A tracking shot in Early Summer (Ozu): we pass down an empty corridor after Setsuko Hara has left it; then we cut to the next shot in which the camera tracks along the empty audience stalls at the play theatre (recalling the aged Uncle who sat here and witnessed a performance:- or, to put it another way: we recall the aged Uncle whose life has almost run its course; who has witnessed the full length of life's performance). This track recalls the Kenko maxim: time does not surprise us from in front, it is ever pressing from behind, hastening us toward death. [One is reminded of the graceful tracking shots in the films of Resnais: e.g. La chant de la Styrene, Last Year at Marienbad, Tout la memoire du Monde,etc. But the tracking shots of Resnais embody a more rhythmic, musical significance rather than the symbolic, existential weight present in the tracking shot in Ozu mentioned above.] There is an symbolic echo, perhaps, of this tracking shot later in the family portrait scene where the camera becomes the inexorable eye of time and history: a strange mute entity who is able only to move forward on rails or remain planted in one place and yet forces the filmmaker into subjection.