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