It is said that Mikio Naruse never
really liked using Cinema Scope. There might have been a commercial pressure to
use this format from up to the late 1950s. Nevertheless, I can´t
agree with him, one of his first films in Cinema Scope proofs that
this spectacular format can be also used for these family dramas
which are only existent in Japanese Cinema. One of the main
characters (as far as we can speak in a shomingeki film about a main
character at all) is a young war widow who has a son. At the
beginning she is interviewed by a journalist who is interested in the
life of farmers. Very soon she begins a love affair with him. This affair
is rather subtle indicated but how so much masters of Japanese
cinema, there is no need for more. Her elder brother wants to marry
off his children. But most of them resist and insisting to live their
own life. Marriages in the films by Naruse or Ozu are always affecting
the economical structure the families are living in. The seeming
event less stories of a film by Naruse or Ozu enfold itself scene by
scene. The intensity of these films seem to come from Nowhere. As a
matter of fact, the Japanese colour films from the 1950s and
especially the films by Naruse and Ozu are some of the most beautiful
ever made. The very Japanese obsession to create cinematic images
about every day life with all its small and big events goes with a
strange chemistry with the magic beauty cinema can as well evoke.
Surely I will probably never be able to give a proper
synopsis of this film with all the details of the family structure,
but my memory is full of moments which follow me into my dreams.
There is for example a mesmerizing moment when the young widow walks
with the journalist on the beach of the sea. The landscape the
persons are moving in becomes an eternal big screen, almost an image
for the long oppressed longing of a young widow. Both is present, the
effort to give an idea about the dry self-determination working life
the widowed farmer´s wife leads but also the beauty of Naruse´s
magic cinema scope images. The Japanese definition of realism and
cinema was never an abstract ideological one. It was always
materialized with the whole apparatus, cinema can offer. Especially
Ozu and Naruse were always put in context with the cinema of the
1960s, among them directors like Antonioni. Both, Ozu and Naruse were
already modernists in the 1930s. Of course a film like Iwashigumo
can be very moving - yes- even let me use the word entertaining but
never in a contradiction to its strange analytical character.
There are scenes when the characters are
interacting with each other, sometimes arguing. But there is always
the freedom that our eyes can escape through a small door or a window
which leads to the eternity of the world. And if Iwashigumo is
also a film about, the unique concept of cinema, Ozu, Naruse and in
another kind Shimazu or Shimizu have created is always as well a
cinema of the self-determination of the audience how and how much it
will be engaged with the film. Ironically the films by Ozu and Naruse
deal mostly with social constraints, to watch them is for me always a
sense of freedom.
As prosaic this seeming event less life
of the protagonists are in Iwashigumo, there are some accesses
to a deeper understanding. For example the classmate of the young
widow who runs a restaurant: if they meet, only a few hints are
enough to give an idea of a life time of these characters which
exists far beyond the 125 minutes long running time of this film. These
so-called eventless moments, I could watch for hours with the same
joy I watch a Hitchcock film again and again.
Once when the widow and the journalist
walk again through the landscape, we see in the far background a
passing rail bus. It is one of this small connections between the
fiction of this film with the whole universe. And Iwashigumo
is full of these small connections. And if he liked it or not, it was
probably Naruse who opened the shomingeki film up for the use of the
more opulent cinema scope format.
As this film is also about agriculture,
it reminds me in an idea I had long time ago about this specific kind
of Japanese cinema. The fiction is literally planted on the soil of
reality beyond film. Therefore the film´s fiction is always
traceable to the reality outside the screen. Very early in the 1930s
Naruse´s friend Ozu recognized that it was a big mistake that his
company Shochiku considered Naruse only as an unnecessary “second
Ozu”. That was as well an underestimation of the many different
facets this movement around Ozu, Shimizu, Shimazu and Naruse offered
not only to Japanese but also to world cinema.
Even though Naruse and Ozu earned
relatively early in their careers the reputation as artists, most of
their films were as well very popular and it is very likely that the
audience of their films recognized themselves a lot during the time
these films were released.
One reason, I consider Iwashigumo
as one of my favorite films by Naruse is the final scene: The young
widow finally accepts that her short love affair with the reporter
was only a short illusion very likely to the memory of her late
husband with whom she spent only a few years. At the end we see her
stubbornly working on the rice field. It is a tiring physical work to
earn her living. In the background the wonderful summer clouds like a
far shadow of a fading idea of happiness. This female character we
followed through more than 2 hours film is now almost as anonymous as
most of the audience who must have watched this film in the late
1950s. And I can only guess how this film will look on a huge curved
screen as one of the finest coloured cinema scope films in Japanese film
history.
Rüdiger Tomczak
