Naruse Mikio

1
Naruse Mikio

• The World without Hope and Pity

2
Life and Career

• Naruse Mikio (1907-1969)
• Born in Tokyo and his father was a craftsman.
  Poverty prevented him from attending higher
  schools and on leaving primary school, he entered
  a vocational training school. He was a quiet,
  shy and dreamy boy and more interested in
  literature than craftsmanship.

3
Life and Career

• On his fathers premature death, he had to find a
  job. Entered Shochiku Kamata Studios as a prop
  boy.
• He was an assistant to various film directors for
  ten years before he was allowed to direct his own
  film in 1930. His apprenticeship a lot longer
  than his contemporaries, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Gosho,
  and Kinugasa.
• Due to his self-consciousness, quietness and
  shyness

4
Life and Career

• Naruse made 89 films in his career with Chanbara
  Fufu (Mr and Mrs Swordplay), his first film and
  Scattered Clouds (1967) his last.
• He mainly produced shomin geki (comic dramas
  about common people) and melodrama, which centre
  on female rather than male characters.

5
Life and Career

• Koshiben, Ganbare (Flunky, Work Hard, 1931) his
  earliest survived film
• Kimi to Wakarete (Apart from You,1933) and Yogoto
  no Yume (Nightly Dreams, 1933) included in the 10
  best films of the year. The producer liked them
  too, but he could not get the proper recognition
  of his studio boss. His move to PCL (Toho).

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Major Films

• Wife, Be Like a Rose (1935) - A daughter whose
  marriage looms tries to reunite her estranged
  parents her father is living with his geisha
  mistress and her mother is intelligent but cannot
  show proper consideration for her husband.

7
Major Works

• The Whole Family Works (, 1939) - the Ishimura
  family - parents and nine children - combined
  income is mere 111 yen and allowed the only most
  talented to go to electricians school.
  Individuals crushed by family? Individuals
  sacrifice themselves for his family?

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Films in the 50s

• Repast (1951) - a childless couple who seem to be
  bored with each other and life in general. The
  husbands runaway niece suddenly turns up and he
  takes her to all those places to which he never
  took his wife. The wife returns to her parents
  in Tokyo leaving behind her husband on his own in
  Osaka.

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Films in the 50s

• Lighting (1952) - a mother has four children,
  whose fathers are all different. Three
  squabbling half-siblings are observed from the
  point of view of the youngest bus conductor
  daughter - egoist eldest sister, indecisive
  second daughter and useless brother.

10
Films in the 50s

• Older Brother, Younger Sister (1953) - Older
  brother is a talented mason and tattooed gambler
  who stops working when he has enough money. His
  younger sister returns from a city being pregnant
  by a university student.

11
Films in the 50s

• Wife (1953) - a childless couple wife
  oversleeps, avoids housework and even leaves hair
  in bento, while husband has a secret affair with
  a widowed secretary. When she finds it out, the
  couple has an enormous row and wife becomes even
  more unsympathetic and husband is further
  attracted by his mistress. Wife goes to confront
  her husbands lover

12
Films in the 50s

• Late Chrysanthemum (1954) - a character study on
  the lives of four retired geisha. One of them
  leads a single life as a money lender and
  investor, two single mothers with an
  unsympathetic child of each do menial work to
  make their ends meet and the married one is
  running a bar with her husband and hoping to be a
  mother one day.

13
Films in the 50s

• The money lender is ruthless even to her former
  colleagues in collecting debts. However, she is
  far from a heartless, calculating woman. When
  she receives a letter from her old client whom
  she loves, she acts like a school girl.

14
Films in the 50s

• Sound of the Mountain (1954) - based on the story
  of Kawabata Yasunari, this is about a woman who
  is trapped in a loveless marriage and finds only
  solace in the warm understanding of her father in
  law.

15
Films in the 50s

• Floating Clouds (1955) - a married forestry
  surveyor and a typist fall in love in war-time
  Indochina. After the war she decides to go and
  see him but he has no intention to break up his
  loveless marriage. He instead initiate a series
  of serious flirtation
• with various young
• girls, while she
• never gives up on
• him.

16
Films in the 50s

• Flowing (1956) -
• A geisha house owned by
• a former star geisha
• is failing. She has a
• single mother niece who has
• no intention to work and a daughter who hates
  her mothers business.
• After great hesitation, she decides to have some
  financial and emotional support from her former
  patron and the father of her daughter. But she
  is given 100,000 yen as consolation money. Only
  intelligent and loyal maidservant knows that the
  geisha house will be forced to close down soon.

17
Later Works

• When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) - a young
  widow (just turned thirty) is working as a head
  hostess in a exclusive Ginza night club. She
  tries to be high-minded while dreaming of opening
  up her own bar. However, times are changing in
  Ginza, too, and how much longer she can hold out
  defending traditional, honest trade.

18
Later Works

• Around midnight, Tokyos 16,000 bar women go
  home. The best go home by car. Second-rate ones
  by streetcar. The worst go home with their
  customers.
• After it gets dark, I have to climb the stairs,
  and that is what I hate. But once I am up, I can
  take whatever happens. When a Woman Ascends the
  Stairs is a portrait of female dignity and
  perseverance.

19
Auteuristic Themes and Style

• Two great directors spent their lives examining
  the heart of the common people and capturing the
  love they felt for them Naruse Mikio and Ozu
  Yasujiro
• - Takamine Hideko who appeared in most of
  Naruses later works.

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Auteuristic Themes and Style

• What Naruses films are about ?
• Most of Naruses works belong to the genres of
  shomin-geki (humourous dramas about common
  people) and melodrama
• Naruses melodrama deals with ? marriage in
  trouble or ? single women who are struggling to
  earn a living or to keep self-respect.
• How are his film motifs treated?
• Naruses films depict these issues in utterly
  realistic manners.

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Auteuristic Themes and Style

• Characters
• Never one-dimensional - every character in
  Naruses films are fallible and sinful, but never
  evil. None of his characters are free from
  worldly desires - desire for money, sex, alcohol,
  gamble, etc. Typical of such characters are
  geisha and bar hostesses.
• Naruse neither romanticizes nor ennobles them,
  but depicts with sympathy and pity.

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Auteuristic Themes and Style

• His characters lack the hope and good humour of
  Ozu's in the face of disappointment, and, unlike
  Mizoguchi's protagonists, they are usually denied
  the luxury of death.
• Alexander Jacoby, Naruse Mikio
• Naruses characters live in limbo - the world of
  eternal suffering.
• They deserve salvation and atonement.
• Buddhist ideology behind his films