Tag: dir: Naruse Mikio

I have heard so much about the name Naruse Mikio, but I didn’t view his work until recently. Naruse Mikio, following after Ozu Yasujirô (I was born, but…), Mizoguchi Kenji (Sisters of the Gion) and Kurosawa Akira (No Regrets for Our Youth), has been universally acknowledged as the fourth master in the Japanese film industry. As a great masterpiece of the very extraordinary Japanese film director Naruse, the black-and-white movie When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) tells a story about a bar mama-san, Keiko (played by Takamine Hideko), who is faced with thee dilemma of deciding whether to start her own bar or to get married at the age of thirty, a turning point in a woman’s lifetime.

I would say that one of the most important reasons that the movie When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is so fascinating cannot be separated from the artistic achievement Naruse made in this film. People who are concerned about Japanese films would know that almost all Naruse’s movies are based on the theme of the fate of women. Without exception, this film also continues the style of his previous films with women in focus. However, Nareuse was not a radical feminist. Instead of portraying men as sinister monsters while showing women’s independence as their only way out, Naruse merely attempts to show Keiko’s disappointment in every man she wished to rely on within the nearly two hours film. Besides, unlike other female-styled directors who stubbornly close women in stifling spaces, on the contrary, Naruse tends to let Keiko, the heroine of his lens, travel around every corner of Tokyo, from the bar to the office, from the modern apartment to the slum.

In addition, through interspersing traditional Japanese women, who wear kimono and step mincingly on wooden clogs, among those Japanese women who are delicate-featured with western-styled dress, the director shows us that the post-war era commerce makes the elegant and traditional Japan seem degenerate. Last but not least, there is one brief scene that not only impressed me the most but also makes a very good interpretation of the title. It is the scene where Keiko climbs the stairs of the bar. The director uses a set of close-ups of Keiko’s face and feet, which brings the audience into the character’s inner world and makes the audience strongly feel the inner struggles and frustration endured by the central character Keiko as she has to walk towards a world that is full of an unpleasant smell of alcohol.

The amazing performance skills actress Takamine Hideko shows in this film are also worth mentioned. For instance, in interpreting Keiko’s reluctant mood as she walks towards a world that makes her feel disgusted, Takamine expresses these emotions in a natural way through the facial expression and even the rhythm of the pace. Because of her excellent performance in a variety of different roles in more than 50 films, Takamine won various film awards in Japan. So far, Takamine’s elegant style of performance and radiation of the charm of Japanese women still largely impresses the audience and makes the film rise to a higher realm. I believe that with the achievement Takamine made in the movie, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs will always attract a large audience of different generations and from different countries.

Overall, some people might question my point of view, but I think the film When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is an exciting film and a most important one.

WORK CITED

http://baike.baidu.com/view/543844.htm

In Japan, we can find a great number of films which are focused on women. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Onna ga kaidan o agaru toki, 1960), directed by Naruse Mikio, who especially specializes in movies featuring women as major characters (josei eiga), is one of the director’s masterpieces depicting a woman’s way of life. The heroine of this film is an employed bar proprietress, Keiko, called “mama” (Takamine Hideko) in Ginza. The genre of the work might be considered as both a melodrama and a satirical shomin-geki which is mainly set in Ginza’s nightlife in the 1960s. We might consider that a theme of the film is the misery of hostesses whose feelings are repeatedly trampled on by her customers who she is in love with. If we trace back the history of Japanese cinema, we also find a film which has a similar theme and setting, Sisters of the Gion (Gion no shimai, 1936), about the sorrow of being a geisha by Mizoguchi Kenji. It seems that Naruse and Mizuguchi’s works share both thematic and setting similarities; however it can be considered that the theme of the films are actually different because When a Woman Ascends the Stair was released twenty-four years later. Needless to say, Japan changed between 1936 to 1960 including its society and people. Naruse’s ingenious camerawork and character development help us probe into the real themes of the movie.

The story is set mainly in bars in Ginza, one of the famous entertainment districts of Tokyo. Keiko is suffering from a management of a bar where she works as an employed bar proprietress (mama) because her customers start going to a different bar which is owned by Yuri (Awaji Keiko), who used to work under Keiko. Being stimulated by Yuri’s high exasperation, Keiko starts to consider opening her own bar; however, Keiko learns that being a proprietress is not as easy as she thought. Some time after seeing Yuri, Keiko hears shocking news – Yuri’s death; she committed suicide because of enormous debt which she made from running a business. Moreover, Keiko finds out that Fujisaki (Mori Masayuki), a branch manager of bank whom Keiko is secretly in love with, is involved in the cause of her death. A sorrow of Yuri’s death and disgust towards Fujisaki lead Keiko to a physical and mental breakdown. She takes a break from work and goes back to her family house for treatment, but Keiko is tired of her mother and elder brother who keep sponging on Keiko for money even though she is sick. After Keiko returns to work from a sickbed, her feeling starts leaning towards Sekine (Kato Daisuke), a factory owner who has some resemblance to her deceased husband, who is fat but sweet to her. Her happiness is evanescent because she finds out about Sekine’s true nature – he is just a philandering man. When Keiko becomes severely intoxicated from her sadness, Fujisaki comes to her bar, and then Keiko and Fujisaki disappear to a nightclub; a bar manager Komatsu (Nakadai Tatsuya), meanwhile, keeps a close eye on her.

Through Naruse’s peculiar camerawork, we can examine a real theme which differs from Sisters of the Gion. In the film, Naruse uses medium shots or medium close-ups mainly in bar scenes with a stationary   camera, and the camera position is parallel with the audiences’ eye level; therefore, its distinctive camerawork makes the audiences feel like they are actually in the bar chatting with hostesses. Moreover, these techniques are often used when both Keiko and her clients are in a frame chatting at her bar. Naruse does not use tilt shots at all in bar scenes to show a power relation between hostesses and customers, so it shows that the director tries to capture a different perspective. Through his distinctive camerawork, it is actually hard to clarify a power relationship between Keiko and her clients. Another significant camerawork in the film is a close-up shot of Keiko’s feet when she ascends the narrow stairs where provides Keiko a space to transform to be a professional proprietress. Naruse uses the close-up shots of her feet to effectively depict her emotions; usually she walks up stairs weakly or sometimes stops walking when she faces hardships, and she skitters up stairs as if she freed herself from something in the end of the film. By comparing these two different scenes of the close-up shot of her feet, we clearly see that she becomes a woman with a forward-looking attitude.

The character development of Keiko significantly emphasizes the real theme of the film. In Sisters of the Gion, the movie ends with Omocha’s heartrending cry after facing lots of hardships with men and being a geisha, so the ending leads us to think that the theme of the movie is about the misery of being a geisha. However, in Naruse’s film, we do not see the image of a woman who is a victim of men even though she experiences repeated betrayals by men. Keiko hears that Fujisaki will transfer to Osaka the next day after they spend a night together, and she cries after he leaves her place. However, Naruse does not end his work with the theme which we can see in Mizoguchi’s work. Keiko goes to a train station to see Fujisaki off and returns money borrowed from him, and she maintains her dignified manner even in front of Fujisaki’s wife. This scene effectively shows that the image of a strong women who tried to be financially independent from men, and we do not see the image in Sister of the Gion because Omocha, the main character of the movie is always thinking how to sponge money and things from men. Ironically, Keiko takes all her hardships as tools which make her more mentally strong woman, but it displays a strength of a woman under difficult circumstances.

The image of women has changed over 24 years since 1936 when Sisters of the Gion was released because of the U.S. occupation after the Second World War. Hirano states that “the emancipation of women was one of the occupation’s top proprieties, and, in fact, equality of women was mandated by the 1947 Constitution of Japan.”[1] It explains to us the equal treatment of women in the film because the status and rights of women is elevated. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a key movie which offers a great source for us to think about the way of women’s lives in new Japan as it changed through the 20^th century.

---

[1] Hirano, Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation. 1945-52. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 182.