This series, which continues through May at PFA, is presented in the U.S. by The Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Japan Film Center, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The series was organized by the Kawakita Memorial Film Library in Tokyo with the help of Audie Bock.
Audie Bock is the author of Japanese Film Directors and a forthcoming study of Mikio Naruse to be published by University of California Press. She has taught Japanese Cinema at Yale University and Harvard University and is a frequent contributor to the PFA Calendar.
A program catalogue written and edited by Audie Bock may be purchased at Pacific Film Archive and at the Museum Bookstore.
Mikio Naruse, like his contemporary Ozu, raised the shomin geki genre--quiet melodramas of lower-middle-class life--to a level of supreme artistry. Film Center director Richard Peña has called Naruse's a “curiously modern sensibility,” adding: “Like those of Ozu, Naruse's films depend upon a careful, supremely subtle modulation of framing, gesture and camera angle.... Naruse might be seen as the progenitor of a ‘cinema of restraint.' Ozu's characters seem preternaturally calm; Naruse's seem held in check, always threatening to break down, yet rarely doing so. The world of his films is composed of so many tiny cells, the visual evocation of the societal pressures his characters sense all around them...‘so that' (as the director has said) ‘if the characters moved just a little bit, they'd bump into walls'....”
