Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman
July 3–December 21, 2025
Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman offers a rare opportunity to see many of Naruse’s great films chronicling the lives of ordinary people—from his 1935 international hit Wife! Be Like a Rose! (the first Japanese talkie to screen in the United States) to his magnificent movies of the 1960s.
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Mikio Naruse: Floating Clouds (1955)
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Mikio Naruse: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)
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Mikio Naruse: A Wife’s Heart (1956)
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Mikio Naruse: Lightning (1952)
- Upcoming
Films - Past
Films - Past
Events
Upcoming Films
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1960BAMPFA Collection
Thursday, July 3 7 PMView DetailsEssential Mikio Naruse. “An elegant essay in black-and-white CinemaScope and tinkling cocktail jazz, this tale of a bar hostess’s attempt to escape her lot could give heartbreak lessons to [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and [Douglas] Sirk” (Village Voice).
Hideko the Bus Conductor
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1941Thursday, July 10 7 PMView DetailsHideko Takamine stars as the teenage ticket taker for a bus line that has seen better days in this charming comedy, the first of her seventeen films with Mikio Naruse. Screening with The Whole Family Works, a chronicle of a family’s struggle to make ends meet during the depression and the war with China, the social costs of which are never mentioned but keenly felt.
Lightning
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1952Saturday, July 12 4:30 PMView DetailsAdapted from a Fumiko Hayashi novel, and starring Mikio Naruse’s favorite actress, Hideko Takamine, this major work illuminates one of the director’s key themes: entrapment within the family system.
Floating Clouds
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1955Wednesday, July 16 7 PMView DetailsThis epic story of wartime lovers separated by a wretched peace is a richly evocative portrait of postwar Tokyo and an endlessly fascinating character study. It is revered in Japan as the ultimate masterpiece of Mikio Naruse’s career and a high point for star Hideko Takamine.
Flowing
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1956Saturday, July 19 7 PMView DetailsIt’s hard to find a more impressive trio of actresses than Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Isuzu Yamada. Mikio Naruse’s tale of geishas in decline is “a tangle of subtle relationships. . . . Quietly brilliant filmmaking” (Village Voice).
A Wife’s Heart
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1956Friday, July 25 7 PMView DetailsHideko Takamine plays a young woman working to raise enough money to open her own coffee shop. When her family takes the money to fund her sister’s wedding, she arranges a loan, but her husband is wary of the loan officer (Toshiro Mifune).
Untamed
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1957Thursday, July 31 7 PMView DetailsOshima (Hideko Takamine) experiences a series of failed relationships as she works toward financial independence and self-realization. “Hideko Takamine’s performance . . . is among her most active and energetic and her character is one of the most liberated in [Mikio] Naruse’s oeuvre.”
Daughters, Wives, and a Mother
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1960Friday, August 8 7 PMView DetailsDaughters, Wives, and a Mother features a stellar cast in a saga of a comfortable suburban family’s unraveling after the family home is mortgaged.
A Wanderer’s Notebook
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1962Sunday, August 10 4 PMView DetailsA revealing biopic, based on the journals of Fumiko Hayashi, the writer Mikio Naruse most frequently adapted, and starring his favorite actress, Hideko Takamine, who gives an “amazingly detailed, unglamorized portrait of the writer . . . imbued with a strong passion for life and writing” (National Film Theatre, London).
Yearning
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1964Friday, August 15 7 PMView DetailsA war widow keeps the family store and her heart in check long after she should have remarried. “Whatever else it is—a critique of the economics of the family, among other things—Yearning is also a poem on the beauty of Hideko Takamine” (Boston Phoenix).
Wife! Be Like a Rose!
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1935Sunday, August 17 5 PMView DetailsMikio Naruse’s warm, funny-sad tale of a girl who tries to unite her poetess mother and estranged father “is presented with a simplicity and a seriousness. . . . The result is one of the most moving films I know” (The Nation).
Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts
Mikio Naruse
Japan, 1935Saturday, August 23 4:30 PMView DetailsTokyo’s lively Asakusa district comes alive in Mikio Naruse’s wonderful portrait of three modern girls who try to break away into love and marriage. Based on a Yasunari Kawabata novel.
Past Films
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