NCTATNY. Naruse.

"Naruse is one of the greatest of all directors, absolutely the equal of Ozu and Mizoguchi, and consequently one of the three towering figures of Japanese cinema," argues Ian Johnston, introducing a Not Coming to a Theater Near You special feature, "Flowing: The Films of Mikio Naruse." All in all, ten films are reviewed by Johnston and Leo Goldsmith.

Back to that intro:

But it still seems necessary to place Naruse in relation to Ozu and Mizoguchi and in particular to address the issue of his film style. It's absolutely true that Naruse's films do not display style in the way that the other two directors do. Stylistically, Mizoguchi's films are characterised by a refined and exquisite pictorial beauty, long takes, and lengthy and elegant camera movements. With Ozu, we have the consistent tropes of the excessively low-angle "tatami" shot, the increasing exclusion of camera movement, the crossing-the-line eye-line mismatching that forms the basis of an editing system, and the formalist abstraction of the "pillow" shots of clothes lines, chimneys, and so forth.

Naruse's style is, in comparison, a more "invisible" one that is in the first place put in the service of the story, of the characters and the emotions in any given scene. It's a quieter form of filmmaking, which repays an equally quiet attention on the part of the viewer to the way Naruse builds up a scene with a steady progression of shots; and the way each scene segues into the next in a graceful flow.

Posted by dwhudson at December 1, 2007 1:09 PM