TOWARDS INTRINSIC NORMS tendency to favor opening sequences and Ozu's early work does not adequately cover the range of Ozu's transitional tactics. As for his theoretical premises, he tacitly holds two definitions of 'diegesis': the diegesis as the spatiotemporal framework (setting, objects, etc.) of character action, and the diegesis as the character action itself, conceived as physical movement. At one point Burch claims: 'The essence of the pillow-shot, its extra-diegetic character lay precisely in its stillness,'104 but this makes such a transition extradiegetic only with respect to the moving world of character action. Even if unmoving, such a shot remains firmly within the spatio-temporal world of the fiction. Yet Burch also claims that the pillow-shot is spatially and temporally removed from the scene, on another 'plane of reality'. He asserts that the pillow-shot is 'unsituated... in diegetic space-time.'105 When he must deal with actual examples, Burch becomes entangled in these incompatible assumptions and must distinguish between 'pure' pillow-shots and 'impure' ones which participate in the diegetic world a little bit: 'the shot of the socks, in its second appearance, is diegetically superfluous and is thus partly expelled from the diegesis.'106 Burch may actually be smuggling in a third definition of 'diegesis' here - that of 'story information', according to which any shot that does not carry a specifiable weight of information somehow gets catapulted outside the fictional world altogether. All this will still not prepare the reader for Burch's most curious claim, that Ozu's pillow-shot is empty because 'the shot is outside the film.'107 From the perspective of a historical poetics, Burch's struggles result from an inadequate theory of narration. He analyzes material units (a certain 'kind of shot'), not strategies, systems, and functions. His conception of narrative remains undefined, referring indifferently to causal, temporal, and spatial principles of organization and to parallels and thematic connections. His account does not recognize the distinctions among narrational knowledge, communicativeness, or self-consciousness, or the degrees to which each one can be present. He extracts a string of shots from its context in the film as a whole and then ignores how that series is internally organized. (On pp. 237-9, all these points are discussed further with respect to his most elaborate example, Woman of Tokyo.) As for his borrowing of the literary term 'pillow-word', suffice it to say at this point that Burch does not argue for the analogy. In many respects, Ozu's intermediate spaces also resemble the jo (the extended pillow word) and the kakekotoba, the 'pivot-word' that constitutes a transition between two different clauses. Burch's book proposes a broad argument that Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s represents a direct continuation of Heian aesthetic principles, and the 'pillow-shot' becomes simply a fluffy metaphor to bolster, so to speak, such claims. Not until the next chapter will I be able to give an account of the full functional complexity of Ozu's transitions. But I can make a start by pointing out the degree to which they are 'legible' expansions of two Hollywood devices: 'placing' shots and cutaways. The former consists of one or a few shots that lead in to the locale that will be shown in establishing shots. For instance, before we see an establishing long-shot of a police chiefs office, we might be shown an exterior shot of police headquarters, then a shot of a door labeled 'Chief of Police'. Although such 'placing' shots are considered time-wasting in 105