Along with Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi, Naruse Mizoguchi, Akio Naruse (1905-1969), was often slightly less famous and influential than the other three. In western studies of Naruse' writings, the author is the first to complain about Naruse's neglect.
This is mainly due to the fact that in the early years his films were mostly difficult to see by foreign audiences. However, with the popularity of discs and the development of the Internet, as well as the holding of a series of Naruse retrospectives, the charm of this Japanese film master is increasingly valued. His influence on later filmmakers, especially Oriental filmmakers, also grew deeper.
One of the most common photos of Naruse
Because the form and subject matter of the work are somewhat similar to Ozu at first glance, there are always academic circles that like to compare the two directors together, and some unknown audiences will think that Naruse is "just another Ozu". This misreading, of course, has become a ridiculous fallacy, but it still has a considerable audience.
One of the most representative and interesting examples is the evaluation of Kore-eda, the best contemporary author and director in Japan, who is always considered to have followed the Ozu tradition in terms of style and theme.
But in Kore-eda's own view, his films are more like Naruse than Ozu. "The characters in Ozu's films are more upright, and they are particularly peaceful; relatively speaking, the characters in Naruse's films are more cunning, and some are very bad... If my parents had appeared in the movie, the movie would have been more like Naruse's work. This is Kore-eda's original words, which can be said to accurately break the difference between the two directors.
Ozu's protagonist is always a middle-class family living in Kamakura, while Naruse's shots are low-class civilians living in difficulty. Ozu's films are more like a mood taken from life and higher than life, but Naruse is based on the most authentic life and deeply rooted in it. Naruse's observation of post-war Japanese society is extremely deep and meticulous, and the characters in his films seem to be living people living around people, and many of the problems he reflects in the film seem to be as incomprehensible as life seems to us.
This profound insight into life makes Naruse's films often have a power that goes straight to the heart. Donald Ritchie, a well-known American scholar of Japanese film studies, regards Naruse as the director who can best understand the situation of Japanese women and the dilemma of survival.
Naruse instructs Si Yezi on the spot in his posthumous work "Chaotic Clouds"
This is inextricably linked to the environment in which Naruse grew up, and at the time of his birth, his family was almost reduced to abject poverty. As the youngest of the family's three children, Naruse could not even continue to attend middle school after completing elementary school, but could only enter a technical school to learn his craft.
At the age of 15, after graduating from a technical school, he was introduced by a friend to the newly established Shochiku Film Company and worked as a prop maker at Putian Studio. He was destitute and rented a small house near the set to live alone, and as far as he later recalls, it was the darkest day of his life.
Naruse's process of becoming a director was also far more difficult than that of his peers at the time. For the fledgling film industry, it wasn't too difficult to become a director at the time. Mizoguchi began directing a film, and Ozu came to Shochiku later than Naruse, but made his debut three years before him. However, Naruse has never dared to expect the status of a director, thinking that props players will be his lifelong career.
Moreover, even after he was promoted from assistant director to director, his salary was still less than a hundred yen, which belonged to the low-level employees who needed to queue up to buy buffets. This poor lower class life was apparently later adapted to his own films by Naruse.
Naruse in his youth
Another important theme of Naruse's films is the failed marriage, a recurring theme in his films that can also find a shadow in his own life. In the 1930s, he briefly married actress Hayatoko Chiba, and later remarried after the war. Those frustrated feelings and tormented family relationships became the most moving parts of his post-war films.
In the years before the war in Shochiku, the most unbearable thing about Naruse was that Shochiku's company, Toshiro Toshiro, also regarded Naruse as another Ozu, and directly told him, "We don't need two Ozu." At that time, Naruse was restricted from shooting similar subjects to directors such as Ozu, Hiroshi Shimizu, and Hiranosuke Gosho, and he had to find a new path. This also directly led to his later departure from Shochiku.
Nowadays, when people look back at Naruse's works, of course, they will no longer ignore his dazzling post-war masterpieces, but there is still considerable neglect and underestimation of his pre-war creations. In fact, although he did not have a good time in Shochiku, Naruse still made a number of quite good films, including "Farewell to Jun" (1933), "Three Sisters as Asakusa" (1935), and "Wishing For a Wife Like a Rose" (1935).
Stills from "May The Wife Be Like a Rose", starring Naruse's first wife, HayatoChiko Chiba
Among them, "May the Wife Be Like a Rose" is the first best work of the year selected by the "Film Shunbao", and it is also the first Japanese film to be commercially screened in the Western world, because this film that is very different from the traditional Japanese female image is known to the West for the first time. Critics in both Japan and the West regard it as one of the best works of Japanese cinema before the war.
However, as the world war II spread, Naruse's filmmaking also stagnated like most directors. After the war, he joined Shochiku's most powerful rival, Toho Corporation, and quickly returned his career to the top.
The beginning of recovering from this stagnation was 1951's Ginza Makeup. The work returns to his familiar themes, revealing the lives of women who have been changed by circumstances, and the film's success also marks Naruse's rebirth.
Subsequently, Naruse found a wealth of inspiration in the works of his favorite female writer Fumiko Hayashi, and a series of classic films adapted from Fumiko Hayashi's novels came out.
The first was 1951's "Rice", which depicts a couple in crisis, but the crisis is never intuitively and obviously expressed, but presented in a very subtle and restrained way. This subtle and delicate approach to expression is considered comparable to Ozu's.
Lightning (1952) tells the story of an unmarried woman who tries to escape her lowly family circumstances, but ultimately fails to do so because she is unable to leave her mother to live alone. The Wife (1953) is about a wife who tries to prevent her husband from falling into the arms of another woman. Late Chrysanthemum (1954) depicts the life of a geisha, telling the lonely and desolate fate of four retired geisha in Tokyo.
Stills from "The Book of The Wave", Hideko Takayama as Fumiko Hayashi
The last adaptation of Hayashi Fumiko's novel, "The Book of The Wave" (1962), is also the most special, and Naruse brings Hayashi Fumiko's own autobiography to the screen. This film is a tragic transcript of the latter's early struggle to survive as a writer, and the image temperament of Fumiko Hayashi is both talented and arrogant.
A culmination of Naruse's film career in 1955's Floating Clouds, a film about a young woman's love affair with a married man during the war (which stretched into the post-war period). The protagonist of the film, Yukiko's persistence and dedication to this unrequited love, makes the viewer sigh, and the widowed man finally lets her harvest the love she dreamed of before her life is about to disappear.
Stills from "Floating Clouds", starring Hideko Takayama and Masayuki Senya
Floating Clouds can be seen as a watershed moment in Naruse's postwar work, and from Floating Clouds onwards, his theme changed from family to concern for those who did not die in the war. Unlike many other directors whose critiques of World War II tend to blame the war itself, Naruse's later works tend to express that life after the war was the real ordeal.
Especially for the majority of women who have lost their husbands, the sense of loss in both material and spiritual aspects is even more evident in the loss of family support and partners. "Floating Clouds" ranks second among the best works in the history of Japanese cinema selected by the "Movie Shunbao", and it is also a masterpiece that even Ozu admires himself.
Naruse's later works, When a Woman Walks Up the Stairs (1960), A History of a Woman (1963), A Confused Affair (1964), and A Cloud of Chaos (1967), all revolve around a woman who lost her husband to war. These women who are forced to live alone, in addition to facing the hardships and sufferings of life, often have to face the cold eyes and unfair treatment of relatives and friends around them.
On the one hand, they need to bear the burden of the whole family, on the other hand, they must also be careful to maintain the traditional family ethics, and even satisfy the exploitation of some delicious and lazy relatives and friends who are insatiable. And their feelings are often bound by traditional concepts such as chastity, so they can only bury the germinated emotions deep in their hearts, and use their own sacrifices to achieve the happiness of the whole family or others. His sympathy and concern for women seemed ahead of its time and modern.
Naruse and Hideko Takayama
Most of these works are starring the famous actress Hideko Takayama, from 1941's "Conductor Hideko" to 1966's "Crash and Escape", Hideko Takayama starred in 17 films of Naruse in 25 years, and is the latter's most important partner, and it is she who has interpreted Naruse's unique feminine qualities.
Whether in the earlier adaptations of Fumiko Hayashi or in the last films shot by Naruse in the 1960s, the women played by Hideko Takayama always had an optimistic and independent temperament that was incompatible with Japanese society at that time.
This personal temperament of hers has rubbed a touch of warmth and brightness into Naruse's gloomy and depressing films, and also allowed Naruse's films not to fall into the abyss of nihilism, but to move towards a more peaceful and self-satisfied mood. The cooperation between Naruse and Hideko has undoubtedly become a golden partner in film history that can be compared with "Kurosawa -Mifune Toshiro", "Ozu-Hara Setsuko", and "Mizoguchi-Tanaka Atsuyo".
Naruse was silent and taciturn during his lifetime, always giving the impression of being depressed. Even Hideko Takayama and his second wife, Naruse, consider him a "gloomy," "serious," and "terrible" person. He didn't like assistant directors to call himself Sir, and he didn't like to sit in the back seat of a car driven by a private driver, almost like an "ancient samurai" like an "ancient samurai."
Although he has children, Naruse does not have much family life, and all his energy seems to be devoted to work. Masao Tamai, who has been Naruse's photographer for years, said he knew nothing about Naruse's private life, and Hideko Takayama had never even had a drink with him.
In his 47-year film career, Naruse has been gently subordinate to the studio's systems and arrangements, always completing his work on time and in quantity. He is not as good at seeking more favorable conditions and positions for himself as his more fiery Toho colleague Akira Kurosawa, nor is he as good at personally asking every detail of the shooting as the harsh Ozu did. He almost never speaks during filming, and if a shot is not satisfied, it is up to the actors themselves to adjust and repeat it until he is satisfied.
Although the studio always imposed strict restrictions on his time and money, Naruse never forgot his responsibility as a director for a film. He understands that the film will eventually have to sign the name of the director, and he also knows how to integrate his gradually formed style into his film.
In the more than half a century after his death, his films have not only never diminished their brilliance, but have been discovered and valued by more and more people. His own private life and story have been forever lost in history.