Spring in New York

New York’s Japan Society is in the midst of celebrating two of Japanese cinema’s biggest stars in the screening series The Most Beautiful: The War Films of Shirley Yamaguchi and Setsuko Hara. Focusing on films made before, during, and after World War II, the series runs through this coming weekend. Hara, of course, played leading roles in many films by Yasujiro Ozu, and never more poignantly than in his 1949 masterpiece about a father and daughter, Late Spring, which screens this Saturday, April 4, in a 35 mm print. Below, watch a scene that shows how Ozu and Hara—and Chishu Ryu, who plays her father—together created simple images that expressed great depths of emotion.