Naruse Mikio

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Naruse Mikio

• The World without Hope and Pity

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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

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Auteuristic Themes and Style

• Naruses films are totally democratic in terms
  of placing his cinematic characters and the
  spectators of his works on the exactly equal
  level. No characters are larger than life. They
  are intelligent as the spectators are they are
  as ignorant as they are they are as imperfect as
  they are.
• Naruse is only interested in making appear those
  who are weak and unwise but not evil.

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Melodrama Style

• Melodrama Melody Drama
• A play with music
• Appeal to the emotions of the audience
• Overtly emotional plots and exaggerated displays
  of emotions
• Combination of liberal use of sentimental music
  and psychologically heightened drama

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Melodrama Style

• Generic requirements
• Sensational tales romance (often forbidden and
  impossible love) crisis (death, fatal illness,
  separation or reversal of fortune) endurance
  (social pressure, prejudice, threat, repression,
  and fear)

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Melodrama Style

• An upper-middle class Caucasian woman falls in
  love with an African-American gardener (Far from
  Heaven)
• A newly wed is shot dead after he frees a Nazi
  prison. (A Time to Love and a Time to Die)

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Melodrama Style

• A college girl is struck by leukemia and dies in
  the arms of her boyfriend (Love Story)
• A Polish woman has to send her daughter to a
  death camp and her son to another as she cannot
  save both childrens lives (Sophies Choice)

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Melodrama Style

• Melodramatic characters try to work through
  difficulties with their own resources or to
  overcome them employing their power of endurance,
  sacrificial spirit or bravery.
• Prolonged suffering of characters and emotional
  scenes, whose moods are emphasized by ample use
  of music
• Exaggerated performance
• Close-ups of pathos-filled faces

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Melodrama Style
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Melodrama Style

• A young wife who is not loved and cheated by her
  husband finds solace in the love of her
  father-in-law. Sound of the Mountain

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Melodrama Style

• Fate of a woman who love a married man and cannot
  live without him. Floating Clouds

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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Naturalistic performance rather than exaggerated
  performance.
• Less stereotypical characterization combination
  of good and evil, innocence and corruption,
  selfishness and unselfishness, worldly desire and
  its transcendence
• Unrequited love and un-happy ending against the
  melodrama tradition pessimism
• Subdued expression of emotion

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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Centre on feminine characters female lives,
  situation, problems, solution
• Appeal to the feminine audience
• Geisha mother and daughter seeking a professional
  career in Flowing

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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Women trying to maintain their independence and
  self-respect while looking for a long-time
  partner. When Women Ascend Stairs

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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Naruses method consists of staging one very
  brief shot after another but when we look at
  them placed end-to-end in the finished film, they
  give the impression of one long single take. The
  fluidity is so perfect that the cuts are
  invisible A flow of shots that looks calm and
  ordinary at first glance reveals itself to be
  like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising
  a fast-raging current.
• - Kurosawa Akira

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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Impression of continuity and fluidity come from
  graphic matches through the consistent style of
  mise-en-scène and the unity in composition.
• The camera placed at the eye-level of the film
  character - horizontal composition.
• Filmed in long and medium shots, avoiding
  close-ups which tend to interrupt continuity
  because they arrest the attention of the
  audience.
• Breaks come only at the significant juncture in
  narrative.

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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Some visual experimentations in early works
• Post-war films adopted naturalistic style
• In Ozus films everything is carefully arranged
  and meticulously calculated in mise-en-scène -
  stylized. Naruses mise-en-scène is casual and
  naturalistic.
• Certain similarities to that of Ozu - set design
  and frontal composition
• Occasional dramatic lighting, pans and travelling
  shots

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Naruses Melodrama Style
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Naruses Melodrama Style
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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Unusual melodrama
• Reliance on silence pivotal and significant
  scenes shot without dialogues.
• The ending of Flowing
• The climax of Floating Clouds
• Throughout Repast the amount of dialogues are
  reduced

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Naruses Melodrama Style

• Eye-line match
• A significant technique to tell a story not
  through words but images
• A technique which does not rely on dialogue.
• In Repast Michiyos suspicion about her husbands
  relationship with her niece represented by images
  in eye-line match rather than words.
• In Floating Clouds the similar match when Yukiko
  suspects her husbands relationship with a bar
  woman.