Japan Society and Metrograph will co-present Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us, a 30-film retrospective devoted to Naruse, the “fourth great master” of Japanese cinema, from May 9 through June 29. Co-organized with The Japan Foundation, New York, the two-part series will offer the first major New York survey of this signal studio-era filmmaker’s work in 20 years, presented in commemoration of the 120th anniversary of his birth and entirely on rare prints imported from collections and archives in Japan. Notable series highlights include all six of Naruse’s adaptations of celebrated feminist author Fumiko Hayashi’s work (Floating Clouds, Repast, Lightning, Wife, Late Chrysanthemums, A Wanderer’s Notebook), as well as some of Naruse’s rarest films, including the New York premieres of three pre-war gems not presented in previous retrospectives: Morning’s Tree-Lined Street, A Woman’s Sorrows, and Sincerity.
With an oeuvre spanning nearly four decades and comprising 89 films —of which 68 survive— the prodigious Naruse (b. 1905 – d. 1969) began his career at leading Japanese studio Shochiku, but, frustrated by opportunities denied him in favor of the company’s star director Yasujiro Ozu, quit to join the newly formed P.C.L., today famously known as Toho and popularized in the West by Naruse’s one-time assistant Akira Kurosawa, who wrote of his elder: “Mikio Naruse’s style is like a great river with a calm surface, and a raging current in its depths.” A contemporary of both Kenji Mizoguchi and his friend Ozu, Naruse won the admiration of peers and critics alike through his stylistically understated and unflinchingly observed melodramas, particularly those that confronted the experience and social status of women in modern Japan within the shoshimin eiga genre (films of the lower middle class). Beginning with his early sound masterpiece Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935), Naruse maintained a reputation among actresses as a revered and coveted women’s director, who guided many of the era’s iconic thespians to some of their greatest performances from since dimmed pre-war stars like Sachiko Chiba (the aforementioned Rose and Naruse’s one-time wife), Takako Irie (A Woman’s Sorrows), and Isuzu Yamada (Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro) to post-war divas like Ozu and Mizoguchi associates Setsuko Hara (Repast, Sound of the Mountain) and Kinuyo Tanaka (Mother), Haruko Sugimura (Late Chrysanthemums), Yoko Tsukasa (Scattered Clouds), and above all Hideko Takamine, with whom he collaborated 17 times, most notably on four of his Golden Age masterpieces Lightning, Floating Clouds, Flowing and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.
Although so highly esteemed, the notoriously taciturn director would often frustrate his colleagues by his reticence to explain his directorial intentions. Said Tatsuya Nakadai, “He was the most difficult director I ever worked for. He never said a word. A real nihilist.” His saturnine and introverted demeanor nonetheless undergirded a quietly egalitarian and progressive sensibility, forbidding his assistants to call him “teacher” and supporting Tanaka (The Eternal Breasts), who apprenticed with him for two months, as she sought to direct her own films. A privately angry artist, who had struggled to lift his family out of poverty, Naruse left behind a stoic, uncompromising body of work that has continued to resonate with filmmakers from Hou Hsiao-hsien to Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and stands as one of the essential corpora of modern cinema. Its themes of personal dreams blunted and gradually ground down by economic struggle, social inequality, and the failure of traditional norms only seem more relevant as the post-war liberal consensus barrels toward collapse. “From the earliest age I have thought that the world we live in betrays us,” the director said, “this thought remains with me.”
Opening on May 9th with Naruse’s undisputed masterpiece Floating Clouds, Japan Society will present the second John and Miyoko Davey Classic Film Series Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part I through Sunday, May 31st, which culminates with his devastating late work Yearning (1964). In addition, Naruse scholar Catherine Russell, author of The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity will present a lecture at Japan Society on the 31st. Part II opens at Metrograph on Thursday, June 5th with Naruse’s best known film When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) and closes on Sunday, June 29 with his swan song Scattered Clouds (1967).
Tickets for Part I at Japan Society are on sale on now at
https://japansociety.org/film/mikio-naruse-the-world-betrays-us/
Tickets for Part II at Metrograph go on sale on Wednesday, April 30 at
https://metrograph.com/category/mikio-naruse/