Into this milieu came Ozu, a passionate cinephile and an admirer of American movies. He was in a sense the ideal Shochiku director, gifted equally in hilarious comedy and sharp-edged pathos. He gravitated at first to ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense), on display in college comedies like I Flunked, But . . . (1930) and urban romances like The Lady and the Beard (1931). Yet even these near-slapstick outings have a curious rhythm: They tend to start silly and end sober. In Days of Youth (1929), the earliest Ozu film to survive intact, the first half shows the antics of a pair of college boys trying to woo a young woman on the ski slopes. Why not? She has flirted with both and knit socks for one (though she promised them to the other). But when they learn that she is engaged to a fellow student, they’re plunged into a funk, and the film’s mood shifts to something far more pitiful. The boys return to Tokyo morose, freezing in their apartment and facing failed grades on their exams. They cheer up only when they resume their woman-hunting ways.

Tokyo Chorus (1931) traces a more nuanced modulation, moving from acute social comedy to piercing sadness. After a remarkably scatological sequence in a company washroom, where the clerks retreat to count their bonuses, a young man sticks up for an older employee and winds up getting fired. Without telling his family, he takes a job working for his middleschool drillmaster, who has opened a restaurant. The men must confront the reality of the new Japan: teachers discharged, principle beaten down by the demands of authority, the shame of being a father who cannot provide for his family. Through the good offices of the instructor he once mocked, our hero finds a teaching job in a remote town, and a chorus of his schoolmates wishes him well. Forced optimism? The happy ending is undercut by the reunion song, which asks when these friends will ever see one another again.

The bittersweet flavor beloved by Japanese audiences and institutionalized by Kido allowed Ozu’s talents full play. Several of his early masterpieces are pathetic through and through—Woman of Tokyo (1933) most obviously—but the great majority enlivened the studio formula through a delicate play of tonal shifts between comedy and poignancy. In The Only Son (1936), one of the saddest films Ozu ever made, the citified son takes his mother to the movies. “This is the talkie,” he explains. She nods apprehensively and falls asleep. The Lubitschian social comedy of What Did the Lady Forget? (1937) swerves into melancholy when our sophisticated moga (modern girl) pauses at a window, longing to stay in Tokyo and anticipating the nostalgia she will feel at home. “Why does a hand have five fingers?” asks the son in Passing Fancy (1933), and to his baffled father, Kihachi, he answers, “If there were only four, they wouldn’t fit into a glove.” The nansensu gag points up Kihachi’s slow-wittedness and becomes part of a hand motif winding through the movie. But the humor becomes something else at the climax. Kihachi has run off from his son. On board a boat carrying day laborers, he recalls the riddle, and his despondency quickly gives way to a determined grin. He suddenly leaps into the water. Floating between cypresses reminds him of another gag his son has told, and the film ends with him starting to swim home, remarking cheerfully, “Very funny.”

Attending to the early films allows us to correct the oversimplified characterizations of Ozu’s style as well. Always the same camera position? No, the setups vary constantly, in response to quasi-geometrical principles. No camera movements? The camera tracks or pans in every Ozu film up to Equinox Flower (1958). (After this, his first color film, he gave up camera movement forever, as if adding a new dimension of expression required him to delete an old one.) Simple cutting? Far from it; he elaborates the editing experiments of his contemporaries in extraordinary ways.

Ozu created the most rigorous style the popular cinema has yet known out of a personalized variant of American continuity principles. He developed his own system of establishing shots, reverse angles, and cutaways. From the start he was treating dramatic space as a circular arena, planting his camera alongside or in between his players and obliging their eye lines to cross—all the better to generate astonishing graphic similarities between shots. Many of his contemporaries worked on foregrounding the picture plane; even the chambara exploited rapid wipes and burst its swordfighters through paper walls, as if they were crashing through the movie screen. In cutting dialogue scenes, Ozu went still further, placing the characters’ heads and bodies in exact alignment from shot to shot, the better to highlight minute differences. An outré example occurs in Passing Fancy when Jiro tells Harue he loves her; the shots sacrifice centering for a wonderful sense of two figures in perfect coordination [see illustrations top right].