Late Spring

When the vase still life enters between Noriko's smile and tears, how does the image make personal change and an unchanging form of time perceptible together without reducing the vase to a symbolic answer?

1. 01
   When the vase enters between Noriko's smile and tears, which change belongs to the character and which duration belongs to time itself?
2. 02
   How does the marriage arrangement retain action-causality while empty rooms, still life, and pauses open it to direct time?

1. 1
   Record

   In the sequence Deleuze singles out, Noriko's face first sustains a smile or composure; the cut moves to the vase in the dim room, then returns to her tearful face. The record should separate the face–vase–face cuts, shot duration, and continuing sound field before assigning the vase a symbolic meaning.

2. 2
   Judge the relation

   The vase neither completes an action for the character nor explains the tears psychologically. As an almost invariant still life occupying the interval, it places the change between the two faces within a continuing temporal relation: the character changes without time becoming the result of an action.

3. 3
   Name the concept last

   This supports the limited claim that time assumes an organizing role—a direct time-image. It does not prove that every still life, empty room, or slow shot is inherently a time-image.

4. 4
   Countertest

   Countertest: if the vase shot merely supplies an ellipsis, spatial orientation, or conventional emotional symbol, while the change is fully explained by action-causality, the name ‘direct time’ should be withdrawn.

Theory coordinate: Cinema 2, ch. 1, pp. 16–17

1. 01
   Cinema 2: The Time-Image

   Authoritative source for the standard translation, translators, ISBN, and publication date.

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Scholarship cited by the scene records: Each study is listed once, with its locators and supported scenes retained together.

1. 01
   The Riddle of the Vase: Ozu Yasujirō’s Late Spring (1949)

   Locator(s): Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (2007), pp. 78–89; point-of-view debate on p. 86

   Cited by scene(s): The vase does not explain Noriko's tears; the cuts give change a temporal form

   Nornes surveys conflicting interpretations and notes that Bordwell and Thompson correct Richie's and Schrader's loose descriptions of point of view. His emphasis on p. 86, however, is that this formal correction still does not explain why the vase is ‘oddly powerful.’ Rejecting the shortcut from ‘she sees the vase’ to a fixed emotional symbol is the atlas's methodological boundary, not Nornes's single conclusion.

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2. 02
   Change, Horizon, and Event in Ozu’s Late Spring (1949)

   Locator(s): Film-Philosophy 20.2–3 (2016), pp. 292–298, DOI 10.3366/film.2016.0016

   Cited by scene(s): The vase does not explain Noriko's tears; the cuts give change a temporal form

   Parks places Deleuze's temporal reading alongside shot legibility, sound continuity, and shot length. He reports four seconds for the first vase shot and nine for the second, whereas this carrier yields 6.089 and 10.260 seconds. Because the article does not identify its transfer or timing method here, the discrepancy is recorded without attributing it conclusively to an edition difference.

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1. Verified complete Bilibili carrier: 晚春 Late Spring _ Banshun (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)bilibili.comOpen film page ↗

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   Edition note: Complete single-part film · 1:47:59.

   Link checked: 2026-08-13

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2. Criterion Collectioncriterion.comOpen film page ↗

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