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30-453: Mikio Naruse ( 成瀬 巳喜男 , Naruse Mikio , 20 August 1905 – 2 July 1969) was a Japanese filmmaker who directed 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967. Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook. He made primarily shōshimin-eiga ("common people drama") films with female protagonists, portrayed by actresses such as Hideko Takamine , Kinuyo Tanaka , and Setsuko Hara . Because of his focus on family drama and

60-561: A Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) tells the story of an aging bar hostess trying to start her own business, A Wanderer's Notebook (1964) follows the life of writer Fumiko Hayashi. His last film was Scattered Clouds (a.k.a. Two in the Shadow , 1967). Two years later, Naruse died of cancer, aged 63. Naruse is known as particularly exemplifying the Japanese concept of " mono no aware ",

90-621: A Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960). She was especially favoured as leading actress by Naruse, appearing in 17 of his films between 1941 and 1966, which are considered "some of her finest performances" (Jasper Sharp), with her "sensitive yet resourceful persona" proving ideal for "Naruse's suffering, persevering heroines" (Alexander Jacoby). Film historian Donald Richie described the characters she portrayed as follows: "Like so many Japanese women then, they wanted more out of life, but couldn’t get it. The war may have been over, women found, but they weren’t better off. They were still fairly unhappy. So

120-437: A conclusion–just like life". While his earlier films employ a more experimental style, Naruse's post-war films show a pairing down of style, relying on editing , lighting, acting and sets . Naruse was described as serious and reticent, and even his closest and long-lasting collaborators like cinematographer Tamai Masao claimed to know nothing about him personally. He gave very few interviews and was, according to Akira Kurosawa,

150-474: A girl star. She toured as a singer to entertain Japanese troops and, after the war , sang for American occupation troops in Tokyo. After initially appearing in a pro- union film, Those Who Make Tomorrow (1946), she became appalled by the rigid attitudes of the union's leaders and members and, during the post-war Toho strikes , and joined a new union along with nine of Toho's major stars, which went on to form

180-501: A return for the director and was the first of a series of adaptations of works of female writer Fumiko Hayashi , including Lightning (1952) and Floating Clouds (1955). All of these films featured women struggling with unhappy relationships or family relations and were awarded prestigious national film prizes. Late Chrysanthemums (1954), based on short stories by Hayashi, centered on four former geisha and their attempts to cope with financial restraints in post-war Japan. Sound of

210-416: A very self-assured director who did everything himself on the set . Hideko Takamine remembered, "Even during the shooting of a picture, he would never say if anything was good, or bad, interesting or trite. He was a completely unresponsive director. I appeared in about 20 of his films, and yet there was never an instance in which he gave me any acting instructions." Tatsuya Nakadai recalled one instant during

240-525: Is often cited as having launched a post- occupation revival of the shōshimin-eiga . Gosho biographer Arthur Nolletti, Jr. regards the early 1960s as the end of the genre's golden age, with its themes moving mainly to television. Both he and film historian Catherine Russell see it sustained in works like the Tora-san series. Hideko Takamine Hideko Takamine ( 高峰 秀子 , Takamine Hideko , March 27, 1924 – December 28, 2010)

270-399: Is the short Flunky, Work Hard! (1931), a mixture of comedy and domestic drama. In 1933–1934, he directed a series of silent melodramas, Apart From You , Every-Night Dreams , and Street Without End , which centered on women confronted with hostile environments and practical responsibilities, and demonstrated "a considerable stylistic virtuosity" (Alexander Jacoby). Unsatisfied with

300-417: The shōshimin-eiga (addressing it as shomin-geki ) as "[e]ssentially a film about proletarian or lower-middle-class life, about the sometimes humorous, sometimes bitter relations within the family, about the struggle for existence, [...] the kind of film many Japanese think of as being about 'you and me'." In her book Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s , Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano sees

330-432: The shōshimin-eiga depicting a "newly emerging modern subject, the salaried man, and his middle-class family", which "appealed to a broad cross-section of social classes", thereby helping to create "a modern national subject". Through their portrayal of social inequalities and capitalism's extended reach on daily life in the shape of company hierarchy, these films suggested a split between Japan's call for modernisation and

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360-704: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 1981 and 2006, at the Locarno Film Festival (1984), at festivals in Hong Kong (1987) and Melbourne (1988), and at the Harvard Film Archive in 2005. Floating Clouds and Flowing have been voted into the 2009 All Time Best Japanese Movies lists by readers and critics of Kinema Junpo. Shoshimin-eiga Film historians Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie define

390-586: The war years , Naruse kept to what his biographer Catherine Russell referred to as "safe projects", including "home front films" like Sincerity . The early 1940s saw the collapse of Naruse's first marriage with Sachiko Chiba, who had starred in Wife! Be Like a Rose! and whom he had married in 1936. In 1941, he directed the comedy Hideko the Bus Conductor with Hideko Takamine , who would later become his regular starring actress. The 1951 Repast marked

420-483: The Mountain (1954), a portrayal of a marriage falling apart, and Flowing (1956), which follows the decline of a once flourishing geisha house, were based on novels by Yasunari Kawabata and Aya Kōda . In the 1960s, Naruse's output decreased in number (partially owed to illness), while film historians at the same time detect an increase of sentimentality and "a more spectacular mode of melodrama" (Russell). When

450-453: The Mountain , Late Chrysanthemums , Floating Clouds , Flowing and When A Woman Ascends The Stairs . Mikio Naruse was born in Tokyo in 1905 and raised by his brother and sister after his parents' early death. He entered Shirō Kido's Shōchiku film studio in the 1920s as a light crew assistant and was soon assigned to comedy director Yoshinobu Ikeda . It was not until 1930 that he

480-492: The United States (where it was not well received). The film concerns a young woman whose father deserted his family for a former geisha . When she visits her father in a remote mountain village, it turns out that the second wife is far more suitable for him than the first. Film historians have emphasised the film's "sprightly, modern feel" and "innovative visual style" and "progressive social attitudes". Naruse's films of

510-602: The awareness of the transience of things, and a gentle sadness at their passing. "From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us", the director explained. His protagonists were usually women, and his studies of female experience spanned a wide range of social milieux, professions and situations. Six of his films were adaptations of a single novelist, Fumiko Hayashi , whose pessimistic outlook seemed to match his own. From her work he made films about unrequited passion, unhappy families and stale marriages. Surrounded by unbreakable family bonds and fixed customs,

540-419: The characters are never more vulnerable than when they for once decide to make an individual move: "If they move even a little, they quickly hit the wall" (Naruse). Expectations invariably end in disappointment, happiness is impossible, and contentment is the best the characters can achieve. Of Repast , Husband and Wife and Wife , Naruse said, "these pictures have little that happens in them and end without

570-618: The death of her mother, she was placed in the care of her aunt in Tokyo . Her first role was in the Shochiku studio's 1929 film Mother ( Haha ), which brought her tremendous popularity as a child actor. Many of the films of her early career were imitations of Shirley Temple films. After moving to the Toho studio in 1937, her dramatic roles in Kajirō Yamamoto 's Tsuzurikata kyōshitsu (1938) and Horse (1941) brought her added fame as

600-542: The field of the shōshimin-eiga . Others include Heinosuke Gosho and Keisuke Kinoshita . Kenji Mizoguchi , although having repeatedly turned to modern subjects, the oppression of women under a patriarchical system in particular, is usually not assigned to the genre canon. Important early (and extant) examples of the shōshimin-eiga are Shimazu's Our Neighbor, Miss Yae (1934), Ozu's Tokyo Chorus (1931) and I Was Born, But... (1932), and Gosho's Burden of Life (1935). Naruse's 1951 film Repast

630-583: The filming of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs where Naruse yelled at an assistant director for drawing a cardboard eye to indicate the point of reference of Hideko Takamine's eyeline. On one occasion, Naruse gave advice to Kihachi Okamoto on being a director, telling him: "You should stick to your own ideas. If you run from left to right and back again to suit the changing times, the results will be hollow." Naruse passed away in July 2, 1969, due to colon cancer. Hideko Takamine said years later that she never went to

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660-562: The following years are often regarded as lesser works by film historians, owed in parts to weak scripts and acting, although Jacoby noted the formal experimentation and sceptical attitude towards the institutions of marriage and family in Avalanche and A Woman's Sorrows (both 1937). Naruse later argued that at the time he didn't have the courage to refuse some of the projects he was offered, and that his attempts to compensate weak content with concentration on technique didn't work out. During

690-588: The funeral or his grave since she wanted her last memory of him to be "that of the healthy-looking face with the gentle smile that I saw when I visited his house in Seijo [District, Tokyo]." Takamine had visited Naruse months before at his house, and was surprised at how talkative and cheerful he was in her conversation with him. Film scholar Audie Bock curated two extensive retrospectives on Naruse in Chicago and New York in 1984–1985. Retrospectives have also been held at

720-446: The intersection of traditional and modern Japanese culture, his films have been compared with the works of Yasujirō Ozu . Many of his films in his later career were adaptations of the works of acknowledged Japanese writers. Titled a "major figure of Japan's golden age" and "supremely intelligent dramatist", he remains lesser known than his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa , Kenji Mizoguchi , and Ozu. Among his most noted films are Sound of

750-491: The kind of roles Takamine played fit the zeitgeist, may have even made that zeitgeist." Comparing Naruse and Kinoshita, Takamine explained: "Though different in style, they shared a common aversion to things that were not natural. What I tried to do was to be as natural as women we see in the news, but adding a touch of drama so that I would be even more real." She married writer-director Zenzo Matsuyama in 1955, but continued her acting career, stating that she wanted to "create

780-465: The longing for the "mystic cohesion" of a "traditional" past. At the same time, the shōshimin-eiga was criticised for a lack of genuine political content especially from the political left . The beginnings of the shōshimin-eiga are assigned to the Shochiku film studio and its director Yasujirō Shimazu in the 1920s. Yasujirō Ozu , a former assistant of Shimazu, and Mikio Naruse are two prominent directors considered to work primarily in

810-445: The new Shintoho studio in 1947. In 1950, she left Shintoho and became a freelance actress. Her films with directors Keisuke Kinoshita and Mikio Naruse during the 1950s made her Japan's top star. Notable films of this decade include Kinoshita's satirical comedy Carmen Comes Home (1951), Japan's first feature length colour film, and the antiwar drama Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Naruse's Floating Clouds (1955) and When

840-457: The working conditions at Shōchiku and the projects he was assigned to, Naruse left Shōchiku in 1934 and moved to P.C.L. studios (Photo Chemical Laboratories, which later became Toho ). His first major film was the comedy drama Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935). It was elected as Best Movie of the Year by the magazine Kinema Junpo , and was the first Japanese film to receive a theatrical release in

870-456: Was a Japanese actress who began as a child actress and maintained her fame in a career that spanned 50 years. She is particularly known for her collaborations with directors Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita , with Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) and Floating Clouds (1955) being among her most noted films. Takamine was born in Hakodate, Hokkaidō , in 1924. At the age of four, following

900-425: Was allowed to direct a film on his own. His debut film, the short slapstick comedy Mr. and Mrs. Swordplay ( Chanbara fūfū ), was edited by Heinosuke Gosho who tried to support the young filmmaker. The film was considered a success, and Naruse was allowed to direct the romance film Pure Love ( Junjo ). Both films, like the majority of his early works at Shōchiku, are regarded as lost. Naruse's earliest extant work

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