WINTER 2006
WEATHERING THE STORM:
THE ENDURING CINEMA OF MIKIO NARUSE
Jan 20-Feb 26, 2006
Sponsored by Scarecrow Video, University of Washington East Asia Center & The Consulate General of Japan, Seattle
"[MIKIO NARUSE's] importance is without doubt the equal of Ozu's and Mizoguchi's." - CAHIERS DU CINEMA
"Sadly, like the exploited lives of his resilient, imperfect heroines, Naruse's cinema is also a quiet, unrecognized triumph." - SENSES OF CINEMA
Although the recognized equal of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa, master Japanese director Mikio Naruse (1905-1969) has slipped into near obscurity in North America. Revered by Kurosawa, deified in Japan and championed by our own Susan Sontag, Naruse finally gets a North American retrospective, the first in over three decades. Northwest Film Forum is showing ten Naruse masterpieces, most newly struck and restored. We have also commissioned an original Aono Jikken Ensemble score to the two silent films in the program.
Born in 1905 to a poor embroiderer and his wife who both died young, Naruse had to quit school early to earn a living. His intimate knowledge of the restraints of family bonds, class and money made him the great master of the shomen-geiki, a genre focused on lower-middle-class daily life. While his visual style varies, his cinema is consciously actor-oriented and it's the emotional rhythms of his characters that drive his films. Naruse's former assistant Akira Kurosawa compared his favorite director's cinema to "a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath."
For Naruse, the struggles of women formed the centerpiece of life's banquet of sorrow. His former geishas, aging Ginza bar hostesses, destitute widows and single mothers search for happiness despite accumulating evidence of its absence. His films may be "invariably about disappointment," writes critic Phillip Lopate; however, "he himself does not disappoint, no more than does Chekhov, an artist he greatly resembles in stimulating our appetite for larger and more bitter doses of truth."
With sincere thanks to Cinematheque Ontario's extraordinary James Quandt for organizing this twenty-city retrospective and to the Japan Foundation for striking new prints, we are thrilled to offer Seattle audiences a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the films of the fourth master of the golden age of Japanese cinema.
Introduction and descriptions adapted from the writings of James Quandt of Cinematheque Ontario and others.
See all ten films (including NIGHTLY DREAMS w/live score) with the NARUSE PASS - $60/$40 Members.
JAN 20-22 Fri-Sun at 6:30, 9pm (plus Sat/Sun at 4:30pm)
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki)
(35mm, 1960, 111 min.)
NEW 35MM PRINT!
A triumph of CinemaScope filmmaking mostly shot in the stifling interiors of Ginza bars, WOMAN features Naruse's favorite actress, the serene and beautiful Hideko Takamine, as favored bar hostess "Mama." Remaining faithful to the memory of her dead husband and supporting her insensitive mother, deadbeat brother, and handicapped nephew, she struggles to maintain her dignity by earning her living in the only profession afforded to an aging widowed woman in post-war Japan.
"An elegant essay in black and white CinemaScope and tinkling cocktail jazz, this tale of a bar hostess' attempt to escape her lot could give heartbreak lessons to Fassbinder and Sirk."- J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
JAN 27 Fri at 7pm
Nightly Dreams (Yogoto no yume), plays with short Flunky, Work Hard! (Koshiben gambare)
(35mm, 1933, 64 min.) / (16mm, 1931, 30 min.)
Two Silent Films by Naruse! Scored Live by the Aono Jikken Ensemble!
With virtuoso camera movement, unusual angles, deep field of vision, and startling montage, NIGHTLY DREAMS is considered Naruse's most visually audacious work. This tale of woe revolves around a young abandoned mother who supports herself and her small son by working as a hostess in a Tokyo bar until her unemployed husband reappears and increases her burden two-fold. An example of the early films that founded Naruse's career, FLUNKY, WORK HARD! employs grandstanding style in a slapstick satire of people at the end of their monetary rope. A meek insurance salesman ducks and hides whenever conflict arises, and his wife and son grow tired of both his humility and their poverty. Typical of Naruse, the antics eventually dissolve into tear-jerking tragedy.
JAN 28 Sat at 7pm
Wife! Be Like a Rose (Tsuma yo bara no yo ni)
(35mm, 1935, 73 min.)
Vivacious young Kimiko and her poet mother try to lure her wandering father back home: the former by making a pilgrimage from her city digs to her estranged father's village, the latter by penning odes of love to a man who in truth she cannot stand. The first Japanese talking feature distributed in the US, WIFE! BE LIKE A ROSE! established Naruse as the lead director of shomin-geki, or dramas of the common people.
JAN 29 Sun at 7pm
Flowing (Nagareru)
(35mm, 1956, 117 min.)
NEW 35MM PRINT!
Rated as one of Naruse's greatest masterpieces, FLOWING features spectacular performances by four of Japan's top veteran actresses-Kinuyo Tanaka (Japan's first woman director), Isuzu Yamada, Hideko Takamine, and Haruko Sugimura. As traditional geisha establishments close or become bordellos to survive in rapidly changing Tokyo, one proud mistress desperately attempts to save her failing business without compromise. FLOWING constitutes essential viewing not only in terms of Naruse's work but also Japanese cinema.
FEB 2 Thurs at 7pm
Late Chrysanthemums (Bangiku)
(35mm, 1954, 101 min.)
Rated as one of the year's ten best by critics like Andrew Sarris upon its 1985 US Premiere, LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS tells the unglamorous story of a proud but flawed quartet of former geishas. Forced into retirement by age and financially struggling in their meager second careers, three of the women survive by sponging off their children and borrowing from part-time loan shark and real estate investor Kin, the only one of the group to make good. At the center of the story, unmarried and childless Kin-whose philosophy is to eat or be eaten-softens when an old patron and lover's letter rekindles a flame. Not without its humorous moments of backbiting and vice, CHRYSANTHEMUMS offers a realistic look at the desolation of post-WWII Japan.
FEB 3-5 Fri-Sun at 7, 9pm (plus Sat/Sun at 5pm)
Repast (Meshi)
(35mm, 1951, 97 min.)
NEW 35MM PRINT!
Based on an unfinished novel Fumiko Hayashi was writing at the time of her sudden death in 1951, REPAST is one of Naruse's finest works and one of a cycle of films about wedded disharmony. Housewife Michiyo pines for Tokyo as she whiles away her time in a childless marriage with a dull husband. Her final flight to the big city raises the question of whether the couple can reconcile. Using signature visual associations-an empty rice bin contrasted with the husband's new shoes-Naruse studies the minute tensions and frustrations of married life.
FEB 17-19 Fri-Sun at 7, 9pm (plus Sat/Sun at 5pm)
Mother (Okaasan)
(1952, 35mm, 98 min.)
NEW 35MM PRINT!
Naruse's reworking of the "mother" genre focuses on a woman's struggle to revive her family's dry-cleaning business in a Japan economically devastated by war. Although she achieves her dream, she must eventually choose between holding her fragmented family together and providing opportunities for one child. Often cited as Japan's most important contribution to post-WWII Neorealism, MOTHER transcends the sentimentality of its genre to offer dense social observation and a complex celebration of motherhood.
"One of Naruse's best films." -Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson, THE JAPANESE FILM
FEB 23 Thurs at 7pm
Sound of the Mountain (Yama no oto)
(35mm, 1954, 96 min.)
NEW 35MM PRINT!
Introduced by Professor Ted Mack.Wife Kikuko endures marriage to a businessman indifferent to her desperate loneliness in this adaptation of a work by Nobel prizewinner Yasunari Kawabata. Returning home from drunken forays after work in Tokyo, the sodden, insolent husband remains unaware that his wife is considering aborting their baby, so abject is her sense of their future together. Among the film's triumphs is the portrait of the husband's father, a wise, empathetic man who shares his daughter-in-law's distress. Naruse called this film "one of my all-time favorites."
"I would put [SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN] on equal footing with the best of Mizoguchi, Ozu, Ford, McCarey, Chaplin, Rossellini, Dreyer, Renoir or Hitchcock: that is to say, among the greatest films ever made." -SENSES OF CINEMA
FEB 24-26 Fri-Sun at 6:30, 9pm (plus Sat/Sun at 4pm)
Floating Clouds (Ukigumo)
(35mm, 1955, 123 min.)
NEW 35MM PRINT!
In the bombed-out ruins of Tokyo, Yukiko searches for former lover Kengo. Although they renew their affair, he tells Yukiko he cannot leave his ailing wife. She sacrifices health and happiness pursuing him while he, a typically weak Naruse male, vacillates. The director's masterpiece, his best-loved film in Japan, and a favorite of Yasujiro Ozu, FLOATING CLOUDS was aptly adapted from a novel by Naruse's great love and influence, Fumiko Hayashi.
"The elegance and indisputable hard punch of Naruse's storytelling become immediately clear the moment the lovers kiss and the director cuts, midclinch, to an almost identical shot of them kissing in the past, an edit that suggests this is a passion that transcends even time and space."- Manohla Dargis, NEW YORK TIMES