Naruse worked for the Shochiku film company, as did Ozu and Mizoguchi, he was forced out because his style was considered too similar to Ozu, and so he eventually moved to the Toho Company. Like Ozu, Naruse’s films often explore domestic conflicts between married couples or parent and child or the burden of finance on an individual, as well as employing the Japanese concept of ‘Mono no aware’ which can be translated as either ‘the pathos of things’ or ‘empathy towards things’. Of course comparisons with Ozu are instantly invoked by the presence of Setsuko Hara in the leading role of Sound of the Mountain (she also starred in Naruse’s previous film Repast). But when we compare an Ozu and Naruse film side by side the differences are quite clear to see, although both were minimalist film makers and both made films about ordinary people, Naruse’s films tend to lean towards more convention photography and are also noticeably more melodramatic (and I mean ‘melodramatic’ in the truest sense of the term, as in a drama played out to music.) Where Ozu generally avoids using music in his films, Naruse wholeheartedly embraces the tool. P.Lopate comments on the comparison between the two directors in the essay: A Taste For Naruse: “Naruse hardly seems like an Ozu copycat…Naruse showed people living much closer to the edge than Ozu did. Ozu’s is a gentler, middle class world where manners are still respected and a rude word can cause a character to burst into tears. In the same situation a Naruse character might shrug or laugh in the other person’s face… Perhaps the main difference is that Naruse is dealing mainly with urban poor, where such time-consuming, stereotypically ‘Japanese’ manners might be considered a luxury.” (P36-7) But Sound of the Mountain is one of the examples of Nurse’s films where he does deal with a Middle class world; based on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata, (the first Japanese author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) the story follows a Japanese family, the dynamic of which is of principle importance to the film, the daughter-in-law Kikuko (Setsuko Hara) and her husband Shuichi (Ken Uehara) are in an unhappy marriage due to Shuichi’s excessive drinking and constant infidelity, meanwhile his father Shingo (So Yamamura) fails to confront his sons failings and instead treats Kikuko with greater affection to compensate. Shuichi get in late most evenings, leaves the home on Sundays, neglects and generally doesn’t appreciate Kikuko’s efforts to keep him comfortable and happy, he publicly derides her saying “You’re good with children, you behave like a child”, ignorant of her true nature at best, attempting to surreptitiously justify his unforgivable behaviour at worst. He’s apparently planning to leave Kikuko but either isn’t sure he wants to or isn’t sure he wants to be with his mistress. The couple are childless, but in an interesting parallel, Shuichi’s sister has many children and has just recently left her husband to move in with her parents again, Shuichi simply ignores his father most of the time, where as his sister openly attacks the father, blaming him for not checking out her husband more closely before making her marry him. Shingo protects his son or rather refuses to attack his son through most of the film, his non-confrontational attitude is bred from his lack of understanding for the opposite sex and an inherited sexist attitude that refuses to criticise anyone of the same gender when it comes to their own personal issues (this of course extends to marital problems) his wife defends his lack of understanding, identifying that ‘women experience sadness differently to men’ that’s why men can’t understand women. In a lot of ways the film is about the differences between the sexes, and how the embedded familial structure and tradition dictates the behaviour of the family, but that tradition only stretches so far. The father slowly begins to realise how foolish his son actually is when people begin informing him about his son’s behaviour away from home. Shingo tries to battle against his sense of tradition and decorum, and goes all the way to see his son’s mistress to ask her to stop seeing his son, unwilling to confront Shuichi, perhaps this is the only course left to him, but then he stops at the house and is too afraid to go inside.
Sound of the Mountain covers interesting sociological grounds and as a domestic drama it is as effective as any of Ozu’s films of the same time period (Tokyo Story, Late Spring or Early Summer). Whilst sharing many of the same actors as Tokyo Story, (Hara, Yamamura, and Teruko Nagaoka all starring in that film one year earlier) Sound of the Mountain is still a unique film and Naruse is still a unique director. His particular brand of sober visuals, his continuous use of mid shots (he rarely breaks to wides or close-ups) can at first seem monotonous and uninventive, but his dedication to this style renders it unique amongst the Japanese cinema at the time. He has been sharply criticised in the past as being too Western in his approach and Sound of the Mountain is no exception. But Naruse makes character films in contemporary settings; there is nothing abstract or extravagant about them, nothing that warrants the flamboyance or decadence of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or the meditative abstraction of Ozu. Even the films establishing shots are meticulous in their repetition, every time the action moves back to the family home this is established by the same shot peering down the adjacent alleyway of the house, each time there is a slightly different camera position but the angle remains the same. There is something suffocating relentless about his style as Audi Bock comments in The Art of the Sidelong Glane: The Cinema of Mikio Naruse: “Naruse’s most frequent producer at the Toho Studios… told me he found the director’s pacing extremely irritating. He complained bitterly that there were no peaks and valleys in Naruse’s style, no moments of relaxation between the battles the way Kurosawa fashioned his films… Naruse’s characters never get relief or release… The pace of their rush toward destruction never lets up, pile upon pile of medium shots, thousands of fast cuts pushing the protagonist towards a life of loneliness or self-sacrifice or oblivion and death.” (p19)
"Naruse's is an actor-orientated cinema... He has been justly celebrated as a great director of actresses... Thus, it comes as somewhat of a surprise to learn that he rarely coached his actors. One actress has left us a funny reminiscence of her experience with the director: 'Mr. Naruse was more than merely reticent; he was a person whose refusal to talk was downright malicious. Even during the shooting of a picture, he would never say if something was good or bad, interesting or trite. He was a completely unresponsive director'... It is said that the great Carl Theodor Dreyer generated a sort of energy field around him; more important than any verbal advice was the way he would walk over to an actor and touch him on the shoulder... So it may be that Naruse, through his own stoical, uncommunicative manner on set, generated a force field that was so strong that the actors could not help but fall into the right, desperate mood, expressing what has been called his 'vision of entrapment'." (Philip Lopate, A Taste For Nurse, P51-4) The high standards of performances in Sound of the Mountain are epitomised by Hara, who is arguably the finest female actor working at the time in Japan and indeed the rest of the world, and although she is not the protagonist of the film, despite what the films 1950’s marketing would like you to think (she is easily the most prominent figure on the films poster) she is the heart and soul of film. As in Tokyo Story, Repast or Late Spring, her unique screen presence lends Sound of the Mountain a value that no amount of film trickery can fake or recreate. Easily mocked as having a coat hanger in her mouth because of her almost constant smiling, and equally type cast as the quintessential ‘good girl’. But she is rightly cast in such roles because of the depth she was able to give them that other actors at the time could not, none of her peers possess such a memorable on-screen persona. Hara is an interesting character herself, remaining single and childless throughout her career (an uncommon move at the time) and eventually quitting acting the same year that Ozu died and retreating into solitude, she has since stated that she never took any joy from acting and only did it to provide for her family. Catherine Russell comments on Hara in her essay Sound of the Mountain: Naruse as Modernist: "By 1954 Hara had acquired the iconic power of Japan's 'eternal virgin' having starred in a long series of war films, followed by Kurosawa's 'democracy' picture No Regrets for our Youth, followed by a string of Ozu home dramas... Her star image was thus closely bound to the national imagery, in which the ideology of the virgin harboured an ideal of cultural purity. Hara's screen presence was one of tight control, under which a current of strong emotion can often be detected. Part of her popular appeal was due to a certain honesty and integrity of character, enhanced by the home drama genre that kept her in extremely plain costumes. However she also excelled in expressing highly contradictory and conflicting emotions. She can be at once hopeful and doubtful at marriage proposals; she laughs when she is most sad and cries when she is most happy. The contradictions and tensions within Hara's star image are very much bound up with a nativitst sensibility, a longing for the past combined with recognition of the impossibility of such a return." (P132-5) Naruse is a master of cinema who deserves acknowledgement for his 'visions of entrapment', and for the depths of his work. Kurosawa once described Naruse’s work as “a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths” which is possibly the most accurate summary of his work ever uttered. Having frequently commented on the natural comparisons between Naruse and Ozu I conclude that Naruse is more accessible than Ozu, but that is not to imply more populist. Naruse’s films are often in danger of falling between two stools, neither as unorthodox as Ozu nor as crowd-pleasing as Kurosawa. The halfway house in which Naruse’s work resides is perhaps the reason why his films have been neglected when it comes to international distribution (obviously coupled with the usual issues of international rights and lack of subtitles) it is a real tragedy that most of his films remain unavailable, however as time goes on perhaps more distributors like Eureka! Masters of Cinema, the BFI, Second Run or Artificial Eye will obtain his lesser known works. M.Dawson |
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Japan is often cited as having one of the most exciting national cinematic outputs, and no decade better exemplifies this than the 1950’s. If we refine our search to the minds behind Japanese cinema within those ten years, then the usual names appear. Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Akria Kurosawa are usually synonymous with the renowned high quality, but one name that is often overlooked is Mikio Naruse. With some eight-nine films to his name as director, starting in 1930 and ending in 1969 at least thirty of which he wrote as well (he wrote less and less in the middle of his career which was in part due to painful break-up with his wife, after which he entered a period of depression). Only six of his films are currently available on DVD in the UK, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), Floating Clouds (1955) Late Chrysanthemums (1958), Flowing (1956), Repast (1951), and the subject of this weeks article Sound of the Mountain (1954).
Modernity overwhelms tradition in Sound of the Mountain, times are changing and the difference in values between the generations is widening with neither the older or the younger completely understanding the other. Kikuko is impregnated by her neglectful husband and secretly has an abortion because she couldn’t bear to have his children whilst he’s drinking and is continually unfaithful. This is risky subject matter for the time and uncommon within Japanese cinema for a protagonist to go to such lengths and seem justified in her actions. The older generation are of course appalled by these actions, but perhaps surprisingly Kikuko is never portrayed or treated as anything less than a victim in this matter. Later Shingo learns of his son’s violent behaviour towards his mistress, in another interesting and ironic parallel, she wants to keep the baby but Shuichi doesn’t, we learn that he beat his mistress and threw her down the stairs trying to give her a miscarriage but it hasn’t worked. Shingo remains weak and impotent as Shuichi’s father, even after all the respect he has for his son has been eradicated, Shingo still refuses to confront Shuichi, and the best he can do is offer his son’s mistress some money to help with the baby, she derides him and his token gesture as simply consolation money ‘would you like me to write you a receipt” she sneers at him. Naruse doesn’t show the conflict between the generations in a typically adversarial fashion (at least not within the main narrative) but instead chooses to demonstrate how the lack of understanding between the older and the younger breed indifference and distance. What Shuichi needs is for his mother and father to show contempt for his actions, but he is a man now and so his parents have no right to interfere no matter how alien or abhorrently dishonourable his actions may appear to them. Instead Shingo quietly contemplates his failure as a father, musing that the success of a parent is determined by the success of their children’s marriages in which case he’s failed completely as both his son and his daughters marriages have collapsed.
Naruse’s pessimism is up for debate, the quoted authors in this article Bock and Lopate disagree on this point, Bock argues that his films are relentlessly bleak and Lopate points to the general air of ambiguity in Naruse’s climaxes as notes of optimism and argues that Naruse enthusiasts do the director a disservice by trying to carve out a place for him in Japanese cinema as the great pessimist. Whilst both sides of the argument have value, I would need to see more of Naruse’s films to form a firm opinion on the matter, suffice to say that Sound of the Mountain is a downbeat film for most of its runtime but there are brief moments of humour and although the eventual outcome is far from conclusive it does have a note of hopefulness depending on your interpretation of the final scene. More than this, at the centre of the film is a sweet and carefully drawn relationship between Shingo and Kikuko, we begin the film with Shingo attempting to explain to Kikuko about the human head being like a giant sunflower, and how he wishes he could send his head of for cleansing. The body would be able to rest for a week without any intrusions - even dreams. Kikuko laughs at his ridiculous ramblings and judges him through her laughter as ‘too funny’, as Shingo’s son increasingly neglects Kikuko, Shingo himself draws closer to her but without ever pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Indeed as Shingo feels forced later in the film to intervene and confront Shuichi’s lover, we get a sense that this is more for Kikuko’s benefit than Shuichi’s. Although he fails to realise that the best course of action for the couple at this point is in all probability separation, his heart is in the right place when he attempts to right the wrongs of his son. How could such a heart-felt if flawed relationship be viewed as pessimistic? Surely its very presence establishes a very firm belief in humanity and the wonderfulness of kindred spirits finding one and other, although Kikuko’s actions are sad and desperate, ultimately she is correct, her life will be better if she’s not tied to her husband by the presence of their offspring. Coupled with how the narrative portrays this sympathetic daughter/father-in-law relationship is the mesmerising understated quality of Hara and Yamamura’s performances, this is of course one area where Ozu and Naruse can be compared and are arguably equals; for all of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi’s skills as visual story-tellers both frequently allowed their actors to fall into more theatrical performances and what would be considered over-acting by today’s standards. The performances in Naruse’s films are by contrast far subtler, and indeed can be counted as some of the more nuanced performances from across the world at the time. In general as film acting has progressed it has become more nuanced, ‘less is more’ is a common mantra amongst contemporary film actors, but in the 1950’s this certainly wasn’t the case, for Naruse, Ozu and perhaps some of Italian Neo Realists like Vittorio De Sica (specifically his classic Bicycle Thieves) the now modern approach to performances was their preferred norm. Although the emotions might not always be present, there is more of an emphasis on the delicate subtleties of characterisation and performance. If we consider an American film produced in the same year as Sound of the Mountain (Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront for example) then the difference becomes clear, where what was once considered a ‘great’ performance by the standards of the time would, if judged by today’s standards, seem exaggerated and ham-fisted. No such claim can be made about the performances in Sound of the Mountain. Lopate comments again on the quality of the acting in Naruse’s films:
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