Harvard Film Archive Spotlights Japanese Director Mikio Naruse

The Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective “Floating Clouds…The Cinema of Naruse Mikio,” through November 3, offers 45 films, many capturing shōshimin-eiga (the dramas of ordinary people). The director, active between 1930 and 1967, is known for a desolate, yet not unrealistic, outlook. Many narratives “magnified the movements within human relationships as intimate responses to historical change,” notes the archive’s contributing writer Kelley Dong. After World War II, his works often highlighted women and their experiences with love, work, and family, as in Floating Clouds, Sound of the Mountain, and Flowing. Existentialism shone through, too. Scattered Clouds, his final film, reflects on the modern idea, Dong writes, “that the solitude of independence invokes both immeasurable pleasure and devastating grief because it marks the death of the past.”