While the script for what would become her son’s final picture, An Autumn Afternoon, was being prepared, Yasujiro Ozu’s mother died.

The year was 1962.

Still a bachelor at the age of 59, Ozu had begun his lifelong career at Shochiku Studios in the late Twenties, making capriciously modern comedies about girls and gangsters and children prone to dancing jazzy little jigs when greeting one another, or refusing adulthood altogether to remain forever (to borrow the stage name of Ozu’s favorite child star, Tokkan Kozo) like “a boy who crashes into things.” Ozu stayed so long at Shochiku that those precocious prewar comedies were eventually eclipsed by the string of Fifties “home dramas” with which he capped his career, a series of extraordinary films which match the most domesticated family matters—parents, children, marrying, aging, dying—with the most idiosyncratic of formalist memes.

For every fleeting glimpse of melancholy and evanescent intimation of mono no aware (“resignation to unchangeable things”), in those final features the director remained an eternally precocious artist at heart, busily fussing with editing patterns based on the relative sizes of sake bottles and factory smokestacks in contiguous images, or trying to get away with the elision of some climactic narrative incident that a more “mature” director would consider essential. Even today, non-Japanese audiences continue to find those radical/conservative antinomies in Ozu’s later films altogether astonishing, and rightly so. But Japanese cinema had been willing to accommodate every imaginable sort of aesthetic secret handshake and cryptic clubhouse code since its early childhood, Ozu included—even if his notorious refusal to adopt such Western commonplaces as color, or the matching of pictures with sound, was as much an act of stylish, if entirely boyish, resistance as the vow of silence taken by the pint-sized brothers in I Was Born, But… and Good Morning.

In so many ways, Ozu and Shochiku—which celebrates its 110th anniversary this year—were made for each other. An entertainment combine that prided itself as first and foremost a director’s studio, Shochiku had made the integration of antithetical approaches to filmmaking a company policy ever since the foundation of its Kamata studio and cinematic training school in 1924. The house specialty—a type of social realism called shomen-geki (tales of the underclass)—welcomed Stanislavski’s Method, Chaplin’s tearjerk antics, Griffith’s complex narrative cross-hatchings, and the cobwebs of Caligari’s expressionist cabinetry. There had to be parameters within which all that absorption of alien influence could function properly, however, and it fell to Shochiku’s young studio head, Shiro Kido—who would become Ozu’s lifelong supporter—to lay down the law. Kido’s ambitious plans included a Shochiku-specific formal approach to cinematic storytelling that valued the shot-by-shot construction of narrative favored by American filmmakers, and discouraged long-take, sequence-centered shooting as smacking too much of the fixed-perspective stasis and behavioral codes of kabuki and shimpa stage. He also called for a content-based value system. “We at Shochiku prefer to look at life in a warm and hopeful way,” Kido sermonized to both his audiences and his stable of young directors, which included formative masters like Heinosuke Gosho and Yasujiro Shimazu, further stipulating that “to inspire despair in our viewers would be unforgivable. The bottom line is that the basis of film must be salvation.”

And though “warm and hopeful” remained Kido’s watch-words, even movies about hookers and hoodlums were okay, as long as debts to society were properly paid and righteous paths recovered by the final fade. Hiroshi Shimizu made the most of such opportunities in his astonishing Japanese Girls at the Harbor (31), in which a Catholic schoolgirl pumps a few pistol rounds into the sorority sister she catches seducing her boyfriend in the campus chapel, serves time in prison, and ends up as a streetwalker in a geisha get-up going nowhere but down. Shimizu complied with a suitably Kido-styled happy ending, though he was clearly more interested in the moments preceding those pistol shots—when, in a hair-raising series of close, closer, CLOSE-UP! jump cuts, the girl’s seething visage lunges out of the darkness like some shadow-dwelling wraith from a long-forgotten prequel to The Ring.