parting: Intergenerational Relations and the Philosophy of Letting Go

As discussed above, the motif of the dilemma between attachment and separation within families is one of the central axes of Ozu’s body of work and recurs from There Was a Father (1942) and Late Spring (1949), through Early Summer (1951) Tokyo Story (1953), Equinox Flower (1958), Floating Weeds (1959), Late Autumn (1960), culminating on An Autumn Afternoon (1962). As Hasumi observes, Ozu’s films “are a narrational fabric constantly woven together—and as soon unraveled—by a plurality of simultaneously coexisting stories… such as a daughter’s marriage, a father’s sadness, or the dissolution of a family” (Hasumi 2024, p. 52). This insight reframes these recurrent familial partings not as isolated dramas but as threads in a continuous fabric of emotional and temporal variations.

This motif of intergenerational parting, while intimate and domestic in register, has also been read as a subtle allegory for the transformations of postwar Japanese society. As Japan entered a period of accelerated modernisation and Westernisation, especially during the postwar Showa era (high-speed economic growth period), the quiet frictions between generations depicted by Ozu reflect not only familial tensions but broader cultural dislocations. The restrained father, the independent daughter, the unspoken gap between their temporalities, all echo a larger narrative of transition: from traditional values toward an emerging individualism, from continuity to fragmentation, from giri2 to the pressures of modern agency. In this reading, the home becomes a site of national reflection, and parting, a metaphor for the historical necessity, and quiet cost, of change. As scholars such as Richie (1974) and Desser (1988) have argued, Ozu’s apparent conservatism conceals a profound engagement with the conditions of modernity. Within this intertextual and thematic repetition—what Bordwell calls Ozu’s “reliance upon symmetries, parallels, and cycles,” in which “the most proximate ‘genre’ for any one film may thus […] be all Ozu’s other work” (Bordwell 1988, p. 63)—generational conflict does not erupt but matures as emotional distance, marked by silence and an ethics of restraint.

While Late Spring presents the first major gesture of paternal renunciation, a father who pretends he wishes to remarry so that his daughter feels free to leave, Early Summer unfolds this gesture in a more collective, familial context, questioning the relationship between tradition and change. By its turn, Tokyo Story shifts focus to the parents’ old age and the children’s subtle indifference, a pain without outcry, inscribed in the disjunction between temporalities. Also in Equinox Flower, Ozu’s first colour film, we see the father once again confronted with his daughter’s desire to choose her own path, in a register where formal restraint is contrasted by symbolic use of colour. Late Autumn (1960), in turn, almost re-enacts Late Spring but reverses the roles: now it is the widowed mother who hesitates to let her daughter go. Even There Was a Father, a film from the wartime period, already anticipates the gesture of letting go with firmness, the father’s authority as an axis of renunciation. In Floating Weeds, where paternity is hidden and errant, time appears as displacement and return, as a staging of a bond that seeks to persist without naming itself.

Keiko McDonald highlights that, in Ozu, generational transition is never presented as an affirmative gesture or a moment of overcoming; rather, it is a quiet adjustment to the impermanence of human connections. Paradoxically, separation is how the bond is preserved (McDonald 2006, pp. 93–94). In this sense, separation in An Autumn Afternoon is not a final point but an act of recognition: that time requires letting go, and that what is released nonetheless remains in another form, as form, as emptiness, as echo.

The separation between father and daughter (she, still unmarried; he, a widower attached to her domestic presence) is framed as a subtle disjunction, composed of everyday gestures and prolonged silences. At times, the father hesitates. The daughter, out of modesty or respect, delays. Time advances without imposing itself, instead suggesting a gradual relinquishment. The decision for Michiko to marry appears less as an act of deliberate choice than as a serene surrender to the order of time, to the logic of substitution, to the cycle of continuity that requires letting go so that something may endure.

The wedding itself unfolds almost entirely off-screen (01:38–01:40:30). We see neither the ceremony nor the guests—only the quiet transitions that follow: empty corridors, the slow fade of daylight on the family home. Through these absences, Ozu displaces the emotional centre of the narrative from event to interval, suggesting that what vanishes continues to resonate. The omission of the wedding scene literalises the film’s meditation on impermanence: an ending rendered through disappearance rather than climax.

As Hasumi writes, “The theme of changing clothes also introduces change and movement into the narratives… What is important here are not even the costumes themselves, but the vibrations that the gesture of changing clothes sends rippling through the narrational fabric” (Hasumi 2024, p. 54). This observation captures precisely Ozu’s way of transforming external gestures into temporal rhythms. In An Autumn Afternoon, such vibrations are no longer visualised through costume but through light, silence, and spatial emptiness—each element marking the same gentle transition from attachment to release. Like the changing of clothes, the act of letting go becomes a movement of continuity rather than rupture.

It is through this simple gesture of letting go that the film becomes profoundly philosophical. It does not concern a tragic loss or a redemptive sacrifice; it is, rather, a form of acknowledgment: that the bond between generations is inevitably marked by disjunction. Transmission does not occur through linear continuity but through interruption. In its deepest sense, inheritance is not what is given, but what is lost. A father’s legacy, as Ozu suggests, may well be simply the ability to step aside.

At this point, the film resonates with Stanley Cavell’s reflections on ordinary life and the idea of acknowledgment. Cavell writes, “acknowledgement “goes beyond” knowledge” (Cavell 1976, p. 257). For Cavell, acknowledgment of others does not mean treating them as objects of knowledge, but accepting their presence without possession. This recognition surpasses mere cognitive or moral action, constituting a form of mutual exposure, a willingness to face alterity without reducing it to prediction or control. The risk lies precisely in the absence of guarantees: the relationship requires openness, a form of commitment without mastery. Recognition, therefore, corresponds less to passive knowledge than to an active response, a lived gesture that gives practical effect to that knowledge. For Cavell, knowledge remains incomplete if it is not translated into some form of practical expression, whether through words, actions, or attentive silence. Knowing something about the other, or about time, in the sense of acknowledgment, does not mean retaining that understanding as an internal, closed fact; it means assuming the responsibility that such knowledge entails. It is an ethical gesture that transforms the relationship: it is not enough to perceive that the other departs, ages, or separates; one must recognise this in a way that allows them to do so, even in silence (Cavell 1976).

In Cavell, recognition always carries a dimension of vulnerability, as it presupposes self-exposure: relinquishing control, consenting to separation and loss as constitutive traits of shared human experience. In Ozu’s cinema, this lesson takes form through minimal visual gestures, devoid of discursive emphasis. It is precisely in the suspension of the image, in the father’s gaze upon the empty room, in the glass left on the table, that the consciousness of loss inscribes itself, not as a thematic reflection but as an ontological presence sustained by the shot’s rhythm and the form’s duration. The image, in maintaining the inevitable in suspension, acknowledges it and, in doing so, consents to its persistence. Just as in Ozu, where bonds are not translated into explicit affirmations but through rigorous attention to the everyday and its subtle variations, so too in Cavell does authentic recognition require acceptance of the other’s irreducible alterity: it is in the space of flight and difference that the very possibility of relation is founded.

Cavell’s account of acknowledgment, especially as it unfolds in The Claim of Reason (Cavell 1979), can be read as a philosophy of form rather than of concept. To acknowledge is not to reach a conclusion about the other, but to remain in relation to what cannot be concluded—a gesture inseparable from the aesthetic form that sustains it. In this sense, Ozu’s long takes and ellipses do not simply depict acknowledgment; they enact it. The frame that holds, the silence that lingers, the absence that is allowed to persist—these are cinematic equivalents of Cavell’s ethical stance: to let the world, and the other, continue existing beyond one’s grasp. The father’s final stillness thus becomes not resignation but a mode of acknowledgment, a moral vision that is formal before it is thematic.

In Ozu, this gesture occurs without discourse. It is given in the framing that distances, in the shot that lingers, in the scene where the father returns home, now without his daughter, finding only the illuminated emptiness of the room. The camera remains fixed. Silence extends. Absence does not impose itself as an emphatic rupture; it inscribes itself instead as a discreet presence, integrated into the form. Separation is not configured as an absolute division. The generational cycle is also a formal structure: Ozu composes through mirrors, parallels, and minimal variations. The daughter who leaves repeats the absent mother; the aging father sees himself in the mirror of his friends; the young soldiers in the bars repeat gestures of a fading past.

The tension between social duty and personal feeling deeply rooted in Japanese literary and philosophical tradition, is also present in Ozu’s work, albeit subtly and never as an explicit theme (Ueda 1991, p. 187). As Ueda suggests, Japanese aesthetic theories often emphasise the subtle preservation of tension rather than its resolution, reflecting a broader sensitivity to the ephemeral nature of human relationships.

In An Autumn Afternoon, the dilemma of separation between father and daughter activates this tension without dramatising it: the duty to allow the daughter a new life resonates silently with the affection that resists her departure. The gesture of letting go asserts itself as a deliberate practice of embracing impermanence as a condition inherent to human relations, without the need to resolve or fix their contours.

While death is not directly thematised in An Autumn Afternoon, it is nonetheless implied. Similarly, the separation that permeates the film, between father and daughter, between generations, between past and present, is not framed as a conflict, but as a gradual process. Ozu is less concerned with filming the drama of rupture than with the silent work of separation as a condition intrinsic to time. The relationship between Shuhei Hirayama and his daughter Michiko forms the most visible narrative thread in the film, yet even here, what matters is not what is said but rather what remains unsaid, what repeats, and what quietly slips away.

The film closes with Hirayama sitting alone in his apartment, a small glass of sake in hand (01:51:07–01:53:00). The camera remains fixed as he drinks in silence, the ticking of a clock replacing dialogue. The composition repeats earlier scenes of conviviality—meals shared with friends and family—but now emptied of presence. This final image transforms solitude into continuity: what remains is rhythm, duration, and the faint persistence of attention.

For this reason, An Autumn Afternoon does not present itself as a lament for lost time. Rather, it offers a meditation on the ethics of allowing time to flow. The relationship between father and daughter condenses this lesson: to love consists in letting go, through a discreet, almost imperceptible gesture, fully integrated into the filmic form, where gesture, cinema, and thought converge in a single vibration.

It is important to recognise that, in Ozu, chronological time (the daughter growing up, the father aging, the decision to marry) is merely the external material of a deeper time—an interiorised time, absorbed into the emotional and affective rhythm of everyday gestures. “Ozu’s time is not clock-time, it is psychological time” (Richie 1963–1964, p. 14).

Ozu’s time is the time of ritual, in which everything is actualised in the here and now, in the present. Richie emphasises how Ozu “is not concerned with the past—only with the present. His characters, no less than Antonioni’s, are living in the now, and they have no history” (Richie 1963–1964, p. 15). In this sense, there are no ghosts in Ozu: “There are no ghosts in Ozu as there are in Resnais and Bergman. The past barely exists in Ozu. Tokyo Monogatari is about the natural advisability of forgetting the dead (daughter-in-law forgets dead husband; old man will forget dead wife)” (Richie 1963–1964, p. 15).

In An Autumn Afternoon, time ceases to be a narrative backdrop and becomes structure. It is inscribed in the rhythm of gestures: the father’s hesitation before speaking, the daughter’s pauses before answering, the slow cuts between empty rooms that mark the passage of unseen hours. The visible emerges less from the event itself than from the interval, the suspension, from what withdraws. It is precisely the moments of pause, ellipsis, and silence that configure the image in Ozu, granting it its own depth and density.

It must be said that Ozu does not merely participate in this cinematic shift: he anticipates and radicalises it. Time ceases to be the support for action and becomes, in itself, the content of the image. An empty corridor, the pause between two lines, the silence between two decisions. Everything in Ozu is organised according to a logic of pure affect and duration. The interval between events becomes more significant than the events themselves. The ellipsis, far from concealing information, becomes a producer of thought: it is in what is not shown that meaning is generated. In the ellipsis, narrative suspends its continuous movement, and in that suspension, time itself asserts itself as thought.

In Ozu, cinematic thought manifests itself autonomously from narrative: it expresses itself in rhythm, in gesture, in light. Each shot already contains an idea; the form is in itself an experience of time. Moreover, in Ozu, to think is to think in time. Cinema thinks with the shot, not about the shot.

6. Conclusions: Cinema as a Philosophical Form of Impermanence

In the end, there is no revelation. In An Autumn Afternoon, cinema does not conclude; it dissolves. Ozu offers neither an answer to finitude nor a narrative resolution to the viewer. What he proposes is an ethics of parting expressed through form itself: a cinema that thinks through duration, repetition, and silence. A cinema that does not say goodbye but allows time to carry things away, slowly, carefully, attentively.

Throughout this article, I have sought to consider Ozu’s final film as a testament film that refuses to conform to the traditional model. Rather than a gesture of consecration or closure, what we encounter is a final variation on the same themes, family, time, separation, continuity, pushed to the limit of erasure. Ozu does not summarise his oeuvre; he repeats it with even greater restraint, as though whispering the same poem one last time.

The relationship with death, one’s own and that of others, is not presented as tragedy, but as an ontological condition of living. As in Heidegger, finitude is not the end but the horizon. As in Cavell, recognition of the other, whether child, parent, or spectator, only truly occurs when we accept that nothing is guaranteed, that everything can be lost, and that, even so, we continue.

In this sense, the film belongs to the lineage of great cinemas of impermanence. Yet it does so in a singular way: by embodying impermanence and incorporating the very idea of death as a progressive dissolution within gestures that repeat. Disappearance, here, is not located within form; form itself disappears, gently, without rupture.

Ozu’s testament is thus less a monument and more a cadence. What truly endures is a rhythm that discreetly resonates through time, the echo of something that does not impose itself, but persists. The legacy of this cinema resides above all in what it teaches us to see: intervals, voids, suspended gestures.

Ozu’s true testament, therefore, is the possibility of inhabiting a cadence, a rhythm that resonates within a form that slowly continues. It is perhaps in this cadence that cinema becomes not merely an art but a philosophy, insofar as it becomes a way of thinking about life through the way life unfolds.

If the conclusion of An Autumn Afternoon seems to leave nothing closed, it is because, for Ozu, death may never have truly been an end. The film proposes a vision of death as the passing on of a legacy: a moment of transition in which life transforms and continues through other bodies, gestures, and rhythms. Formal, thematic, and existential repetition is not redundancy but a mode of inscribing a continuity without a fixed subject, much like in ritual.

In this sense, Ozu’s testament dissolves into a current where everything returns under another light, from another angle, within another silence. Death, in the end, seems to be nothing more than the gesture of passing on to the next shot.