In matters of style, diligence is usually understood to be antithetical to spontaneity. This is the conventional wisdom when it comes to cinematic style too, and among viewers in the West, Japanese cinema in particular tends to be thought of as the effusive outpouring of maverick auteurs—iconoclasts raging against the machine and rejecting commercial constraints to protect their cherished individuality. So it can be surprising that many of that tradition’s great achievements in fact emerged from an industrial studio system built around mass production. Ozu and Mizoguchi, for instance, were above all journeymen directors for large studios, working under a mandate to churn out product at scale, and Naruse, too, was known as a faithful employee who always finished his films under budget and never said no to an assignment; needless to say, these conditions didn’t stop them from creating masterpieces. One of their colleagues was the woefully overlooked Hiroshi Shimizu, who made at least 163 films over the course of a career that spanned the silent era and the talkies. The assembly-line conditions don’t seem to have been especially onerous for him: “I’m going to make only three films the way the company wants me to,” Shimizu said in 1935, “and in exchange I can make two films that I want.”

Throughout his career, Shimizu possessed the reputation of a bon vivant touched by sprezzatura, and although he was a company man by habit, he wasn’t above loafing off on the job. “Ozu and I create films through hard work,” Mizoguchi said, “but Shimizu is a genius.” The first Japanese director to shoot on location and en plein air—an approach that lent his films an enchantingly casual quality—Shimizu seems to have extended that attitude to his own life: When his friends visited set, he would happily excuse himself from shooting while the cameraman kept toiling away. Sometimes he would shut down the set entirely to take the crew swimming. The lackadaisical conditions proved curiously productive for Shimizu, as was evident in a recent New York retrospective organized by the Museum of the Moving Image and Japan Society, which revealed how the carefreeness of his films flourished not despite but because of a quietly steadfast formal rigor.

Shimizu liked setting his films at vacation resorts, imbuing them with the leisurely air he cultivated in his life and in his work. Ornamental Hairpin (1941) ambles unhurriedly from one episode to another, sketching out the dynamics between a group of guests staying at the same hotel: a grouchy professor, a young couple, a grandfather and his grandsons, and a soldier on leave from the war, recovering from an injury. While bathing in the hot springs, the soldier accidentally steps on a loose hairpin, which we learn belongs to a traveling geisha, Emi. Called back to the resort to retrieve it, Emi meets the soldier and decides to prolong her stay. She is soon welcomed into the group as they continue on with their vacation. Early on, the professor complains about the noise coming from outside his room—but as he’s forced to share the spa alongside the other guests, he is drawn out of his splendid isolation into a kind of makeshift community. Emi and the soldier walk the grounds, getting to know each other and keeping the grandchildren company; the professor struggles with an overzealous Go partner who doesn’t want to stop playing; the snoring of the old men keeps the young people awake at night. The subtly shifting relationships among the group endow the film with a gentle momentum, as friendships are formed and small arguments play out without much consequence. One night over dinner, the group makes a promise to continue meeting up upon their return to Tokyo. Although the prospect of that happening is dubious at best, there’s something touching about their earnest desire to make the effort. In the closest the film comes to a dramatic climax, the soldier recovers enough to try walking across a bridge of wooden planks as the other characters cheer him on.

If Ornamental Hairpin feels like a breezy excursion, that quality is made possible by the strict formal control that underpins the film. When introducing us to the resort, Shimizu slices it up into sharp, perpendicular angles that silo the guests into separate spaces as the opening sequences unfold. Soon enough these give way to more accommodating and spacious views. The cramped quarters draw the guests into the same orbit, and as they begin to share the camera’s frame along with the resort’s facilities, the film allows itself to relax into wide-angle shots of the new friends enjoying the hot springs together. Like the rest of the group (and the viewer), Emi finds herself pulled into the resort’s easygoing conviviality, but she takes things further when she decides not to return to Tokyo, out of dissatisfaction with her old life: “I didn’t want for money. I could sleep when I wanted, get up when I wanted, wear what I wanted, eat what I wanted, see what I wanted. But that’s all. I want more meaning in my life.” She comes to understand that a purely negative kind of freedom, defined by an absence of constraints and obligations, isn’t enough.

Emi’s sober realization only enhances the bitter irony of the film’s final sequence, during which she revisits the sites where she and her companions grew close—the river, a grassy field, a staircase—and finds that there’s nothing about the resort itself that can bring about the change that she wants. It was her companions who made the difference, and in declining to return to Tokyo with them, she has ended up in the same condition of negative freedom that she was trying to escape. Shimizu underscores the irony by showing Emi’s melancholy perambulations through these sites from the very same angles as those previous scenes, when they had bubbled with so much mirth. The repetition insistently recalls her first encounter with these spaces, while also making clear how much things have changed. A letter arrives from the soldier, asking her when she will visit the group in Tokyo. But as the final shots of her solitary walk imply, it won’t be possible for those spontaneous bonds to take root again. So much of this is communicated by the film’s intricate staging of space—often so delicate as to escape attention, but nevertheless a means through which Shimizu methodically shapes the viewer’s experience. As with the relaxing vibes of a vacation resort, it’s the careful preparation and planning behind the scenes that makes an air of casualness possible.

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The New York retrospective of Shimizu’s films was split into two halves, loosely corresponding to his output before and after World War II. If the quest to hold together a community frayed by centrifugal pressures is the core struggle in prewar and wartime films like Ornamental Hairpin, then Shimizu’s postwar films try to reconstitute a community already torn asunder. Children of the Beehive (1948), for instance, follows a group of children orphaned in the war as they wander the country. The film features an astonishing sequence set amidst the bombed-out ruins of Hiroshima—shot on location, but supervised by American occupation authorities to prevent Shimizu from depicting too much of the destroyed city. A game of hide-and-seek between one of the orphans and a young woman who’s taken on a surrogate mother role unfolds in the rubble of destroyed buildings. She has to depart for Tokyo, but the orphan chases her into the ruins when she tries to leave him behind. He darts back and forth between pieces of rubble that dwarf his tiny frame as he tries in vain to find her amid the maze of detritus. The camera mirrors his disorientation with partial, obstructed views from inside the nooks and crannies that he desperately searches through, as the two stage a reenactment in miniature of the attempt to find a way through a landscape ravaged by war. Eventually, he gives up and drifts away crying, and she peeks out from her hiding spot to watch him from afar. All the while, the unforgettable setting of the ruins themselves serve as a reminder of the blighted postwar environment they are forced to navigate. But even grave subject matter like this is enlivened by Shimizu’s touch, thanks to his intuitive sympathy for the resilient wisdom of children. In a sequel to Beehive, an orphan catches a raccoon and is surprised at the way it looks, since he has heard that they were supposed to have big bellies. That was only true before the war, another boy explains matter-of-factly: “Raccoons these days are malnourished.”

Inevitably, capitalist modernization is central to Shimizu’s concerns in his postwar films. In Mr. Shosuke Ohara (1949), the scion of a formerly illustrious family squanders his fortune by doling out favors to anyone who asks—that is, when he’s not drunkenly gambling that fortune away. One elaborate, misguided favor involves the purchase of a batch of sewing machines, to be operated by the village’s young women. The machines are installed in the middle of the scion’s family estate, a spacious complex festooned with the family crest. The home embodies what the historian J.G.A. Pocock called the “personality-sustaining” function of inherited real estate: passed down through the generations, it stands as a testament to historical continuity, weathering the changing of the times with a placid indifference—at least until it falls into the hands of a downwardly mobile failson. The sewing machines he buys mark the incursion of progress—economic modernization and female incorporation into the workforce—into this formerly steadfast bulwark of tradition and stability. But that incursion is met by a counteroffensive. The seamstresses work side by side with a group of monks trying to pray, and as the clanging noise of the machines interferes with their ceremony, they raise their voices and start chanting louder and louder, triggering an arms race of escalating noise. Here again, Shimizu is attuned to the disequilibriums that lie latent in even the most settled and traditional of physical structures—just like the snoring of the old men impinging on the other rooms in Ornamental Hairpin, the rigid boundaries that maintain spatial order start to dissolve under the pressure of unruly and uncontainable sounds.

And smells. In The Masseurs and a Woman (1938), one of Shimizu’s greatest early films, a blind man makes his way down a street, using a cane to find his path and bumping into careless passersby. A woman who works at the same hotel as he does watches him, bemused. Shimizu orchestrates an intricate balance of gazes by showing her in close-up: a view of her face enlivened by curiosity about the blind man, a face that remains poignantly inaccessible to the person stimulating those emotions. As he approaches her, she playfully turns away and starts to move down the road while looking back from time to time in order to prolong and savor the pleasure of her one-sided view. Shimizu holds the camera’s focus steady, keeping the close-up in place even as she recedes into the distance. The farther she goes, the more she retreats out of visibility. Before long she is enveloped entirely in the soft mists of the out-of-focus background.

Her view can’t remain one-sided for long. As she backs away from and then circles around him to avoid being detected, the blind man seems to notice something in the air—a smile flits across his face as he tries to figure out what it is. Guided by her scent, he follows her back toward the direction he came, now completely knocked off of his initial course. With a look of concern, she notices that the object of her gaze turns out to have his own ways of perceiving. And as she keeps moving backwards, she keeps escaping the camera’s focus, too—not out of any carelessness on Shimizu’s part, but as a cinematographic analogue for her partial imperceptibility. Wavering on the edge of being perceived through scent, she just barely eludes the zone of the camera’s focus as well, continually slipping away from our visual grasp as the sequence’s meticulous attunement to depth of field elegantly grafts scent onto sight.

Fragrances are crucial to Shimizu’s work: moving swiftly through space and barreling through social distinctions, smells insinuate themselves in even more determined ways than the sounds of raucous neighbors or machinery. (Kant once observed, in typically prudish fashion, that “internal penetration through smell is even more intimate than through the absorptive vessels of mouth or gullet,” since “other people are forced to share in the pleasure whether they want to or not.”) In A Woman Crying in Spring (1933), a group of miners plods through a snowy forest; they arrive at a bar filled with geisha and chuckle that “smelling make-up isn’t bad at all.” A respite from the harsh elements, the welcoming environs of the bar are filled with drink and good company, and the geisha who populate it are meant to serve as comforting furniture for the customers. Shimizu’s films are often preoccupied with women forced into servitude by a hostile society, and geisha and sex workers are a recurring presence. Their subordination is marked by scent: In Forget Love For Now (1937), the perfume that a single mother has to wear to her job as a bar hostess causes her son to be bullied when his friends smell it on him, kicking him out of their group “because your mom is bad.” The smell of the perfume marks the mother as socially deviant, a condition that spreads to her son like a contagion and initiates a slide into delinquency that eventually ends in tragedy. For the blind man in Masseurs, fragrance is a conduit for desire; here, it channels painful class anxieties.

The mother’s perfume sticks to her son only because their cramped apartment is so small—a problem shared by many of the largely poor and working-class characters that inhabit Shimizu’s films. Dancing Girl (1957) plunges into the gritty Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa, where a dancer shares a tiny apartment with her husband. When her sister unexpectedly comes to visit, there’s nowhere for her to sleep but the same room as the couple, which leads almost inadvertently to a messy entanglement with the husband. As in the resort in Ornamental Hairpin and the family estate in Mr. Shosuke Ohara, Shimizu is sensitive to the frictions generated by bodies pressed against each other in a tight space—and to the permeability of the boundaries that partition such a space. For Shimizu, a fragrance wafting through the air encapsulates the problem of how people are supposed to live together: it’s both an inconvenient burden and an invitation to intimacy, with each current unpredictably morphing into the other.

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In the closing moments of Mr. Shosuke Ohara, the family estate succumbs to the throes of historical change when its possessions are auctioned off to pay for the son’s copious debt. The film’s last scene shows him leaving town for good, freed from the shackles of tradition and carried by a train into an uncertain but rosy future. The son is just one of the many characters throughout Shimizu’s films who are uprooted from a settled place and pushed into a life of turbulent movement and transience. Shimizu is attentive to the more peripheral parts of Japan: Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933) takes place in the port city of Yokohama’s seedier stretches, its opening shot offering a dizzyingly panoramic scan of the ocean skyline dotted by boats, while A Woman Crying in Spring treks to the wintery reaches of Hokkaido in the north. Both these films center on a geisha, and both close with her leaving Japan, bound for foreign lands. But these women are exiled on terms that are more ambiguous than the scion of Mr. Shosuke Ohara. If the dissolution of his family estate liberates him to pursue new adventures elsewhere, the prospects for geisha pushed into migratory labor are decidedly more harrowing. They share the same predicament as Ornamental Hairpin’s Emi: Their lines of flight out of the patriarchal confines of the nation-state resemble a kind of emancipation, but one also tinged with a gentle melancholy for what they’re forced to leave behind.

That vertiginously lenticular perspective also emerges in Mr. Thank You (1936), Shimizu’s most celebrated film, which takes place on a bus trip through a stretch of mountainous terrain. The film’s title comes from its protagonist, a bus driver nicknamed Mr. Thank You for his habit of calling out arigato! to the pedestrians whom he cajoles out of the bus’s path. Forward tracking shots, from the perspective of the bus itself, approach pedestrians walking on the road from behind, before dissolving into a rear-view perspective as the bus pulls ahead of them. Passing through physical objects like so many wisps of air, these lovely shots are perhaps the purest distillation of Shimizu’s feather-light aesthetic; they seem to be concerned above all with motion itself, representing the forward stream of movement on which the bus is ferried. The way these shots balance forward movement with retrospective vision is miraculous, not only because of how visually thrilling it is to coast on them, but also because of the philosophy of history that they express. They embody the wistful perspective for which Shimizu clearly felt a deep affinity, inhabited most poignantly in his films by those geisha like Emi who are condemned to exile: Looking ahead while looking back, but always carried inexorably forward on the relentless currents of history.

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