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Behind the scenes of a finished work of film are hidden the vast expenditures of time and labor by many different people. This begins with the first stages of musing and speculating about how the film will be put together, goes along with the stage of fitting together the visual elements and the dialogue of the film, and follows through all of the research, decision-making, and preparations for the film, all the failures and rash trial-and-error efforts, until the film itself is finally ready to show. Over this span of time, no doubt supportive friendship and affection comes to bind the staff together, as well as the occasional outbreak of petty jealousy or antagonism. The images that we take in visually, the sounds that vibrate in our ears, over the course of an hour-and-a-half, or perhaps two hours, are only the materializations of the merest part of the passions and labors that were poured into the making of the film. However, even such a condensed result was enabled precisely because of these combined efforts. Its own processes of productionムnamely, exhibiting the finished productムrequire that the finished work of film, underwritten by the memory of the labor which brought it into being, be shown, paradoxically, without the traces of many of the very processes of production that enabled it to be made at all.
In fact, in this assemblage of extra-filmic materials, there might exist parts of the production process which were essential to the making of the film, but which are finally not visible in the film itself. This might include, the memory of the labor expended during the pre-production phase of location-hunting, for places and images that ended up not being used, not appearing in the film. We spectators don't even suspect that such materials might exist, but once they are lined up and exhibited next to the finished work of film, the inflections of meaning within the work of film itself become all the richer and all the more loaded, in the context of the juxtaposition. The fact that so many of these materials from the collection of Yuharu Atsuta, testimony to the traces of the vast labor diffused in the "extra-filmic" parts of the production process, are now being curated and exhibited in the form of a museum exhibition and a set of digital resources by The University Museum, The University of Tokyo, and the Department of Culture and Representation, thus making one of the cultural legacies we have inherited in Japan accessible as common intellectual property to people anywhere with an interest in Ozu and his works, is truly an occasion to celebrate.
As the medium of film is considered one of the most important mediums for representing twentieth-century culture, there is no doubt it will continue to be the object of serious research in the field of cultural history. However, needless to say, in order to conduct this kind of serious academic research, nothing is more important than the possibility of continued access to the film-works themselves, on top of the collection and preservation (archiving?) of extra-filmic materials, and their continued availability to the public. Having access to these immensely valuable materials on OZU Yasujiro and his works, presented in a digitized form over the 'net, may be of invaluable help to people researching or specializing in film aesthetics, history or theory in far-flung places all over the world.
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