E-Mail This Article to a Friend A living architecture ‘The Films of Mikio Naruse’ BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	"The Films of Mikio Naruse" At the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive through October 30.

That a filmmaker as great as Japan’s Mikio Naruse (1903-1969) remains largely unknown even among those who care passionately about cinema shows how badly the movies’ first century needs dusting off and re-evaluating. In Naruse’s case, it wouldn’t take much, first because there’s been scarcely any evaluation to start with, at least not in English, and second because Naruse’s films — a selection of which is screening through October 30 at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Film Archive — contain a built-in dust repellent. Seen today, they’re as fresh and modern as if they had just been made.

Fresher and more modern. Naruse is not a contemporary, he’s still ahead. Watching one of his films is like trying to catch up with someone who always walks faster and changes direction without warning. Stern and severe, the filmmaker’s attitude is also generous in its estimate of its audience. Naruse’s cinema, one of the darkest that can be imagined, is also a popular cinema, expert in the byways of middle-class lives and hard and clear in its understanding of everyday economic imperatives. With microscopic subtlety, he traces the inner wars among ambition, sexual desire, the sense of duty, and something more obscure that no other director puts under such intense light: the appetite for loneliness and defeat.

In Scattered Clouds (1967; MFA October 22 @ 10:30 am), a woman recently widowed finds herself forced from all sides to embark on a new relationship before she’s emotionally ready — a fateful mishap of timing that threatens the fragile start of a connection with the man who loves her. The heroine of Yearning (1964; MFA September 30 @ 5:45 pm; HFA October 10 @ 9:15 pm), another widow, is one of a number of Naruse protagonists who refuse happiness until it’s too late. The central figure in Late Chrysanthemums (1954; HFA October 7 @ 7 pm; MFA October 30 @ 10:30 am) is a geisha-turned-businesswoman who still dreams of her lost love but unconsciously waits for the moment when she can rid herself of its memory.

Flowing (1956; HFA October 9 @ 7 pm; MFA October 13 @ 1 pm) is the apt title of another of Naruse’s best films, this one about the decline of a geisha house, whose residents form an all-female surrogate family. His films are all flows, anecdotal narratives, chains of events having to do with things lost and sought. In Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro (1938; MFA October 20 @ 4:30 pm), a piece torn from a poster becomes a child’s toy boat floating down a narrow stream, a metaphor for the singer hero’s ruined career and lost love. Many of Naruse’s privileged characters are drifters, like the hero and heroine of Floating Clouds (1955; MFA October 6 @ 12:30 pm; HFA October 8 @ 7 pm), who resume their adulterous affair across spans of time, or the writer heroine of A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962, one of six Naruse films based on works by 20th-century writer Fumiko Hayashi; HFA October 10 @ 7 pm), who improves her craft while moving from job to job and from man to man.

Naruse distrusts the home; his films criticize all domestic arrangements and take apart the strings that hold together couples or large families. Summer Clouds (1958; MFA October 8 @ 10:30 am) is the great epic examination of the fall of the extended family as a dominant social model and its replacement by the marital unit. In both this film and The Whole Family Works (1939; MFA October 9 @ 10:30 am), members of the younger generation want to attend university while their parents want to make the kids work. Looming in the background of The Whole Family Works is the militarist empire that will no doubt decimate the family. The anarchic final scene seems to extol the sheer energy of youth — but it’s an energy pent up, without outlet.

The harsh and funny Little Man, Do Your Best (1931; MFA October 1 @ 12:15 pm) sets up a parallel construction between a wife’s domestic work and her husband’s work as an insurance salesman. The wife’s relentless house sweeping becomes a sign of protest. Sound of the Mountain (1954; MFA October 1 @ 8:30 pm; HFA October 9 @ 9 pm), Naruse’s exquisite adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, shows domestic life as a kind of hiding, as the avoidance of an impossible truth that finally forces itself on everyone in so blunt a way that the humiliated heroine has no choice but to leave.

Every Naruse film involves a journey away from the home, with its geometric constraints on identity. In the last section of Repast (1951; MFA October 2 @ 11 am; HFA October 7 @ 9 pm), the disillusioned heroine gains renewed insight into her married life in Osaka when she leaves her husband to visit her mother and sister in Tokyo. The key to the Tokyo sequence is that the heroine, freed from her situation, becomes able to see herself, others, and the world. The space of the film widens with her increased perspective — a phenomenon that recurs at the end of Sound of the Mountain.

In masterpieces like Floating Clouds and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960; HFA September 30 @ 7 pm), the heroine’s creation of a passageway through space, one representing her own identity and her own bargain with life, is a metaphor for Naruse’s filmmaking, which cuts paths through time and space with startling angularity and boldness. Each new shot brings a new set of tensions, which the eye must sort out and balance, and the very timing of cuts brings its own tensions, as looks dart off-screen at unexpected angles, as people cross the same space in two different shots, or as someone kneels into a new floor-level composition. Shot changes carry uncertainty and danger: throughout Summer Clouds, Naruse builds a pattern of fading out on a two-shot of the widowed heroine and her married lover, to start the next scene with a long shot that makes the threat of time visible.

Naruse is less interested in linking his characters to the realistic depiction of a wider social reality than in experimenting with motifs of exclusions, of positions about to be abandoned or of spaces already filled by the time people reach them. In the exhilarating Every Night Dreams (1933; MFA October 1 @ 12:15 pm), after a wife takes her estranged husband back, Naruse holds on an empty frame, which ends the scene with the calm of a snowfall. Effects like this — which Naruse scatters throughout his films — display a combination of wistfulness and graphic firmness that goes beyond what’s usually called beauty in film, though Naruse’s films are the most beautiful ever made. (Whatever else it is — a critique of the economics of the family, among other things — Yearning is also a poem on the beauty of Hideko Takamine, in the next-to-last of the 17 films she did with Naruse.) But their beauty is chilling, like the beauty of the moon, on which Setsuko Hara reports in Sound of the Mountain. This beauty is the embellishment and relief of a living architecture that fascinates the eye and leads it onward.