TOWARDS INTRINSIC NORMS As a Shochiku director, he worked firmly within the conventions of the 'piecemeal' approach to decoupage. Early in his career, his Life of an Office Worker was praised for its opening montage of the hero's daily routine; brief shots of the family's morning exercises were apparently linked through flowing dissolves.67 Several of Ozu's films, both silent and sound, contain over a thousand shots. Between 1935 and 1942, Mizoguchi's films range from an average shot length of sixteen seconds to ninety seconds, but Ozu's range from nine to fifteen seconds. (See Appendix.) Gosho is sometimes considered the fastest cutter in the classic Japanese cinema, but Ozu is often on par: compare L'Amour (1933: 5 seconds ASL) with Passing Fancy (1933: 4 seconds ASL), or Entotsu no mieru basho (Where Chimneys Are Seen, 1953: 10 seconds ASL) with Tokyo Story (1953: 10.2 seconds ASL). Although Ozu's shots grew somewhat longer when he converted to sound, he disliked long takes, complaining that Shochiku hurried him in making Toda Family so that 'I couldn't avoid shooting lengthy shots.'68 After this film, his takes got steadily shorter; his last six films, despite their impression of tranquil immobility, change shots, on the average, every seven seconds. This director of the image was no less a director of the cut. And, of course, of controlled cuts. Ozu approached editing as he approached the shot, using the conventions of Western cinema as a pool of elements that could be selected and recombined. Whereas most of his Japanese contemporaries cultivated a decorative, eclectic classicism, Ozu limited his editing alternatives to a few simple but profound choices. He accepted the need for the unified sequence, establishing and reestablishing shots, shot/reverse-shot cutting, matches on action, and other devices of continuity editing; but he found his own equivalents for them. He then took the crucial step of making these equivalents more systematic than the originals (and thus achieved an organization seldom found in his contemporaries). He then filtered these equivalents through his idiosyncratic rules of shot composition. Thus 'processed', Ozu's editing procedures are at once 'legible' (being functional equivalents for the procedures of ordinary cinema) and eccentric (being arbitrarily systematic in all manner of details). Ozu granted the validity of Western and Japanese editing conventions as macrostructural organizational principles, but he deflected them through particular 'unreasonable' devices. He revised classical decoupage not by rejecting it but by decentering it. Like any classical filmmaker, Ozu assumes that at the level of editing, a movie consists of sequences of shots, and that each sequence's internal organization conforms to the needs of the syuzhet. In classical filmmaking practice, there are, roughly speaking, three types of sequence: scenes, summaries (such as 'montage sequences'), and transitions. Already we can see Ozu's 'decentering': he uses scenes, does not use summaries, and puts extraordinary emphasis upon transitions. Let us look first at the editing strategies used in constructing dramatic scenes, and take up transitions in the next section. Cast in simple functional outline, the Ozu scene as a syuzhet unit looks like this: 1. Identification of the locale of the action. 48. An Inn in Tokyo 49. Equinox Flower 50. Equinox Flower 89