In a cemetery in Kamakura, Japan, sits a gravestone with no name, only the single character Mu, meaning nothingness. It belongs to Yasujiro Ozu, whose Tokyo Story was voted the greatest film of all time in a 2012 poll of directors. This episode traces the contradictions of his life from 1903 to 1963: a merchant's son who survived meningitis at age three thanks to his mother's nursing, a chronic class-skipper who fell for Hollywood epics like Civilization in 1917, a student expelled from his dormitory for a love letter to a younger male student, and a failed exam-taker who joined the Shochiku Film Company in 1923 against his father's wishes and won a director's chair in 1927 after punching a co-worker in the cafeteria line and pitching a screenplay to the boss.

We break down the rigid visual language he built: the locked-down camera, the tat ...