Festivals: call for entries

Kyrgyz Serial: The contest of scripts (2024_kg)
 
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Call for entries: The VI Film Forum Of Women Film Directors Of Kyrgyzstan

 

Deadline: 01.03.2024

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XI Forum of the young cinema Umut-2024

 

Dates & place: 28.03-01.04.24, 2024, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Organizer: Cinema Department with support: Interstate humanitarian cooperation fund
Participants: Ex-Soviet countries
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Tuesday, 28 February 2012 00:00

Ozu Sensei

 

(Mumbai's impressions)

 

Ozu Sensei (nearest word in Japanese to Guru) by Arun Knopkar

Yasujiro Ozu was born on the 12th of December 1903. He passed away, after exactly sixty years, on the 12th of December 1963. In these sixty years, there were two world wars. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed using nuclear weapons against a civilian population. Empires were dissolved. Hitler was defeated. Stalin had died and the Khrushchev had revealed the truth behind the Stalin myth. Yuri Gagarin had circled the earth on the 12 April 1961 and the Viet Nam war was raging.

Life in Japan had undergone a world of transformation. From a proud Asian nation that zealously guarded its customs, arts and culture, it was a vanquished nation. Its youth was turning to the West for new ways of life. Cinema had also gone through immense changes: technological, ethical and aesthetic. Neo-realism was born and the energy of its wave was transferred to the French New Wave.
 
Underneath all these changes, these were the unchanging rhythms of life. Men and women were born, they suffered, experienced joys of life and camaraderie. As they aged, they found these ties disintegrating slowly and experienced the essential loneliness of life. Then with death, they passed into shunya or nothing of the Buddhist view of life.
The Old Testament had said: One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
 
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose…
 
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
 
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall he$ and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
(Ecclesiastes, 1:4)
 
Ozu was one of the rare, or perhaps the only artist of the twentieth century, who, from film to film, expressed ever anew, what was not new and can never be new: the eternal rhythm of life coming into existence, floating over the waves of time, being joyously rocked by them and then shattered by them, to finally sink into ananta or shesha, without beginning or end or the everlasting reminder.
 
Ozu made his first film in 1927 and it was a black and white and silent film. As the technical possibilities of the medium increased, sound, colour and complex camera movements came into use; Ozu started decreasing his technical means. He did away with changing the local lenths of his lenses, to work only with a normal 50 mm lens. Thus, he achieved the same consistency of spatial tension, in each shot of each film, bringing it closest to our normal vision. He did away with all changes in camera angles, like top angle, eye-level of a person who issitting on a tatami – as was still the custom in move traditional Japanese homes and public placed like bars.
 
Ozu’s films may appear simple to an uninformed viewer, on account his understated technique. But this apparent simplicity is achieved with meticulous and complex planning at every level of filmmaking, from the script, dialogue to the grading of its colour. While working on the script, he measured the timing of his dialogues in seconds to achieve certain rhythmic patterns and controlled the tonalities during the shoot, to make them musical. The dialogues are often banal in their semantic content and serve as phatic signs.
 
Context-loaded phatic dialogue is a peculiarity of the Japanese language that Ozu used a great deal. So, by using impoverished words, he could concentrate on their rhythms and tonality, almost like a good Indian singer would do in a gazal or thumri.
 
Some of the great directors, who had charismatic personalities, loved showing them off on the sets. The image of a direction with the riding boots and a whip in the hand is one such image. It was a different scene with Ozu. Here is Donald Richie’s eyewitness account of his shooting method.
 
One cut finished, one line of dialogue completed, Ozu began getting ready the next text. The conditions seemed in all respects identical but Ozu would nonetheless reframe each cut Hara had not moved, yet Ozu looking through the viewfinder insisted on a shift of half a millimeter to the right. …
 
Everyone was exhausted. What a way to make a film! There were no congratulations, such as are commonly given to an actor after pulling off a difficult bit of dialogue, none of the air of celebration or dejection that greets the completion of a sequence. There was no exhilaration, no despair no visivle emotion at all. It was carpentry. Yet, when later I saw this sequence in the preview room, I marveled. …
 
Here were scenes of two women talking to no one, reacting to nothing. And yet, up there on the screen one saw life itself, life with its own rhythm, its rarified reality. Ozu’s calculations as to camera angle, camera distance, delivery, timing everything was there, but it was no longer apparent. It had been transformed. What had been a blue-print was now a completed dwelling, lived in.
 
(Pp.13, 14, Japanese Portraits, Donald Richie, Tuttle Publishing, 2006)
 
Most world cinemas, even today, use the shot division pattern standardized by Griffith. Thus pattern, with many variations, consists of an establishing shot, followed by two over-the-shoulder shots, which lead into close-ups and are capped by a re-establishing shot. The grammar of the ‘analytic dramatic’ school, as Andre Bazin called it, used of the imaginary axis the line drawn through the two characters nearest to the camera on different sides. This line allowed the geography of the shot to be established clearly, so that right-left, front-back, up-down were fixed by staying on the same side of the imaginary line or axis. This grammar of continuity helped the spectator to join the shots in his mind to make sense of the action. When the actor spoke or looked at another actor in a close-up, the previous long shot had made it clear who he was speaking to or looking at. Even directors who used great depth of field and long takes with complex mise en scene without cuts (like Wyler, Orson Welles, Erich von Stroheim, Max Ophulus and later Wong Far-Wai and Ho Hsiao-Hsien) have respected the imaginary line.
 
Ozu single-handedly invented a completely different grammar of editing. He established the geography of a place clearly, placed his objects carefully and reduced the visual clutter. He used an invariable camera position, which was the eye-level of a character sitting on a tatami. Then he made his characters look just a little above the lens and straight in the direction of the camera. So, instead of the complementary left-right looks of the analytic dramatic school. Rather than stressing the differences in characters, he was so keen to reduce them to a common look, that sometimes he gave them the same body-orientation.
 
To be continued.
 
By Arun Knopkar

From Mumbai's catalogue,