Preface

This dissertation was to have been on Aravindan. The few films I had seen of his oeuvre – Thampu, Kummaty, Esthappan – had charmed me with their deceptive simplicity, and left me with a feeling I found difficult to articulate in words. That, coupled with the paucity of written material on Aravindan and his films, made writing this dissertation a personal challenge I was eager to take on.

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

A note on this dissertation

In a career spanning 36 years, Yasujiro Ozu made 54 films, of which only about 33 survive today. I have access to only four of these – I Was Born, But… (an early silent film), Tokyo Story, Late Autumn and An Autumn Afternoon (all made in his final years when his style was at its most refined). While four films may appear to be too less to base a critical appreciation on a director’s output as prolific as Ozu’s, I am primarily interested in his later films, and the last three films mentioned above are fairly representative of that phase. In fact, I will mainly be basing my observations and analysis on just two films – Late Autumn and An Autumn Afternoon – and referring to I Was Born, But… to illustrate the evolution of his cinematic style.

My knowledge of Ozu, other than his films, is mainly derived from three books – Donald Richie’s Ozu, David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Cinema: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. In these pages, my attempt will be not to regurgitate all that I’ve read in the above books, but instead to present my own perspective on Ozu. My attempt will be to try and find the motivations for Ozu’s unique aesthetic choices. As a film-maker, what interests me is not so much what he did, but why he did what he did.














A still from Late Autumn

'The Cinema of the Familiar'

If you read the books of P. G. Wodehouse, you will find a certain repetitiveness. Not only are the plots similar with the same characters cropping up again and again, but you will begin to recognize words, phrases and even complete sentences making their appearance again and again. And far from being monotonous, these repetitions entertain, their familiarity endears. Such also are the films of Yasujiro Ozu.

If a motif is defined as an element that recurs frequently in a body of work, an Ozu film is replete with them to such an extent that everything is a motif. It begins with the title: An Autumn Afternoon, Early Autumn, Late Autumn, Early Spring, Early Summer, Late Spring… The films too are similar in their subject and theme, focusing mainly on the relationship between old parents and their adult children, especially on the question of marriage. They films are peopled by more or less the same actors playing more or less the same characters: the widowed father, his cronies, the unmarried daughter… Even the shot-taking is familiar. We recognize set-ups, compositions, transitions. The camera remains static and low. Ozu characters mainly talk, and the camera catches every word. Only rarely will there be an off-screen dialogue. And music will begin only when a scene is about to end, playing through the transition and ending when the next scene begins.

But Ozu films weren’t always like this. A lot of his earlier films were campus comedies and gangster films. (Early Ozu was very much influenced by American cinema especially that of Ernst Lubitsch and Harold Lloyd.) The camera moved around (there are a lot of trolley shots in I Was Born, But…) and so did the characters. But somewhere down the line, Ozu began to move away from the American influence and became what many critics call “the most Japanese of directors.”

Donald Ritchie attributes Ozu’s aesthetic choices to the practice of Zen Buddhism, especially to the concepts of mono no aware (acceptance or resignation) and mu (nothingness). David Bordwell differs on this and analyses the films using a parametric approach based on poetics. Both arguments are persuasive. And I don’t know enough about Zen Buddhism or film narrative theory to disagree with either. As Bordwell points out, Ozu can be critiqued as all three – a ‘commercial’ film-maker who was a master storyteller; a profound moralist as an ‘art-cinema’ director; and as a ‘parametric’ director, one of the great experimental film-makers.

Before I embarked on this dissertation, I was curious to find out the motivations for Ozu’s minimalism. What was it that made Ozu refuse camera movements, fades, dissolves – all deemed to be a necessary part of a film-maker’s arsenal. While Ritchie’s explanation of mono no aware and mu does indeed satisfy (after all, the sole inscription on Ozu’s tombstone is mu), and Bordwell admits that detailed awareness of the working of Ozu’s film style eludes our grasp, I think a part of the answer lies in Ozu’s choice of genre and subject.

Tracing the development of both cinematic style and thematic content in Ozu’s films, it seems obvious to me that both have gone hand-in-hand. It is pertinent to note that Ozu’s signature style that dominates his later films is almost absent from his early works. If Ozu had continued to make films in the jidai-geki (period films) like his first film The Sword Of Penitence (which he would have if Shochiku had not closed down their jidai-geki operations in Tokyo), we might have seen a different cinema from Ozu altogether. Somehow, even for Ozu, a swashbuckling samurai film couldn’t have done with a static camera. Similarly, the early Ozu campus comedies and gangster films abounded with energy and demanded camera movements. It was only when Ozu settled down to making films about older people that his unique aesthetic style flowered.

As Bordwell says, with Ozu, we must adopt new viewing strategies, recognizing that film style can claim our attention in its own right. It seems to me that Ozu also is trying to draw our attention to style. A case in point are his compositions. Ozu doesn’t frame situations in the analytic-dramatic context, showing us what is to be seen. Rather he leaves things unseen, making us more aware of what is being shown. Take An Autumn Afternoon. Our introduction to Hirayama is through the corner of his desk, as his secretary walks in through the door and leaves a paper on his desk. He remains off-screen. And even when we get to see him, it is an odd composition – Hirayama is to the left of screen looking on to the camera. What’s more, these compositions keep recurring throughout the film, making style in Ozu’s films just too difficult to ignore.

Another way Ozu draws attention to his style is in the way he shoots a scene. In shooting a conversation, for example, most film-makers would shoot a variety of angles and magnifications and cut between them to relieve the monotony of people talking, in such a way that we are constantly looking at something new and fresh. Ozu does precisely the opposite. He shoots only a limited number of angles, keeps the magnification almost constant and keeps cutting between them. This he does not only in one scene but repeats it for subsequent scenes shot in the same space, be it Hirayama’s office in the factory or the sake bar where he and his cronies meet, so that we begin to recognize individual shots themselves.

Transitions are another stylistic tool Ozu uses. When a scene ends, Ozu transits to the next scene not through fades but through a series of shots that has an oblique connection to the scenes it interconnects. Signs of Tokyo street life just before a bar scene. Smokestacks in anticipation of a scene in Hirayama’s office. Corridors and clotheslines especially are an Ozu favourite. Interestingly, Western critics refer to them as pillow shots from the pillow words in Japanese poetry, while Japanese critics refer to them as curtain shots, from curtains signaling the end of a scene in a proscenium theatre. Typically, music plays through an Ozu transition. Occasionally he will surprise us by continuing the music throughout the next scene.

Ozu also underplayed drama. He eschewed close-ups, a device analytic-dramatic film-makers use to heighten the drama, and never used music to underline the dramatic content of a scene. Ozu’s style was to keep his magnifications almost constant, usually midshots and long shots, and let the drama unfold imperceptibly, as in daily life, giving the impression that almost nothing happens in his films. He also resorted to ellipsis, preferring not to show important dramatic events, but instead have characters casually refer to them in the dialogue.

An Ozu film is then a pattern, not so much in narrative structure, but in visual structure as well. A design in space and time, there are repetitions and variations, similarities and contrasts. Gradually, we begin to recognize the elements and wait in anticipation for their next appearance. Ozu’s cinema then is ‘the cinema of the familiar.’















A still from I Was Born, But...

Conclusion

This is in no way a substantial study of Ozu. Indeed, my resources have been too few, the time at my command too less. Ritchie and Bordwell have spent years studying Ozu and the contexts he operated in. I, in contrast, have only had a couple of films. Like Ozu, though, I have tried to say more with less.

But my study of Ozu is not going to stop here. The thirst to see more, read more, know more is still unquenched. For me, he is an inspirational film-maker, one who encourages me to try something new, something fresh, something different while still remaining true to what I feel and think about cinema and life. My purpose is not to copy his style, but to find my own.














A still from An Autumn Afternoon