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During the Asia–Pacific War (December 1941 to September 1945), Naruse made six films, three of which deal with aspects of traditional Japanese arts and culture: samurai combatants, yose vaudevillians and noh theater actors. The Song Lantern was not Naruse’s favorite endeavor (“the Department of the Interior was very intrusive,” he later recalled of wartime censorship efforts) yet the film boasts a remarkably otherworldly, haunting atmosphere—thanks in no small part to Kyoka Izumi, from whose eponymous supernatural novella the screenplay was adapted. The closest that Naruse ever comes to the existential moodiness of Mizoguchi and the overplayed theatricality of Sternberg, the Meiji-era setting opens with a spectacular nohgaku set piece before evolving into a high-strung melodrama of obedience, authority and filial allegiance, complete with one of Naruse’s rare employments of split-screen composition and numerous tropes of occult, uncanny horror. – Nace Zavrl

Directed by Naruse Mikio.
With Hanayagi Shotaro, Yanagi Eijiro, Oya Ichijiro.
Japan, 1943, 35mm, black & white, 93 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

Harvard Film Archive Floating Clouds... The Cinema of Naruse Mikio film series co-presented by the Japan Foundation and co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute