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Yasujiro Ozu - An Appreciation
Yasujiro Ozu - An Appreciation
by Kaevan Umrigar
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.
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.
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.’
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.