Mikio Naruse’s career spanned the 1930s late-silent era up through the time of color film and anamorphic widescreen. His interest in the professional and domestic lives of modern working women in Japan was a constant throughout the dozens of films he worked on, reaching as far back as Every-Night Dreams, one of Naruse’s earliest surviving features. Sumiko Kurishima, one of the first major screen stars in the Japanese film industry, stars as bar hostess Omitsu, toughing out single motherhood after being abandoned by her husband Mizuhara. After a three-year absence, Mizuhara suddenly returns as a supposedly reformed man ready to care for his family, only to create more problems for them through his weak and ineffectual constitution. While the subject is squarely in his wheelhouse, Naruse’s visual style in Every-Night Dreams is unusual in his filmography for its bombastic approach, finding myriad opportunities to echo Omitsu’s tumultuous home life with nervy push-ins and ominous dolly movements. 

35mm from National Film Archive of Japan, permission Janus Films

Preceded by: “Up and Down the Waterfront” (Rudy Burckhart, 1946) – 8 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema