Things however changed when I began working on the script of my dialogue film. I realized I had a film on my hands where the characters had very little physical action – they just sat in one place and talked. To see how the great masters made cinema out of precisely such situations, I referred to two films. One was Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage. The other: Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon.
A few minutes into An Autumn Afternoon, the title of a book on Ozu that I’d never read, just heard about, came to mind – Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. I had the feeling I was watching poetry. This was not the free verse of Tarkowsky, but something more structured – like a sonnet (or as I was to discover later, a haiku). There and then, I resolved to see more of his work. I resolved to read all I could about him. I resolved to write this dissertation on him.
Now, knowing a lot more about Ozu than I did then, I find there are a lot of similarities in his style of film-making and mine (though for completely different reasons). His pet subject was the Japanese family and its dissolution; mine is turning out to be the Parsi family and its dissolution. He rarely moved the camera during a shot, especially in his later years; my initial inclinations have been to do the same. He used music very sparingly; I tend to such minimalism too. I am writing this dissertation, therefore, not as a student of film studies, but as a student film-maker. By learning more about Ozu, I am hoping to learn more about myself.
Ozu filming The Flavour Of Green Tea Over Rice
