Early Naruse: Five Silents and a Talkie

A coda to our extensive Naruse retrospective of summer including one film, 1935’s exquisite talkie The Girl in the Rumor, that had been unavailable for the retro, Early Naruse focuses on the master’s first preternaturally confident steps as a director, screening six of the earliest extant works in his filmography. Those familiar only with the relative restraint of Naruse’s later output may be astonished by the experimental flair and occasionally raucous humor of those silent films he made under contract to Shochiku. No mere juvenilia, these six pictures prove Naruse was, from jump, an artist with a probing social conscience and an insatiable curiosity about the emotional and pictorial possibilities of film form. Everyone has to start somewhere, yes, but if you happen to be Mikio Naruse, it turns out you start by touching the superlative.