Revered in Japan alongside the work of such masters as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, the films of Mikio Naruse (1905-69) are at last again available to Western audiences, in a 36-film retrospective presented at AFI Silver and the Freer and National Galleries of Art. Even though he directed the first Japanese sound film to find distribution in the US (WIFE! BE LIKE A ROSE! 1935), Naruse remained largely unknown here throughout the sustained peak of his lengthy career. Despite championing by critics such as Susan Sontag, Phillip Lopate and Donald Richie, it has been some 20 years since the last US Naruse retrospective.

Raised in poverty and becoming a director only after a long, trying apprenticeship, Naruse specialized in shomin-geki, contemporary dramas about the poor and lower-middle classes. He's been compared stylistically to his close friend Ozu and was drawn, like Mizoguchi, to stories focusing on women. But Naruse's films are tougher, edgier and more modern than either. Kurosawa, Naruse's onetime assistant and great admirer, called his film style "like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths."

Thanks to James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario, and the Japan Foundation for making this series possible. Special thanks to Sarah Finklea, Janus Films; Tom Vick, Freer Gallery of Art; Peggy Parsons, National Gallery of Art. For information on films in this series that will not be shown at AFI Silver, visit the Freer and National Gallery of Art's Web sites (www.asia.si.edu and www.nga.gov).

All films NOT RATED. In Japanese with English subtitles. All the films in this series feature new 35mm prints.

"The frankness and thoroughness with which Naruse delves into lower-middle-class psychology reveals sides of life . . . which would have been utterly taboo in films of the West at the time."

--CRITIC AUDIE BOCK

AFI Member Passes will be accepted at all screenings in the Mikio Naruse Series.

HUSBAND AND WIFE

Struggling young couple Ken Uehara and Yoko Sugi move out of his parents' house to rent a room from eccentric Rentaro Mikuni. The staid Uehara becomes jealous when Sugi seems to favor the landlord with her attentions. Discovering she's pregnant, the couple grapples with the question of abortion.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Toshiro Ide and Yoko Mizuki; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto. Japan, 1953, b&w, 87 min.

WIFE

Based on a novel by pioneering feminist Fumiko Hayashi. Bored housewife Hideko Takamine neglects the housework, when not outright sabotaging it. But when she discovers her husband, Ken Uehara, is having an affair with his widowed secretary, she fights desperately to hold on to him.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Toshiro Ide, from the novel by Fumiko Hayashi; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto. Japan, 1953, b&w, 89 min.

MOTHER

This haha-mono, "mother picture," is distinctive for its wry humor, toughness and poignancy. Loving teenage daughter Kyoko Kagawa narrates the story of her mother, Kinuyo Tanaka's, struggle to keep the family laundry business going after the war and great personal loss. Japanese film historian Tadao Sato groups this film with Mizoguchi's LIFE OF OHARU and Kurosawa's IKIRU, all from 1952, as the beginning of "the second golden age of Japanese cinema."

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Yoko Mizuki; PROD Ichiro Nagashima. Japan, 1952, b&w, 98 min.

OLDER BROTHER, YOUNGER SISTER

Machiko Kyo returns home from Tokyo pregnant after an affair with a college student--a scandal that will threaten the marriage prospects of the younger sister in her cash-strapped family. Roughneck brother Masayuki Mori decides to take on the role of disciplinarian, with harrowing results. "OLDER BROTHER, YOUNGER SISTER presents a family trapped by its own construction, each member unable to move because of the others."--Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film.

DIR Mikio Naruse, SCR Yoko Mizuki, from the novel by Saisei Muro; PROD uncredited. Japan, b&w, 1953, 86 min.

LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS

An expert combination of three Fumiko Hayashi stories, justly celebrated as one of Naruse's greatest works. Retired geisha Haruko Sugimura spends most of her time loan-sharking to former geisha friends, all of whom seem to have children with whom they're disappointed, yet on whom they depend. Sugimura is hard-bitten, cynical and condescending to her debtors, but her tough posturing is tested when former lover Ken Uehara turns up.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Sumue Tanaka and Toshiro Ide; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto. Japan, 1954, b&w, 101 min.

SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN

The sublime Setsuko Hara, best known in Yasujiro Ozu's films, did some of her finest work for Naruse. Here she gives a moving performance as the wife of boozing, womanizing Ken Uehara. Despairing of her unhappy marriage, she considers terminating her concealed pregnancy. So Yamamura shines as the wise father-in-law with whom she forms a unique friendship. Based on a novel by Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Yoko Mizuki, from the novel by Yasunari Kawabata; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto. Japan, 1954, b&w, 96 min.

FLOATING CLOUDS

For many this was Naruse's artistic pinnacle-- his greatest commercial success and Kinema Jumpo's Best One winner of 1955. Hideko Takamine and Masayuki Mori, wartime lovers in lush Indochina, are reunited amid the bombedout rubble of postwar Tokyo. While they renew their affair, Mori is emotionally ambivalent and refuses to leave his wife. Singularly undeterred, Takamine sinks to ever more ruinous depths in her all-out attempts to regain their lost love.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Yoko Mizuki, from the novel by Fumiko Hayashi; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto. Japan, 1955, b&w, 123 min.

SUDDEN RAIN

Reuniting Naruse with star Setsuko Hara after the triumphs of REPAST and SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN, this wry chamber piece focuses on a couple whose pet peeves and minor irritations escalate into major rifts and animosity. External pressures--money woes, needy relatives and problem neighbors--are catalysts for Hara and husband Shuji Sano to disagree even more. They are near the breaking point when a lighthearted diversion points them toward hopeful reconciliation.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR uncredited; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto. Japan, 1956, b&w, 91 min.

FLOWING

Scholar Phillip Lopate ranks FLOWING as one of Naruse's three masterpieces, alongside LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS and FLOATING CLOUDS. Hired as a maid in a once-proud geisha house, Kinuyo Tanaka observes the last days of this dying world in postwar Tokyo. Mistress Isuzu Yamada, drowning in debt, plays samisen to chase her blues away, but it's only a matter of time before she will be forced to sell or go the bordello route. The future of daughter Hideko Takamine hangs in the balance.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Toshiro Ide, from the novel by Aya Koda; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto. Japan, 1956, b&w, 117 min.

A WIFE'S HEART

After the hardships of losing her father and watching the family business decline, Hideko Takamine saves her money to strike out on her own, hoping to open a coffee shop. Without her consent, her family appropriates the money to fund her sister's wedding. Not to be deterred, Takamine gets a loan from the bank, making her husband jealous when he suspects she is having an affair with the handsome, helpful loan officer.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Toshiro Ide; PROD Sanezumi Fujimoto and Masakatsu Kaneko. Japan, 1956, b&w, 101 min.

REPAST

In this film, a favorite of the late Susan Sontag, Setsuko Hara gives a brilliantly nuanced performance as an Osaka housewife who feels trapped in her marriage to a stockbroker. A surprise visit from the husband's niece, on the run from her parents, galvanizes Hara. She takes the troublesome young woman back home to Tokyo--and contemplates never returning to her husband. Profound and subtle, this is "one of Naruse's finest works," said critic Audie Bock.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR Toshiro Ide and Sumie Tanaka, from the novel by Fumiko Hayashi; PROD Fumio Haysaka. Japan, 1951, b&w, 97 min.

WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS

"An elegant essay in black and white and tinkling cocktail jazz," wrote critic J. Hoberman, "the last classic of Japan's pre-New Wave golden age." Young widow Hideko Takamine, bar hostess at a fashionable Ginza nightclub, dreams of opening her own place but cannot escape her debilitating problems. Her stumbling blocks are symbolized by the flight of stairs she ascends each evening to work while others are heading home.

DIR Mikio Naruse; SCR/PROD Ryuzo Kikushima. Japan, 1960, b&w, 111 min.