FILM SERIES: FLOATING CLOUDS... THE CINEMA OF NARUSE MIKIO

The complete line-up for the forty-five-film retrospective Floating Clouds… The Cinema of Naruse Mikio is on the Harvard Film Archive website now, and tickets are available. Please note that not all of the HFA’s forthcoming series are online yet.

Though still underrated and underappreciated for his restrained formalism, the influence of Naruse Mikio (1905-1969) endures today, teaching generations of filmmakers how to temporally and spatially imagine the grandeur of freedom on a microcosmic scale. One can find traces of Naruse in Pedro Costa's stately compositions, Hirokazu Kore-eda's chosen and blended families, Wong Kar-wai's webs of protracted longing, Park Chan-wook's pairing of love and justice as illicit twin desires, and Martin Scorsese's flashbacks and flash-forwards. Across nearly ninety films, he magnified the movements within human relationships—between parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers, in-laws, half-siblings and step-siblings—as intimate responses to historical change.

Co-organized by the Japan Foundation in New York, Floating Clouds… The Cinema of Naruse Mikio is part of a special North American celebration of Naruse's prolific career led by the HFA, BAMPFA, Metrograph and the Japan Society, NY, and continuing with screenings at the TIFF Cinematheque and Vancouver Cinematheque. The HFA's extensive retrospective features forty-five film prints—many rare, some making their New England premiere, and all but one on 35mm—from the Japan Foundation and National Film Archive of Japan. Several new prints of Naruse's silents were made for the Harvard Film Archive by Shochiku and Imagica. Amid a reinvigorated battle between tradition and modernity, the lasting power of Naruse's cinema derives from the dignity he grants to those whose resistance begins with small, thankless changes in thinking.

The son of an embroiderer whose parents died young, Naruse dropped out of elementary school, briefly worked as a mechanic and entered the studio system as a Shochiku prop man. One year after Ozu’s first film, he debuted as a director with the lost silent Mr. and Mrs. Swordplay (1930), yet low pay and repeated comparisons to Ozu Yasujiro by Shochiku head Kido Shiro contributed to Naruse's exit from Shochiku and ironically, his newfound success at Toho with the talkie Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935)—winner of the Kinema Junpo prize and one of the first Japanese films to receive theatrical distribution in the United States.

The talkies that followed varied in tone and genre, but were unified by a consistent interest in the institutions of marriage and family. Naruse’s ability to never exceed a budget or fall behind schedule granted him access to better scripts, mostly literary adaptations. These newfound privileges were stifled by wartime bowdlerization, contributing to many a title Naruse found lacking; however, he still managed to direct films he considered among his favorites, such as The Whole Family Works (1939)—a precursor to the later films Lightning (1952) and Summer Clouds (1958)—and The Traveling Actors (1940). 

After World War II, Naruse emerged as a master dramaturgist with Ginza Cosmetics (1951) and Repast (1951). The first of six adaptations of works by the feminist author Hayashi Fumiko, Repast ignited critical reappraisal. Returning to the lucid lower-middle class women of his early films, Naruse focused on the changing shape of love and work after the war—two domains where one might find meagre compensation for the failures of the state. Though he was inspired by the grammar of Soviet montage and Hitchcockian suspense, he was most fluent in the language of the shoshimin eiga (films centered around the everyday lives of middle- and working-class families) and the woman's picture. Within these parameters, he commanded a balance between the grounding realism of the former and the melodramatic forces of the latter, creating a world wherein a sudden burst into tears naturally coincides with the sky weeping rain.

As Japan's loss in World War II gave way to a period of reform and industrialization, Naruse's films also changed. Entering the 1960s with less creative control and critical attention, he dove deeper into the matter of women's economic independence and confronted a misogynistic system of bills and debts, layoffs, inheritances and business partnerships with an astounding degree of specificity. But despite their class-conscious cynicism, the late films are also exceedingly existential. The profound sense of disenchantment felt throughout his final film Scattered Clouds (1967) is driven by a strikingly modern idea: that the solitude of independence invokes both immeasurable pleasure and devastating grief because it marks the death of the past. 

To work with Naruse was an especially rewarding experience for female actors, including Chiba Sachiko, Yamada Isuzu and Hosokawa Chikako of the early talkies; Tanaka Kinuyo, Sugimura Haruko, Hara Setsuko of the mid-period films; and Aratama Michiyo and Tsukasa Yoko, who anchored his final films. Most important of these was Takamine Hideko, the child actress-turned-megastar who appeared in seventeen of Naruse's films and two of his most renowned: Floating Clouds (1955) and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960). Unlike Mizoguchi Kenji, who dictated even the direction of his actors' pupils, the notoriously taciturn Naruse gave his actors almost no feedback, which opened up an expanse of possibility in performance.

Because Naruse placed more narrative importance on the machinations of the inner life than on external circumstance, his films challenged actresses to embody the private act of thinking. Though hardly docile, the typical Naruse heroine is a thinker who observes more than she speaks—in Lightning, for instance, he and Takamine replaced lines with gestures. She thinks about life and the lives of others, and she feels the pressure of being thought about. As the protagonist of Sudden Rain (1956) exclaims to her judgmental neighbors: "I was criticized for not greeting others. That's just because I was thinking." And when empty promises—whether by an empire or a pathetic man—reveal disappointing truths, she finds strength by refusing self-pity. Though she may not immediately quit her job or leave her husband, through the repetition of her routine Naruse uncovers a slight but significant shift in perspective.

In these tales of willful contemplation, much of what might be considered markers of style are folded into scenes rather than sequences. Characters are separated by wide chasms filled with projections, dreams and desires. Percussive cuts to motifs (a hole in an old shoe, a view from a window, a person's back, fireworks, thunder) generate a gentle lilt, or what Kurosawa Akira—who was the AD on Avalanche (1937)—described as a "flow [so] magnificent that the splices are invisible."  This flow elegantly orients itself around the friction between one or two people, sitting in a room. At the end of his career as a studio filmmaker dissatisfied with many of his films, Naruse remained curious about the complexities of such seemingly simple encounters. Before his death to colon cancer in 1969, he told Takamine he "wanted to make a movie with no sets at all [...] just two actors in front of a white curtain backdrop."

Like the humidity of a summer storm, Naruse’s subtle films are vaporous yet full with the suggestion of futurity. Despite being labelled a pessimist, his depictions of forlorn women spoke to his belief in an unalienable right to ambivalence as an expression of autonomy and a stubborn entitlement to a future that does not yet exist. What has been described as the hopeless vision of a director who famously believed "the world betrays us" should instead be understood as the celebration of a resilient mind capable of thinking differently than it did yesterday, even if yesterday looks a lot like today. – Kelley Dong

Curated by Haden Guest. Film descriptions by Kelley Dong, Carson Lund, Nace Zavrl, Brittany Gravely and Chris Fujiwara.

Co-presented by the Japan Foundation.

For tickets & detailed information, please click here.

Special thanks: Shigehisa Kuriyama, Andrew Gordon, Gavin Whitelaw, Stacie Matsumoto – Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard; Akinaru Rokkaku and Hiroyuki Kojima—Japan Foundation, NY.

Harvard Film Archive FLOATING CLOUDS... THE CINEMA OF NARUSE MIKIO special film screenings co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute and the Japan Foundation