TOKYO-GA

“If there is such a thing as the sacred treasure of cinema, then it is, for me, the work of the Japanese director, Yasurjiro Ozu. But my journey through Tokyo was no pilgrimage. What interested me was what had changed in Japan since Ozu’s death.” Wim Wenders visits Japan at a time of great upheaval as the country forcefully opens itself up towards the West. In unpretentious images the film shows people playing golf on the rooftops of skyscrapers, unbelievably large amusement arcades, graveyards which young people have appropriated as basketball courts and the endless lust of young Japanese people for Western pop and rock music. Wenders searches in vain for traces of Ozu and so his film, as well as being a snapshot in time of an ultra-modern megacity, also becomes an account of his alienation and a melancholy reminiscence about a master of the past. Daniel Sponsel