CAREER exhibiting a mastery of Western d&coupage (epitomized in That Night's Wife), a series of trials for future masterworks, and a phase of mature achievement (from Woman of Tokyo to The Only Son). There follow, in Burch's opinion, the 'plateau/peak' of Toda Family and There Was a Father (1942), and then, after a brief postwar hiatus, an immediate decline from 1949 onward. Trying to define stylistic phases confronts us squarely with the overall problem of divergent criteria for period units. Everything depends on what we want to measure. We ought not to expect that changes in, say, camera position will coincide with a new approach to staging or editing. Although Ozu's camera was placed quite low from early in his career, I Was Born, But... does seem to mark the earliest surviving employment of his characteristically low height. But I Was Born, But... does not exploit intermediate cutaway spaces as fully as does Walk Cheerfully or That Night's Wife, both made two years earlier. And none of these films offers as vivid examples of the graphic match as does The Lady and the Beard or even Days of Youth, both made still earlier in Ozu's career. Similarly, if quantitative features of decoupage were our interest, we could break Ozu's career into yet other stages. Appendix A shows that Ozu's surviving silent films display a rough uniformity of average shot length (between four and six seconds). With his first sound feature, The Only Son, the ASL doubles to nine seconds and steadily increases across the next three films. In the years 1947-57, the ASL drops back to around eight to ten seconds. In the final phase, Ozu's ASL remains eerily uniform at around seven seconds. (This trend starts with his first color film, Equinox Flower, as if this new luxury demanded stringency on another front.) Needless to say, such figures become most meaningful with respect to d&coupage norms in the Japanese cinema as a whole. We can, I think, point to milestones in the style's development - Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But..., Woman of Tokyo, The Only Son, What Did the Lady Forget?, Toda Family,A Hen in the Wind, Late Spring, Equinox Flower- but often on the basis of rather different stylistic features. Part Two of this book will consider stylistic changes across Ozu's career without seeking to create a rigid master scheme. Since Ozu seemed to regard each film as an occasion to recombine elements which he or someone else had already introduced, we ought to expect neither linear evolution nor simple periodization. The vicissitudes of Ozu's output demonstrate the extent to which it, like his persona as filmmaker and as Japanese, came to embody a set of values. His career thus constitutes a social construct of great significance. Early on, he could have taken many directions, but critics and his studio steered him away from farce and sentimental romance toward comedy and home dramas. He was rewarded for films which sustained the mildly critical humanism of the shoshimin-geki genre. After the war, his collaboration with Noda was applauded by middle-aged critics for its respect for Japanese tradition. But these films of the 1950s paved the way for a reaction. Directors like Oshima and Imamura called for a rude cinema which protested against not only their elders' formal elegance but the definition of 'Japaneseness' inherent in it. Ozu came to be identified with an arid rigor and a serenity that was oblivious to the Japan of the Cold War, resurgent capitalism, and the Security Treaty. For the 15