Summer Clouds
(Iwashigumo)
With Awashima Chikage, Aratama Michiyo, Mizuno Kumi.
Japan, 1958, 35mm, color, 129 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Trading black-and-white for color and his usual boxy aspect ratio for the wide expanse of the scope frame, Summer Clouds was not merely a formal departure for its director, but a leap in subject matter as well. The confined spaces of domestic homes and urban streets are replaced in the film, for the most part, with the sweeping horizons of rural Atsugi, where farmland meets mountains and open sky. Here, in a cavernous countryside farmhouse that evokes the homesteads of American westerns, a melodrama of colliding epochs plays out in patient, novelistic detail as Watsuke (Nakamura Ganjiro), the patriarch of a multi-generational peasant family, resists the shifting tides of modernization. Meanwhile, his headstrong, widowed daughter-in-law, Yae (Awashima Chikage), finds herself caught between Watsuke’s stubbornness and the individualistic careerism of her younger relatives—a divide that is amplified when a married journalist (Kimura Isao), visiting from the city, steals her heart. Though characteristically measured for Naruse in both its pacing and its distribution of sympathy, the film ultimately expresses a reverence for the toil of the lonely farmer that borders on the romantic. – Carson Lund
Part of film series
Upcoming screenings from this program
Anzukko
Mother
Sincerity
Summer Clouds
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Summer Clouds
The Stranger within a Woman
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Traveling Actors
Scattered Clouds
Scattered Clouds
Flowing
A Wanderer’s Notebook
Repast
Every-Night Dreams
Street Without End
Apart From You
No Blood Relation
The Road I Travel with You / Avalanche
