35-37 Naruse: Volume One

[matrixschmatrix]

Phew, by the time I got my shit together Amazon was sold out- but there was one decent priced used seller that ships internationally. I get the feeling this one's going to be impossible to find a month from now.

[Michael Kerpan]

This is my most cherished MoC release. I did my part in purchasing this set, more than once.

Ditto.

[dad1153]

Bought mine a couple of months ago during an amazon UK sale (hugs Boxset). Unless Criterion re-releases these as BD's and/or Eclipse sets (doubtful at best) they're one-of-a-kind releases (big book!) that just aren't done anymore for a director with as low a sales potential as Naruse.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Along with my Mabuse set from MoC, this might be among my favorite DVD sets and in the event of a fire at my apartment, I will save it! I'll never forget that this was my first of Region 2 DVD purchase to go along with my Region Free player I got nearly three years ago. Anyways, sad to know it's wasn't a money maker, but I will kiss my set tonight and remind it how much I cherish it. <3

[Steven H]

Yeah, it's one of my favorite DVD sets too. I think it showed up at my house right around a birthday and pretty much talked non-stop about it to my friends and girlfriend at the time. In fact, it's a wonder they tolerated me. Memories.

[Opdef]

Same here. Seeing how much love there is for it on here, I can't believe it didn't sell well. I'm sure it wasn't even that expensive when I bought it a couple of years ago. Tragic to hear it's no more, but makes me appreciate mine even more.

[dad1153]

All remaining stock destroyed in the Sony DADC fire. Now officially OOP and not being repressed. Grab one if you see one!

peerpee, if you can share (and the info is no longer valuable since the remaining stock has disappeared and it's an OOP title), how many units of Naruse: Vol. One exactly were stored in the factory that burned out? Just curious about how much stock remained of the original run.

[zedz]

If anybody here missed out on this brilliant set after all the boosting and fabulous sale prices over the years, they only have their own fool selves to blame.

[Gregory]

^ I've been tempted to say something similar to that. It's such a lovely set, and I remember the price dropping to £20, then later £18, and then £15 after that. I don't know why anyone who buys DVDs and has any potential interest in Naruse would have waited (holding out for £12?).

[peerpee]

All remaining stock destroyed in the Sony DADC fire. Now officially OOP and not being repressed. Grab one if you see one!

peerpee, if you can share (and the info is no longer valuable since the remaining stock has disappeared and it's an OOP title), how many units of Naruse: Vol. One exactly were stored in the factory that burned out? Just curious about how much stock remained of the original run.

All this is currently the subject of a large, complicated insurance claim (so it is still of value, hopefully!) and I'm not privy to exact figures. This release only had one printing back in late 2006, and I don't think it sold half of that printing over a near five year period -- which is dreadful. For the record, initial sales were healthy and this was looking like a good release, but then sales dropped off the edge of a cliff after a year and never climbed back up again. There was obviously a small, aware fanbase who all bought it, and then it never permeated any other strands of culture/society! Pretty tragic -- but at least it gave a lot of joy, and will probably become a decent collector's item now.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for Naruse...and any further releases.

[Michael Kerpan]

If only more people would _watch_ Naruse's films, I'm sure more people would love them. But how the hell does one get people to watch them? (Are too many potential viewers put off by the lingering, erroneous image of "Naruse the dour pessimist"?)

[knives]

I know I had to practically pay the one person I got to pick up this set who was put off for that very reason. It's absurd to me that people aren't willing to get into the grime a bit especially when it's done so cheerfully, but there you go. I think part of it though is that people aren't interested in any Japanese drama which is the biggest misfortune at all. Sure Ozu sells slightly because of fame, but even than only a few are going after him.

[Michael Kerpan]

I find it surprising how set in stone American conventional wisdom about Japanese cinema has been ever since the initial Richie-Anderson book (and the Audie Bock book). Even though subsequent work (including Richie's more recent solo books) have shed a vast amount of additional light (and made innumerable corrections), the original notions stubbornly persist. I would say Naruse might be the number 2 victim of this syndrome. Tadashi Imai undoubtedly being no. 1 (seemingly trashed by Anderson and semi-defended by Richie on alternate pages, totally trashed by Bock).

Every time there is a major Naruse retrospective, audiences find the stereotypical view of Naruse is wrong -- but the stereotype just won't give up its hold (in the US, at least).

[knives]

I think what makes this even worse is this thought in Americans that the Japanese can't do drama. It's all Samurai stuff or anime. I love those two things, but that's a pretty small amount of the make up. For instance the guy who I convinced to buy this set said to me completely straight faced, "The Japanese, especially in the golden era treat women as paper thin weak silent vessels who occasionally serve beverages." He treated One Wonderful Sunday as this three eyed frog when he did see it and felt at the time that it was an outlier. I had to yell at him so loud for that one you won't believe. I don't think that's an uncommon view though so most people just treat the dramas as if their total crap sight unseen. That is of course for those who are even aware that Japanese cinema goes beyond the two items I listed.

[Michael Kerpan]

Oh -- there's also "knowledge" that Japan makes bad science fiction films and gross-out exploitation films.

Ozu got a certain cachet by being misunderstood (in large part) in a way that was easy to categorize (profound and sublime quiet beauty) -- Naruse (similar as he is to Ozu in many ways) could never be misunderstood in this same way.

[MichaelB]

I have the same problem selling Eastern European cinema. Once they leave the safe confines of Western Europe, the tastes of English-speaking distributors are appallingly narrow, and generally involve alighting on a small number of people who can be sold as auteurs while ignoring the rest. So Hungarian cinema essentially is Miklós Jancsó, Béla Tarr and István Szabó, with the latter usually represented by his more internationally-friendly work (tellingly, his Hungarian-language films of the past twenty years have had the poorest distribution!).

But if you ask Hungarians, it's a very different story: they'll cite a dozen or more names that they rank just as highly, many of whom have barely had their work distributed internationally at all. They also wouldn't recognise the Western cliché that "Hungarian cinema" is invariably made up of ultra-long takes and complex geometric choreography of both camera and performers - they're far more likely to favour Péter Bacsó's The Witness, Zoltán Huszárik's Szindbád or Zoltán Fábri's Merry-Go-Round, which are very different in tone.

[knives]

I think unfortunately that applies to most national cinemas. For example Spanish cinema seems to only be Almodovar to a lot of people. Hell, even as you've been working so hard to change British cinema has a tremendously narrow look to numerous people.

[PillowRock]

this thought in Americans that the Japanese can't do drama. It's all Samurai stuff or anime.

And monsters. Don't forget monsters. We all grew up watching badly dubbed Japanese monster movies. Godzilla, Rodan, and Gamera were as well known to American children of the 1960s & 70s as Dracula and the Wolf Man.

[Michael Kerpan]

Japan is a bit luckier -- at least it was recognized that it produced three fairly different sorts of art films -- Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi. ;~}

[MichaelB]

I think unfortunately that applies to most national cinemas. For example Spanish cinema seems to only be Almodovar to a lot of people. Hell, even as you've been working so hard to change British cinema has a tremendously narrow look to numerous people.

It's a perfect illustration of the dictum that history is written by the victors. If films aren't watched at all, they don't get written about - and if they're only seen at festivals by influential critics who damn them in influential publications, they get ignored on the assumption that the critic is correct, or at least not so incorrect that it's worth going to the lengths of actually tracking a copy of the film down (something that required considerable effort, and often funds, until very very recently).

It's even worse when the filmmakers themselves attempt to rewrite history - the Cahiers du Cinéma mob damned a lot of perfectly good French cinema on largely ideological grounds, and Lindsay Anderson and co. did a brilliant job of promoting Free Cinema as the only worthwhile British documentary development in the whole of the postwar era, an impression that lasted decades until a concerted effort was made to dig out, watch and write about the other films that were being made at the same time.

And of course if a film flops badly in its country of origin before being sold internationally, the chances are that it won't even open anywhere else.

[essrog]

Phew, by the time I got my shit together Amazon was sold out- but there was one decent priced used seller that ships internationally. I get the feeling this one's going to be impossible to find a month from now.

I was asleep at the wheel on this one and ordered one today from a seller that ships from the U.S. I paid more than I should have (especially considering all the deals on it over the years that I missed), but all the praise here convinced me to go for it.

[Drucker]

So is this and others out of print for good? I know this was discussed as not being a big seller, so does that mean even if the materials are recovered to put out more copies, that won't happen?

[MichaelB]

So is this and others out of print for good? I know this was discussed as not being a big seller, so does that mean even if the materials are recovered to put out more copies, that won't happen?

They have all the mastering materials, which were stored elsewhere - nothing has been "lost" in the fire in the sense of the core data having vanished completely and irretrievably: it's just the physical reproduction of that data that's gone up in smoke.

But the problem is that the cost of repressing and reprinting a pretty lavish package that included a 180-page book and a thick cardboard sleeve as well as the three DVDs wasn't considered economically justifiable when set against the box's very poor sales. So yes, the Naruse box and Toni and doubtless some other titles are effectively OOP for good - or at least for as long as the rights are held by MoC.

[Drucker]

I own the Silent Naruse box but have only watched one movie in it, which I did like a lot. I'm really intrigued and want to get this box, but spending $100 on a director I don't know that much about before I even have a player which can play the set isn't something I can do at this point. Sigh.