Floating Clouds
(Ukigumo)

Screening on Film

Directed by Naruse Mikio.
With Takamine Hideko, Mori Masayuki, Okada Mariko.
Japan, 1955, 35mm, black & white, 123 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: The Japan Foundation

A devastating adaptation of Hayashi Fumiko's final novel, Floating Clouds match-cuts between softened memories and brutal reality, past and present, sun-kissed images of French Indochina and a post-war Japan cloaked in shadows. Ignominy has overtaken Tokyo, where two former workers for the Imperial Forestry Ministry—Kengo, a married officer (Mori Masayuki) and Yukiko, a typist (Takamine Hideko)—reignite their wartime affair in a doomed attempt to revivify a past distorted by the ripe promise of endless imperial capital. Arguably Naruse's most famous and acclaimed film and perhaps his most formally ambitious, Floating Clouds was described in Ozu Yasujiro's diary as a "real masterpiece." – Kelley Dong

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