![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/e8/01/001e01e8_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/e8/01/001e01e8.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
2xDVD9 + DVD5 (VIDEO_TS) | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 320 mins | Total: 17,84 Gb
Musical Score AC3 2.0 @ 384 Kbps | Japanese intertitles with optional English subtitles
Genre: Drama, Art-House | Japan
2xDVD9 + DVD5 (VIDEO_TS) | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 320 mins | Total: 17,84 Gb
Musical Score AC3 2.0 @ 384 Kbps | Japanese intertitles with optional English subtitles
Genre: Drama, Art-House | Japan
Mikio Naruse was one of the most popular directors in Japan, a crafter of exquisite melodramas, mostly about women confined by their social and domestic circumstances. Though often compared with Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi for his style and treatment of characters, Naruse was a unique artist, making heartrending, brilliantly photographed and edited films about the impossible pursuit of happiness. From the outset of his career, with his silent films of the early thirties, Naruse zeroed in on the lives of the kinds of people - geisha, housewives, waitresses - who would continue to fascinate him for the next three decades. Though he made two dozen silent films, only five remain in existence; these works - poignant, dazzlingly made dramas all - are collected here, newly restored and on DVD for the first time, and featuring optional new scores by noted musicians Robin Holcomb and Wayne Horvitz.
Criterion
It's sad to read in the liner notes for the new Eclipse set, Silent Naruse, that of the twenty-four films that the Japanese writer/director Mikio Naruse made in his first years of filmmaking, only the five contained here still exist. An early cinematic pioneer whose career spanned nearly half a century, he made eighty-nine films in total, and only about half of them have survived the decades since. In an age when film seems so permanent, and even the worst box office dud gets preserved in high-definition for future generations to suffer through, we can't forget that, once upon a time, the art of movies was mutable.
Thus, Mikio Naruse is a director that more of us probably know by name rather than by his work. He was an artist whose specialty was what was termed the "woman's picture." Like Douglas Sirk in the U.S., Naruse made movies that, for the most part, focused on family drama with a female center. Many of his films were emotional tales that explored the unique struggle of women in Japanese society–particularly those who lived on the fringe, either economically or socially, or sometimes both, one dictating the other. This peek into his earliest work confirms that these were issues he was concerned with from pretty much the get-go, though the core ideas would be ones that would develop over time, along with his style.
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================= DVD9 - Disc1 - 5,73 Gb =================
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/ef/01/001e01ef_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/ef/01/001e01ef.jpeg)
Flunky, Work Hard (1931) (Koshiben ganbare)
28 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
28 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
Mikio Naruse’s earliest film in circulation is a charming, breezy short about an impoverished insurance salesman, Okabe, who is desperate to sell a policy to a wealthy family, and his scrappy young son, whose fisticuffs among the other boys of their village put Okabe’s livelihood in jeopardy. This rare Naruse film about a father and son hints at some of the fluid technical experimentation that would come to define his first films.
IMDB
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/89/02/001e0289_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/89/02/001e0289.jpeg)
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/8a/02/001e028a_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/8a/02/001e028a.jpeg)
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No Blood Relation (1932) (Nasanu naka)
79 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
79 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
An actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim the daughter she abandoned years before—with the help of her gangster brother. Yet the child’s father, and especially her nurturing new stepmother, won’t give in to the mother’s demands so easily. With its mix of maternal melodrama and expressionistic flourish, No Blood Relation is a gripping example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, and features a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda.
IMDB
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/8f/02/001e028f_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/8f/02/001e028f.jpeg)
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/90/02/001e0290_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/90/02/001e0290.jpeg)
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================= DVD9 - Disc2 - 7,71 Gb =================
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/f4/01/001e01f4_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/f4/01/001e01f4.jpeg)
Apart from You (1933) (Kimi to wakarete)
60 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
60 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
For Apart from You, Mikio Naruse turned his camera on the lives of working women, which he would continue to do throughout his long career. Here, he contrasts the life of an aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her career, with that of her youthful counterpart, a lovely young girl resentful of her family for selling her into a life of ignominy. This gently devastating evocation of women’s limited options in Depression-era Japan was a critical breakthrough for the director.
IMDB
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/91/02/001e0291_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/91/02/001e0291.jpeg)
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/92/02/001e0292_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/92/02/001e0292.jpeg)
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Every-Night Dreams (1933) (Yogoto no yume)
65 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
65 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
A single mother works tirelessly as a Ginza bar hostess to ensure a better life for her young son. Her long-lost husband returns, vowing to find work and take care of both her and the child, yet his presence only complicates matters in this atmospheric study of lower-class life set in the dockside neighborhoods of Tokyo. Mikio Naruse’s Every-Night Dreams is a formally ravishing drama about the desperation of daily living.
IMDB
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/93/02/001e0293_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/93/02/001e0293.jpeg)
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/94/02/001e0294_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/94/02/001e0294.jpeg)
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================= DVD5 - Disc3 - 4,40 Gb =================
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/f7/01/001e01f7_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/f7/01/001e01f7.jpeg)
Street without End (1934) (Kagirinaki hodo)
88 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
88 minutes • Black & White • Japanese intertitles with English subtitles • Silent with optional score • 1.33:1
Mikio Naruse’s final silent film is a gloriously rich portrait of a waitress, Sugiko, whose life, despite a host of male admirers and even some intrigued movie talent scouts, ends up taking a suffocatingly domestic turn after a wealthy businessman accidentally hits her with his car. Featuring vividly drawn characters and an audacious commentary on politics and class in 1930s Japan, Street Without End is a grandly entertaining melodrama that brought Naruse deftly into the sound era.
IMDB
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/96/02/001e0296_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/96/02/001e0296.jpeg)
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/97/02/001e0297_medium.jpeg)
Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]
![Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [The Criterion Collection]](https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/97/02/001e0297.jpeg)
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Again, sometimes it's easy to see why a filmmaker, foreign or otherwise, is hailed for his or her work. No one would argue with those hailing the films of Fellini, or the deconstructionist designs of Godard. It's the outlying icons, though—the artists and artisans who helped forge the path toward preservation—that need remembering. For Mikio Naruse, there is a relatively small line of countrymen in front of him, a series of names almost every film fans knows. Hopefully, with the help of this box set, he can join their revered ranks. While perhaps not wholly indicative of his entire output, Silent Naruse both highlights his work and helps this important filmmaker get the recognition he deserves. That's the joy of perspective. That's the beauty of such a DVD delight.
ALL Credits goes to RBone.
No More Mirrors.