The Mercury Scene

Found this absurdly verbose note somewhere in the writing books of my script, and it’s kind of annoying to find there is a time when I can make seemingly salient and penetrating observations.

These are a few random notes after watching Autumn Afternoon, the last film of Yasujiro Ozu.

I’ve been meaning to watch Ozu’s films for a while, mainly because Vincent Gallo lauded the loneliness of the final scene – he claimed that after watching all of Ozu’s films it was that last scene in his last film which summed up the entire sensibility of the artist’s work.

I waited almost two hours for that moment and wasn’t disappointed. It’s two shots and it hits you like a tonne of bricks, but to be honest I don’t know if it says more about Gallo’s sensibility and weltanschauung or Ozu’s.

Incidentally for those who have seen Buffalo ‘66 the dinner table scene borrows extensively from Ozu’s camera work - notice the use of illegal cuts.

And this is where I feel like Ozu is the counterpoint or the intaglio of Bergman - they both favour clean compositions, shoot wide shots from low angles (both probably borrowing from John Ford). However where as Bergman shows the disintegration of facades as people devolve into emotional wrecks such as Liv Ulmann’s character in Scenes form a Marriage, Max Von Sydow in Hour of the Wolf, Bibi Anderson’s character in the first half of Persona – in Autumn Afternoon characters such as Michiko always maintain their pleasant façade – leaving their outbursts for off screen, or never out bursting but instead expressing emotion in a solemn, devastated, non violent way.

Then there is the fact that in later Bergman films Sven Nykvist, possibly the greatest camera man who ever lived would do amazing whip-pans and crash zooms – allowing the actors to dictate the movement of a scene, unleashing them from some of the shackles of blocking. However in Ozu’s world characters, like in Barry Lyndon, are almost frozen, even their body language expresses very little – instead of a wild gesticulation you might have the scrunching of a blanket, or the bobbing of a head. But they are still locked onto their marks so as to not force Ozu’s camera to pan, pull out or in any way move. Every frame is locked.