Tag: IMAGE ANALYSIS

After the conversation about his resigning teachership with Hirata, Horikawa moves to his hometown with his son. This six minutes concerns the beginning of their life-long sojourn. It is often noted that an image of train is the central device of Ozu’s films. Here, this device, shot from on board, frames the conversation between the father and the son. Their exchanges signify their rootlessness, home lost. The father says they are going back to his hometown, but there is no place which they can call their own. The shots of this conversation are conventional cutbacks with the exception of its …

Throughout this six minutes, large part of dark areas are provided by human figures (students and teachers) since they wear dark uniforms or suits, while the brighter areas are from background. The first few seconds of this segment show very prominent power in brighter end of grayscale spectrum. The images show the white mountain ranges beyond, with dark foreground. Then it cuts to the dark figures, the teacher (supposedly Horikawa) and the students marching on the bright ground, with their back toward the audience. Then, the view of the Mount Fuji over the Lake Ashinoko with the dark framing tree …

Only six minutes of the film. But this first six minutes are already filled with wealth of ideas and images. First, the condition of the print. It is quite apparent that the grayscale of the images are “narrowed”. In another words, the dynamic range has been lost. Black has faded, while white lost its luster. I believe that the surviving material is positive 16mm reduction print. I don’t know if the loss of image quality occurred when this reduction/duplication process was performed, or it has degraded over the course of time. The modern image processing technologies can manipulate images quite …