Mikio Naruse: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:49, 27 February 2006

Revision as of 16:18, 28 February 2006

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Naruse is known as particularly exemplifying the Japanese concept of ''[[mono no aware]]''.

His films contain very simple screenplays, with minimal dialogue, unobstructive camera work and low-key production design. HisEarlier films areemploy a more experimental, expressionist style, but he is best known for the style of his later work: deliberately slow and leisurely, designed to magnify the everyday drama of ordinary Japanese people’s trials and tribulations, and leaving maximum scope for his actors to portray psychological nuances in every glance, gesture and movement.

He is known for filming economically. He often used money- and time-saving techniques that other directors shunned, such as shooting each actor delivering his or her lines of dialogue separately, and then splicing them together into chronological order in post-production (this reduced the amount of film wasted with each retake, and allowed a dialogue scene to be filmed with a single camera). Perhaps unsurprisingly, money is itself a major theme in these films, possibly reflecting Naruse's own childhood experience of poverty: Naruse is an especially mordant observer of the financial struggles within the family (as in ''Ginza Cosmetics'', 1951, where the female protagonist ends up supporting all her relatives by working in a bar, or ''A Wife's Heart'', 1956, where a couple is swindled out of a bank loan by the in-laws).