Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us

Описание: “Over a career spanning four decades from 1930 to 1967, Mikio Naruse bore witness to the making of modern Japan, before and after World War II, in films that primarily examine the cruel condition of women cast adrift in a society in constant, convulsive upheaval. Chiefly a director of melodramas for famed studio Toho, often in the shoshimin (common people) genre, Naruse was a revered women’s director, guiding the era’s most iconic actresses, including Setsuko Hara, Kinuyo Tanaka, and, above all, the indefatigable Hideko Takamine, to many of their greatest performances.

Formerly demoted by Japanese and Western critics alike in favor of his friend Yasujirō Ozu, a conspicuously idiomatic stylist, the notoriously taciturn Naruse left behind a quieter, more unassuming body of work that today reveals itself as an equally essential contribution to modern cinema, inspiring filmmakers from Ann Hui and Hou Hsiao-hsien to Park Chan-wook and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Marked by the understated fluency of its formal rigor, the drab realism of its settings, and its themes of personal dreams extinguished by economic deprivation, gender inequality, and the failure of traditional kinship structures, Naruse’s thoroughly disillusioned cinema only grows more ripe for reconsideration as our postwar global consensus barrels toward collapse. ‘From the earliest age I have thought that the world we live in betrays us,’ the director said, ‘this thought remains with me.

Co-organized with Japan Society and Japan Foundation, New York, Metrograph is pleased to commemorate this master of Japanese cinema’s golden age with a two-part 30-film retrospective—presented entirely on rare film prints imported from archives and collections in Japan—on the 120th anniversary of his birth.

Tickets will go on-sale April 30th.

Special thanks to Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Alexander Fee (Japan Society), Mako Fukata; Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive); Shun Inoue, Akinaru Rokkaku (Japan Foundation, New York); Shion Komatsu (Toho); Rikako Kosugiyama (National Film Archive of Japan); Kate MacKay (BAMPFA); Tony Stella

Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part I will be presented at Japan Society from May 9 – 31, 2025