Naruse Mikio

The World without Hope and Pity

Auteuristic Themes and Style- What Naruse’s films are about ?・ Most of Naruse’s works belong to the genres of

shomin-geki (humourous dramas about common people) and melodrama

• Naruse’s 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?• Naruse’s films depict these issues in utterly

realistic manners.

Auteuristic Themes and Style

• Characters

• Never one-dimensional - every character in Naruse’s 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.

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’

• Naruse’s characters live in limbo - the world of eternal suffering.

• They deserve salvation and atonement.

• Buddhist ideology behind his films

Auteuristic Themes and Style

• Naruse’s 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.

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

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)

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)

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 children’s lives (Sophie’s Choice)

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

Melodrama Style

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

Melodrama Style

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

Naruse’s 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

Naruse’s 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

Naruse’s Melodrama Style

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

Naruse’s Melodrama Style

• ‘… [Naruse’s 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

Naruse’s 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.

Naruse’s Melodrama Style

• Some visual experimentations in early works

• Post-war films adopted naturalistic style

• In Ozu’s films everything is carefully arranged and meticulously calculated in mise-en-scène - stylized. Naruse’s 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

Naruse’s Melodrama Style

Naruse’s Melodrama Style

Naruse’s 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

Naruse’s 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 Michiyo’s suspicion about her husband’s relationship with her niece represented by images in eye-line match rather than words.

• In Floating Clouds the similar match when Yukiko suspects her husband’s relationship with a bar woman.