Japan Society and Metrograph have teamed up to co-present “Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us,” a rare 30-film retrospective devoted to the “fourth great” master of Japanese cinema. Co-organized with the Japan Foundation, New York, the two-part series, running May 9 to June 29, will offer the first major New York survey of the landmark filmmaker’s work in 20 years, presented in commemoration of the 120th anniversary of his birth and screened 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 unscreened 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 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 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 screen performances —from dimmed pre-war stars like Sachiko Chiba (the lead of Be Like a 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 regulars 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.
“He was the most difficult director I ever worked for. He never said a word. A real nihilist,” once said Tatsuya Nakadai (Samurai Rebellion, Kwaidan), who got his start under Naruse.
Naruse’s mercurial demeanor nonetheless undergirded a quietly egalitarian and progressive sensibility, as he famously forbid his assistants to call him “teacher” and supported 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 Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien to Oscar winner Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
“From the earliest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us,” Naruse once said, adding, “This thought remains with me.”
Opening on May 9th with Naruse’s undisputed masterpiece, Floating Clouds, Japan Society will present “Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part I“ through May 31, culminating in his devastating late work, Yearning (1964). Naruse scholar Catherine Russell, author of The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity, will also present a lecture at Japan Society on May 31. “Part II” opens at Metrograph on June 5 with Naruse’s best-known film, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), and closes on June 29 with his swan song, Scattered Clouds (1967).
