Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman

“There are no happy endings for Naruse, but there are incredibly enlightened defeats.” —Audie Bock

BAMPFA’s extensive retrospective of the films of Mikio Naruse (1905–1969) continues this fall with works ranging from his 1938 backstage drama Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro, and his 1940 comedy Traveling Actors (one of the director’s personal favorites), to his astute depictions of marriage—Wife, Husband and Wife, and Repast (starring Setsuko Hara)—and his great collaborations with Hideko Takamine, Yearning and Floating Clouds.

Working with the great performers of his time, Naruse eliminated surplus dialogue, communicating volumes through glances and gestures, his lucid, cinematic style propelling the narrative. Akira Kurosawa described Naruse’s films as being like a deep river, with a quiet surface disguising a raging current underneath. Kurosawa remarked that the flow of Naruse’s shots was so magnificent that the splices seemed almost invisible.

Naruse experienced vast social, political, and technological changes while chronicling the daily lives of ordinary people. As scholar Catherine Russell suggested, he was both “auteur” and "salaryman,” working for the studio Toho for most of his career and finishing scores of films—on time and on budget. Money, and the lack thereof, is a central theme of many of Naruse’s films, often a topic of conversation for his protagonists, informing their decisions. Especially empathetic to the plight of women, Naruse excelled at depictions of their struggles, resistance, and endurance, as in his adaptations of the works of popular novelist Fumiko Hayashi, including Late Chrysanthemums.

—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

Please check showtimes for each film HERE.