There’s a certain level of stature obscurity affords a filmmaker if the plaudits are coming from the right places, but I went into the Mikio Naruse’s retrospective that began this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive without any real skepticism and came out believing the program manager’s claim that the Naruse program will be “the premiere retrospective event of the fall.”

Out of the four, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), Mother (1952), A Tale of Archers at the Sanjusangendo (1945), and The Song Lantern (1943), I’d only call the first an unqualified masterpiece (it’s central performance given by Hideko Takamine is the stuff of gushing hyperbole), each is certainly more than worthy, and the four together sparked a few ideas as to perhaps why Naruse’s work has been relatively unseen outside Japan. While Kurosawa’s appeal for American audiences has been rehashed endlessly, I’ve only seen a few stand up and take on the notion that Ozu is “the most Japanese of Japanese filmmakers” (most notably Jonathan Rosenbaum).

With only four of Naruse’s films under my belt it’s hard to make any sort of authoritative judgment, but when stacked against Ozu, they seem remarkably less accessible, precisely because they focus so specifically on Japanese cultural traditions (Noh performance, specifics of the Samurai code, lantern singers, the role of the bar hostess and architecture of her staff) without effort to explain their intricacies to an audience who wouldn’t necessarily have prior knowledge. Coupled with the fantastically complex performances that seem intimately bound up and circumscribed by social codes that most will be scrambling to fully digest renders these films a little harder to access than something like a Tokyo Story or An Autumn Afternoon, even if Ozu’s favored performance style and formal strategies are initially more off-putting.

That said, I came into The Song Lantern with little knowledge of Noh theatre besides the very basics, and damn if I wasn’t chilled to the core by young Isuzu Yamada’s (14 years later, she’d stun again with her turn as Lady MacBeth in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood) Noh dance that closes the film. Eight more are showing this weekend, so we’ll see what those bring…