Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us

Selections from the program will screen at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (July 3 through December 21) and the Harvard Film Archive (July 5 through November 3) before heading up to the Cinematheques in Toronto and Vancouver next year. Separately, Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström have curated Sorrow and Passion: Prewar Mikio Naruse, a program for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 21 through 29) that “focuses on a crucial five-year period in his career (1935–39), when he worked at the newly established P.C.L. film studio and its successor, Toho.”

Chronologically, the New York series, too, begins in 1935, the year Naruse broke through with Wife! Be Like a Rose!, which was named the best Japanese film of that year by the critics at the prestigious journal Kinema Junpo and was one of the first Japanese films to released theatrically in the U.S. Before 1935, Naruse—born in Tokyo in 1905 and raised in poverty by his brother and sister after his parents died young—made silent features for Shochiku, where studio boss Shiro Kido never took much of a liking to the young director’s morose demeanor—and where Naruse’s reputation was already being overshadowed by Ozu’s.

Of the twenty-four silent films Naruse made between 1930 and 1934, only five remain, and completists and the otherwise curious will find them on the Criterion Channel. As Michael Koresky wrote in 2011, these films are “brilliantly shaped and dramatized, marked by not only an electrifying youthful experimentation but also a stunningly mature world-weariness; the young Naruse was already honing his no-nonsense fatalism.”

The oeuvre of around ninety films, sixty-eight of which have survived intact, spans from 1930 to 1967’s Scattered Clouds, completed two years before Naruse died. Of the countless ways one might approach such a daunting body of work, we’re going to recommend three. The first and most succinct is Imogen Sara Smith’s video introduction on the Criterion Channel, which runs just over sixteen minutes and features clips from and Smith’s illuminating comments on a handful of landmark films, including Floating Clouds (1955), which opens the New York retrospective.

“The story is just so bleak and so touching at the same time,” Hou Hsiao-hsien told Kent Jones when discussing Floating Clouds in 2015. “As a director, Naruse has the ability somehow to depict how human emotions in a relationship change because of society, in this case after the Second World War, with the sense of hopelessness. And these characters are portrayed so delicately and movingly on-screen.”

Masayuki Mori and Hideko Takamine star as an ill-fated couple who repeatedly try and fail to end an impossible relationship. Takamine and Naruse made seventeen features together, and “when Takamine moved on-screen,” writes Moeko Fujii, “she made you see how some things can’t be caught in a still: a hesitation, a second wind, a tremor, the fever of a body contemplating whether to stay or to go.”

In When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), the film opening the second part of the New York series, Takamine plays Keiko, a hostess and widow looking to break out of the Tokyo bar where she works and begin a new life on her own terms. “Naruse was one of the greatest craftsmen of all time, a man who always spoke softly about our weaknesses,” says Pedro Costa. “This is one of those rare films that will offer you new mysteries each time you see it.”

Writing about When a Woman Ascends the Stairs in 2007, Phillip Lopate observed that Naruse’s films “are not flashy, but they ring true, they appeal to our demanding intelligence, our sense of the rigor of daily life; and, seen in bulk, they draw us into an astonishingly consistent, psychologically resonant universe. His work, almost all of which is set in the contemporary era, is about people (very often women) of limited means trying to keep their heads above water, escape domestic quagmires, and realize their dreams in a world rife with betrayals and self-betrayals. As he famously said about his characters: ‘If they move even a little they quickly hit the wall.’ That this rather grim vision should prove delightful in the viewing remains an enigma.”

Imogen Sara Smith also discusses Yearning (1964), “a slow-burning, unusually structured film,” as she’s called it in a piece for Reverse Shot. “After an hour of patient, achingly drawn-out build-up, the story takes flight in an unexpected direction.” Naruse “centers women’s lives and their point of view without idealizing them; his women are sometimes confused, self-sabotaging, whiny, or even selfish. His men range from lovelorn nice guys to lazy, entitled jerks, but they are almost always rather ineffectual, and often emotionally stunted—the furthest cry from the archetypal heroic samurai. Men are immature, even infantilized, Naruse seems to suggest, because they are always being waited on, pampered, and propped up by women.”

The second possible route into the oeuvre is Chris Fujiwara’s 2005 piece for Film Comment, a sort of taxonomic breakdown of the filmography by theme: Family, money, love, and so on. “Naruse’s is a strikingly modern cinema,” wrote Fujiwara, adding that “if Mizoguchi’s long-take traveling shots show time in perpetual flow, and if Ozu’s reverse-shot patterns freeze the timeless within time, Naruse’s varied and distinctive rhythms, created by the careful counterposing of look with look and movement with movement, highlight the cruel exhilaration of being jostled in the present moment.”

Kurosawa once remarked that Naruse’s “method consists of building one very brief shot on top of the other, but when you look at them all spliced together in the final film, they give the impression of a single long take. The flow is so magnificent that the splices are invisible. This flow of short shots looks calm and ordinary at first glance then reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath. The sureness of his hand in this was without comparison.”

Filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt would surely agree. In 2016, he revised and presented A Mikio Naruse Companion, the third way into the oeuvre we’ll recommend, the option for those looking to go all in. Sallitt is quick to point out that his collection of notes on every surviving film Naruse directed “cannot hope to supersede” The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity, the 2008 book by Catherine Russell—who, by the way, will deliver a talk at Japan Society on May 31—but Sallitt’s observations and analyses are invaluable.

“It seems to me,” writes Sallitt in his introduction, “that few artists in the history of cinema have displayed as much command of every component of the filmmaking process as Naruse. As a writer of dialogue, a builder of narrative structure, an overseer of performance and behavior, a composer of images, an architect of editing continuity—Naruse can be described in each category as a master.”