On today’s episode we discuss Floating Clouds (1955) and A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962) - also known as Her Lonely Lane. Floating Clouds features another doomed romance, this time set against the ruins of the post-World War II Japanese society. The film is one of Naruse’s most widely seen films, and for good reason. It’s a great film with two towering performances from Hideko Takamine and Masayuki Mori. We then go on to discuss A Wanderer’s Notebook, an adaptation of a stage play based on the autobiography of Fumiko Hayashi, a poet and novelist who wrote the novel that Floating Clouds is based on. Naruse adapted four other Hayashi works prior to Floating Clouds. A Wanderer’s Notebook traces Hayashi’s life from her beginnings trying desperately to find employment in a cutthroat and often chauvinistic environment, to her time in interacting with literary figures of her time and getting her work published.
Discussion of Floating Clouds opens the podcast and discussion of A Wanderer’s Notebook starts at (42:22).
Our previous episodes on Naruse’s films were released in conjunction with the retrospective in New York that Japan Society and Metrograph hosted – “Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us.” Two venues are hosting Naruse retrospective starting in July. The Harvard Film Archive is starting their Naruse retrospective on July 5 with a screening of Floating Clouds, which also screens there on July 6. The Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive just started their retrospective in July. You can find links to the schedules for both retrospective below. Floating Clouds is available to watch on Criterion Channel.
- Harvard Film Archive’s Mikio Naruse retrospective schedule https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/floating-clouds-the-cinema-of-naruse-mikio
- Berkeley’s Mikio Naruse retrospective at BAMPFA - https://bampfa.org/program/mikio-naruse-auteur-salaryman
- A Mikio Naruse Companion by Dan Sallitt - https://mikionaruse.wordpress.com/
- “Caught: Mikio Naruse” by Chris Fujiwara - https://www.filmcomment.com/article/caught-mikio-naruse/
- Mikio Naruse: A Master of Japanese Cinema by Audie Bock - https://www.worldcat.org/title/17227763
Hosted by Aret Frost and Tony Huang (@Tghuang)
Consultant: Ryan Swen (@swen_ryan)
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