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 ORGANIZED
BY CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIOIN ASSOCIATION WITH THE JAPAN FOUNDATION  |
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Perhaps, at last,
Mikio Naruse’s time has come.
A multiple award-winner and frequent box office champ in Japan, a titan
among French cinéastes, and the first Japanese director to be
reviewed in The New York Times (14 years before Rashomon),
Naruse (1905-1969) still remains virtually unknown in this country, despite
championing by important critics like Susan Sontag, Phillip Lopate, Audie
Bock and Donald Richie. But then Naruse has never been easily categorized.
Though superficially compared stylistically to Ozu, and specializing
in the problems of women like Mizoguchi, Naruse’s characters — curiously — most
resemble those of Akira Kurosawa, his ardent advocate and former assistant,
despite their total divergence in world view. Though eschewing the jidai-geki (period
picture) for the shomin-geki (movies about the poor and lower-middle
classes) — people
constrained by the bonds of family, class and money — Naruse, like
Kurosawa, created characters who refused to see themselves as victims,
relentlessly pursuing happiness despite its seeming impossibility and,
lashing out against all boundaries, go down with all guns blazing. (Naruse’s
Mifune was the legendary actress Hideko Takamine, who in fifty years of
stardom moved from being Japan’s Shirley Temple to its Katharine
Hepburn.) Long stymied by rights issues and a lack of subtitled prints,
a Naruse retrospective (the last in New York was twenty-one years ago)
is at last possible in his centennial year, thanks to the extraordinary
efforts of James Quandt of Cinematheque Ontario, organizer of this multi-city
tour, and The Japan Foundation, which has struck twenty-two new 35mm prints
for this thirty-one film retrospective, an overview of Naruse’s four-decade
career, from silents to the era of color and Scope. |
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CLICK HERE FOR A MENU OF FILMS IN THIS SERIES
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO PHILLIP LOPATE TALKING |
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“[In
the films of Naruse,] a flow of shots that looks calm and ordinary at first
glance reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising
a fast-raging current.”” “Ozu and Mizoguchi’s brilliant
peer.” “Director Mikio Naruse—that “other” great master
of Japanese cinema, patron saint of all things radiant in their celluloid
despair… Film Forum’s 31-film retrospective—flush
with rubbed-raw riches—[is] tantamount to the miracle of resurrection... Rediscovering
Naruse during this extraordinary series is unlikely to mitigate the perpetual
essentiality that we’ll need to rediscover him again, and again.” “DON’T MISS! Sure you know your Ozu from your Kurosawa, but this
fest provides a chance to bone up on Mikio Naruse, Japanese cinema’s
most overlooked great director.” “A list of Japan’s greatest directors—folks like
Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa—should include Mikio Naruse… his
unfussy style and talent for eliciting strong performances from women
put his work on equal footing with that of his more famous peers. Now
might be the time for the director’s rediscovery.” “Repeated visits to Naruse films draws one into a strangely
singular, self-contained world...The effort pays off: if Naruse’s films
are invariably about disappointment, he himself does not disappoint
- no more than does Chekhov, an artist he greatly resembles in stimulating
our appetite for larger and more bitter doses of truth.” Click
here to read Chris Fujiwara on Naruse in this month’s Film
Comment “Naruse’s films celebrate, without extravagance, the
lives of ordinary people struggling for something better than the hand
fate has dealt them. Performed with quiet certainty by superb actors,
shot and edited with a sure and relentless hand, they raise the ordinary
and even the sordid to a quality near sublime.” Senses of Cinema on Mikio Naruse
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Available at Amazonn: |
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OCTOBER 21/22/23/24 FRI/SAT/SUN/MON
“The Japanese director’s magnificent
1960 melodrama. “The last classic of Japanese cinema’s
pre-New Wave golden age.” “Beguilingly poetic, full of natural metaphors
and quiet, almost heroic desperation.” “The supreme triumph of Scope filmmaking.” OCTOBER 25 TUE WIFE
“[Fumiko Hayashi was] probably Japan’s
most distinguished modern woman writer… “The natural rapport between the disconsolate
Naruse and the dead novelist OCTOBER 25 TUE
“Masayuki Mori’s face, full of sharp
angles, has shades of disdain, self-doubt, gentleness and cruelty – a
Japanese James Mason, in a sense.” OCTOBER 26 WED (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION) 
SUDDEN RAIN “A masterpiece in miniature... Naruse’s complex
touches are brilliant.” AND THE APPROACH OF AUTUMN OCTOBER 27 THU DAUGHTERS, WIVES AND A MOTHER OCTOBER 28/29 FRI/SAT “The elegance and indisputable hard punch
of Naruse’s storytelling become immediately clear the moment
the lovers kiss and the director cuts, midclinch, to an almost identical
shot of them kissing in the past, an edit that suggests this is a
passion that transcends even time and space.” “A haunting memory-sequence of Indochina,
lit more brightly than the rest of the film and with a Bolero-like
musical figure behind, depicts the couple’s first sexual attraction… Elegant-looking
even when his character has fallen on hard times, the sardonic
Mori is finally worn down by Takamine’s love… in one
of the most moving endings in Naruse, we sense that a man like him
can only feel love in the form of pity and remorse.” OCTOBER 30/31 SUN/MON 
FLOWING (aka House of Geisha) “A delicate, absorbing chamber work about
the decline of a geisha house. For the last several minutes
the film goes completely without dialogue, alternating shots of the
daughter practicing her sewing machine upstairs, the geisha mother
supervising her samisen pupils, the elderly maid going about her
business … as modern, as contrapuntally abstract, as
Resnais’s Muriel or the finale of Antonioni’s The
Passenger.” “A rare kind of cinema-of-character, comparable
only to the films of Ozu.” NOVEMBER 1 TUE NOVEMBER 2 WED SUMMER CLOUDS “His approach to melodrama ascends to Sirkian heights
of expressiveness.” “A vivid departure for Naruse from his preoccupation with lower-middle
class urban life, NOVEMBER 3 THU (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
A WIFE’S HEART AND HUSBAND AND WIFE “Planned as a sequel to the highly successful Repast,
this film again treats the minute irritations in young married life
that can burgeon into a full-scale break-up. As in Repast, Setsuko
Hara was to have played the wife to Ken Uehara’s husband, but the star’s
illness created the opportunity for Naruse to suggest one of his casting
tours de force: Sugi had never played anything but a sweet young girl
before, but she carries out the disillusioned wife role to perfection.” NOVEMBER 4/5 FRI/SAT “It is something to see Sugimura counting
money, and sticking a wad efficiently into her kimono top. When her
heart has been broken one last time by an old lover asking for money,
she burns his photograph in a scene of chilling finality.” “It moves effortlessly from one small encounter...
to the next to create an immensely moving portrait of anti-heroic
endurance.”  NOVEMBER
6 SUN
GINZA COSMETICS (1951) Kinuyo Tanaka knocks herself out to support
her child by working as a Ginza bar hostess, but then has little time
for the kid himself. Never a mistress for money, she may be finding
a way out in the most curious of coincidences, but . . . A final sequence “explains
the film’s peculiar title, and delivers a quiet blow to the heart” (James
Quandt). NOVEMBER 6/7 SUN/MON 
(1962) Grub Street in Japan, as real-life novelist
Fumiko Hayashi (adapted six times by Naruse) slugs it out with dire
poverty, repeated affairs with losers, crummy day jobs, and snot-nosed
male chauvinist publisher rebuffs. In a “luminous performance” (Variety),
Hideko Takamine embodies the author of some of her and Naruse’s
greatest hits. “In what is probably her greatest performance,
Hideko Takamine even succeeds in making herself look homely, curling
her mouth into a sarcastic grimace as she threads her way through
Tokyo’s literary bohemia, sloughing off insults and condescension
or retaliating when it suits her, obstinately falling in love with
the wrong men.” NOVEMBER 7 MON (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
WIFE! BE LIKE A ROSE! “An acknowledged masterwork.” – Chuck Stephens, The Village Voice. Read full review here “Naruse brings a biting lyricism worthy
of John Ford.” – Chris Fujiwara, Film
Comment. Click
here to read entire article. “A more lighthearted
project than usual for Naruse, touched by the ebullient lyricism
of early sound films. Revolving around the efforts of a happily-in-love
young woman to bring her estranged parents together so that all may
be happy, the film is riveting for its portrayal of the girl’s
mother, a haiku poetess whose self-absored intellectual life poses
a barrier for reconciliation with her laborer ex-husband. The story
line (and the title) may appear anti-feminist; but Naruse’s
sympathy for the strong-minded, independent and charmingly
melancholy poet argues the reverse.” AND NOT BLOOD RELATIONS (1932) Back from Hollywood (!), Yoshiko Okada teams
up with her gangster brother to get back the daughter she abandoned
seven years before, but now must duel the girl’s loving adoptive
mom. Screenplay by Kogo Noda, Ozu’s perennial collaborator. Print
courtesy National Film Center, Tokyo. NOVEMBER 8 TUES (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
TALE OF THE ARCHERY AT THE SANJUSANGENDO (aka Pride and Arrows)
THE SONG LANTERN (aka The Lantern Singer)  NOVEMBER
9 WED
MOTHER
“Naruse’s best known film in Europe, where
it was released shortly after it was made… the Europeans, particularly
the French, led by Georges Sadoul, were avidly searching for a
neo-realist label to put on Japanese films. Mother, with
its street life and economic hardships, buoyed by the persistent
cheerfulness of the child’s point of view, seems to fill the bill
of resembling Italian postwar films about contemporary life.” “One of Naruse’s best films.” NOVEMBER 10 THU “Pop singer Yuzo Kayama, who had been launched
in films through Akira Kurosawa’s 1962 Sanjuro as the
leader of the do-gooder young samurai, manages to carry off
this James Dean-like role of boy who is wild because he isn’t
loved.” NOVEMBER 11/12 FRI/SAT “One of my all-time favorites. I love this picture.” – Naruse. NOVEMBER 13 SUN “An almost perfect realization of Fumiko
Hayashi’s novel.” “Most Naruse families have at least two
loafers and spongers; the family in Lightning is rather
extreme in its slatternly, parasitic behavior – fun to watch,
actually, as three half brothers and sisters (each from a different
father) and their mother leech off one upright job-holding daughter.” REPAST (aka A Married Couple) “The style is classical, unobtrusive....as
compelling as anything by [Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa]. As in
Late Chrysanthemums and Floating
Clouds, Naruse here
creates an ardently materialist world where the social pressure
for money acts like a vise to the head, threatening to break up
Setsuko Hara from her weak husband. Hara, never more lovely, gives
one of her greatest performances here; as in Ozu’s Early
Summer, she hides a forceful yen for freedom behind her polite,
practiced smile. But here she has a greater range of emotions than
I’ve
ever seen from her -- it’s an eye-opening performance. Naruse,
the most unsentimental of the masters, closes the proceedings on
an ironic note.” “The first, and one of the best, of six
Naruse films based on Fumiko Hayashi’s works.” “One of Naruse’s finest works.” SPECIAL FEATURE: A VISIT TO NARUSE'S GRAVE NOVEMBER 14 MON (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
THREE GIRLS WITH MAIDEN HEARTS
“This first adaptation by Naruse of Kawabata’s
writing [also see Sound of the Mountain] bespeaks the energetic
and cheerful atmosphere of the new P.C.L. studios where Naruse moved
in order to be able to make talkies at last.” “A splendid melodrama capturing the rich
texture of urban street life.” – Chris Fujiwara, Film
Comment. Click
here to read entire article. AND STREET WITHOUT END (1934) Hit by a car on her way to meet her fiancé,
a coffee shop waitress falls for the handsome and rich driver. But
when his snooty family looks down on her, she starts to re-examine
her options. Print courtesy National Film Center, Tokyo. SPECIAL FEATURE: A VISIT TO NARUSE'S GRAVE NOVEMBER 15/16 TUE/WED (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
THE WHOLE FAMILY WORKS (aka A Working Family) (1939)
With their combined salaries totaling a lousy 111 yen, there’s
just no wiggle room for the Ishimura family — two parents and
nine children — to allow their most talented to go to electricians’ school.
Individual crushed by the group? Individual sacrificing himself for
the group? Intriguing neorealism, as Japan’s national polity
geared up for war. “While the Japanese aggression into Southeast
Asia was heating up to a full-scale war, Naruse made this family
drama that is really a story about struggling to survive in the Depression,
and it is one of the best films from Japan in this era. … The dialogue
the director wrote has a particularly authentic ring, and
critics of the daty remarked on the excellent performance from Honma
as the harsh, complaining mother (Honma would later be seen
throughout the world as the medium in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon).” AND “Yamada and Hasegawa were two of the biggest
box-office stars of the day, so getting them to work with made Naruse
feel that he was being treated as a top-ranking director by the newly
formed Toho company, even though the project was assigned. As the
militaristic spirit that would culminate in the Pacific War intensified,
the ‘performing artists’ piece’ became
more and more common as a means of avoiding censorship, but
Naruse manages in this film to give the genre remarkable freshness
with his own script and the unusually fine acting he elicits from Hasegawa.” SPECIAL FEATURE: A VISIT TO NARUSE'S GRAVE NOVEMBER 16 WED (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
(1940) Hey, even actors playing the front & back
of a horse have their pride! And when their snooty backer decides
to dump them for the real McCoy, this time it’s war. “One of my personal favorites.” – Naruse. AND APART FROM YOU (1933) At the seaside, a teenager, ashamed that
mom’s a geisha, drifts into delinquency — until befriended
and straightened out by a young geisha apprentice. But where can
their relationship go? Print courtesy National Film Center, Tokyo. “Naruse takes two genres, the long-suffering
mother film and the lovers-who must-separate film, and casts them
in a new world—that of low ranking geisha on the outskirts
of the city—to give them a freshness and authenticity heretofore
unknown. … The sensitivity of his portraits won him
his first recognition from the most prestigious film magazine
in Japan, Kinema Junpo, and its annual ‘Best Ten’ poll.” SPECIAL FEATURE: A VISIT TO NARUSE'S GRAVE NOVEMBER 17 THU
(1967) In Naruse’s final film, it’s
not bad enough that pregnant Yoko Tsukasa (Samurai Rebellion)
is left widowed when pretty boy Yuzo Kayama flattens her husband
with his car. Then, after he’s declared innocent, Kayama keeps
wanting to tell her how he’s sorry. But after a while,
she starts to listen. “Sirk-saturated colors!” “One of Naruse’s strangest and strongest.” |
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WHEN
A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS
OLDER
BROTHER, YOUNGER SISTER
FLOATING
CLOUDS
ANZUKKO 
LATE
CHRYSANTHEMUMS 
YEARNING
SOUND
OF THE MOUNTAIN (aka The Echo)
LIGHTNING
NOVEMBER
13/14 SUN/MON
TSURUHACHI
AND TSURUJIRO
SCATTERED
CLOUDS