The Eclipse Viewer - Episode 2

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This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Robert Nishimura give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Robert are joined by special guest Scott Nye to discuss Silent Naruse, a collection of Mikio Naruse’s five surviving films that he directed for Shochiku Studios in the early 1930s.

About the films:

Mikio Naruse is one of the most popular directors in the history of Japanese cinema, a crafter of heartrending melodramas often compared with the work of Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. From the outset of his career, with his silent films of the early thirties, Naruse focused on characters, mostly women’”geisha, housewives, waitresses’”carrying on despite the compromises and disappointments of confined daily lives, a subject that would continue to fascinate him for the next three decades. Though he made two dozen silent films, only five are known to exist today; these works’”poignant, brilliantly photographed and edited dramas all’”are collected here, on DVD for the first time and featuring new scores by noted musicians Robin Holcomb and Wayne Horvitz.

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