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Feature

Published

11 February 2007

Mikio Naruse - a Modern Classic

By Eija Niskanen

Although Mikio Naruse is counted amongst the great Japanese classical masters of cinema, alongside with Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu, his reputation has only recently reached the West. This is largely due to the lack of availability of his films, a situation now getting better. He did not win any international film festival prizes during his lifetime. Also, critical evaluation of his films within academic circles has never been big. It is actually curious that Japanese cinema is always taught by centering on the three names mentioned above, and throwing in Oshima to highlight the new wave and Kitano as an example of the current cinema. So a re-evaluation of Naruse as one of the masters of Japanese cinema is a welcome addition to the canon.

The invisibility of Naruse might also be due to his style. He was not so elaborate as Kurosawa, and neither did he develop a highly distinctive personal bookmark style, as did Mizoguchi with his long takes or Ozu with his parametric treatment of space. Naruse's style is calmer, simpler and "easier", but it hides underneath it a richly depicted view of human relations, especially those within or resembling domestic situations. The National Film Center of Modern Art Museum in Japan has screened a large Naruse series already a couple of times in this decade, and, following the interest, Japanese bookshops feature a number of new books on the director. In the West, Naruse retrospectives started with the 1983 Locarno Film Festival. Following, there is also now some Western writing and research on Naruse going on, for example by Ben Singer, Freda Freiberg, Catherine Russell, Audie Bock, Alain Masson, Chris Fujiwara and Alexander Jacoby.

Of interest are the recent screenings of pre-war films, such as The Whole Family Works (Hataraku Ikka ,1939), which reveal a tendency towards realism and narrative experimentation. They certainly widen the image of Naruse as a stylistically "invisible" director, as he experimented both with visual style and with the flashback structure of his films. In his first sound film, Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts (Otome-Gokoro Sannin Kyodai, 1935) Naruse had the chance to experiement with voice-over narration. Thus, alongside our image of Naruse as a mature master of 1950s and 60s, there is another, exciting Naruse to be found in the prewar period. Naruse's prewar films reveal a tendency towards flashier camera work, including tracking in and cutting over the 180 degree line, as opposed to his more invisible postwar style. This more apparent style can be noticed in Morning's a Tree-lined Street (Ashita no Namiki Michi, 1936), a story about two young women who work in a Ginza coffee shop, struggle with their lives and love relationships. Indeed, the characters and themes dear to Naruse are there: bar hostesses and coffee shop waitresses who try to support their families, impossible love, money in relationships.

As the early films already reveal, Naruse worked within the domestic and female-oriented genres, such as shomingeki and domestic melodrama. Already the titles of his films - Mother (Okaasan), Husband and Wife (Fufu) and Older Brother, Younger Sister (Ani Imoto), give a sense about Naruse's interests. Naruse centered on dialogue scenes, within which a web of human relationships and emotions boil under the peaceful surface. The placement of the story was therefore close to Ozu's films, but while Ozu pictures his characters getting on peacefully with their lives despite some disappointment, Naruse's characters seem to deal more actively with their disappointments, and finally end up being more bitter about them. In this sense Naruse's pessimistic view on relationship problems strikes a very modern sensibility, one that we still can identify with. Naruse has been compared to Anton Chekhov on his treatment of human life. If one goes to look for biographical sources, those can be found too: perhaps the numerous women supporting themselves and their children without a husband are a reflection upon Naruse's own childhood of having been raised by his sisters after his parents' death. The protagonist of Mother (1952), who gives up her child for adoption is a typical female character in Naruse's films, as well as the war widow who runs a small shop in Yearning (Midareru).

Lacking in monetarial funds Naruse never received a university education, but took a job as a set construction assistant at the Shochiku studios. After ten years of assistantships - a normal time to directing career during the heyday of studio system - Naruse was allowed to direct slapstick comedies.

Although bitter dramas centering around women and families are the trademark of Naruse, one must not forget his sense of humor. Naruse had an ability to add humorous sides to his characters, for example to the sisters and brothers, fathered by different men in Lightning (Inazuma, 1952).

Naruse also wove the practical topic of money into the relationships he was depicting. For example in Late Chrysanthemum (Bangiku, 1954) the female moneylender goes around trying to collect debts back from the geishas, but falls prey to a greedy man herself. The same theme with money as the basis for relationships continues in Flowing (Nagareru, 1956). Family members are married off for fortune and survival rather than the sake of tradition, for example in Summer Clouds (Iwashigumo, 1958) depicts the changing of family relations as being always tied to economic turns.

Naruse directed for two studios. It has been claimed that Shochiku thought one Ozu was enough, and that this is why Naruse switched to the PCL-studio, which was to later merge into Toho. And it is under Toho's roof he directed his most famous films, but he also diversified to Shintoho and Daiei. Naruse's first Toho film was Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts, based on a Yasunari Kawabata novel. Naruse was to return to Kawabata in 1954 with Sound of the Mountain (Yama no Oto, 1954). Naruse loved literature from his youth on, and was to film numerous novels, many of them from Fumiko Hayashi, Naruse's favorite writer. These include Repast (Meshi, 1951), Lightning, Late Chrysanthemum, the partly autobiographical Lonely Lane (Horoki) and Floating Clouds (Ukigumo, 1955).

The story of Floating Clouds about a woman's struggle in postwar Japan also offers magnificent acting from one of Naruse's regulars, Hideko Takamine, the quintessential Naruse actress with her ability to reflect women's hopes, disappointment, earthly practicality and bitterness. The same bitter fight between one's own hopes and the limits of surrounding reality are brought out wonderfully in Takamine's role as the bar owner, mama-san, in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Onna ga Kaidan wa Agaru Toki , 1960). Another Naruse regular was Haruko Sugimura, who specialized in tougher, middle-aged women's roles, for example as the money lender in Late Chrysanthemum. Setsuko Hara also did many roles in Naruse's films.

The stage is often a narrow apartment or a restaurant, bar and guest house frequented by average folk. Naruse used to block his actors in such narrow stages that they were hardly able to move. In dialogue scenes Naruse filmed one actor at a time from the beginning of the scene until the end, before he turned his camera to the co-actor. Acting in Naruse films was not always an easy task: many of his regular actors complained that the director never gave them particular instructions on what he wanted from a scene [ 1 ].

In outdoor scenes the bridge is also a crucial set for dialogue scenes, underlining the characters' aim towards something. Naruse's style became more and more simple over time and he did not seem to have any need to highlight his message with visual means. In his last films the camera hardly moves at all. This simplicity, however, was created through a refined system of filming: Masai Tamai, Naruse's regular cameraman, has told how Naruse wanted the outdoor scenes to be filmed so that one actor moves and looks over his/her shoulder at another actor, who then moves. The takes were done with a non-moving camera, but this filming style created a flow in the scenes. Akira Kurosawa, who briefly worked as an assistant to Naruse in the 1930s, has analyzed that Naruse's way to pile short takes on top of each other gives an impression of one long take [ 2 ].

Although a central director of the Classic period, there is something very modern about Naruse's characters and stories. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the recent interest in his films. Watching a Naruse film is not about examining "how they used to do films". It is about getting involved in stories that still strike a chord with us.

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