I am interested in the relationship of the lower
part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure
on which the reality of daily Japanese life obstinately supports itself.
The Japanese did not change as a result of the Pacific War—they
haven't changed in thousands of years!
—Shohei Imamura (1)
Yokohama, 1977. American film critic and translator Audie
Bock is interviewing Shohei Imamura at the offices of Imamura's film school
(which has since moved to Shin-Yurigaoka, just outside Tokyo). Imamura is
speaking of the shrines dedicated to the fox god Inari that modern Japanese
corporate bosses install on the rooftops of their modern corporate office
towers: “You may think all that is real,” [he said], gesturing
toward the dreary cityscape outside, “but to me it's all illusion.
The reality is those little shrines, the superstition and the irrationality
that pervade the Japanese consciousness under the veneer of the business
suits and advanced technology.” (2)
In nineteen feature films over 45 years Imamura has probed the lower depths
of Japanese society and “the Japanese consciousness”. Not for
him the tourist-friendly vision of Japan as the post-war economic powerhouse
of Asia, the land of kimono-clad elegance, Zen serenity, and harmonious
Confucian social hierarchies. Instead he has put onscreen a world populated
by prostitutes, pimps, and petty thieves, peasant farmers and middle-class
pornographers, serial killers and shamen. This is the irrepressibly “real”
Japan of his bawdy, ragged, sensual films.
Born in 1926, the third son of a physician, Imamura attended elite high
schools where, he says, encounters with Japan's ruling-class children soured
him on the sheltered minds of the privileged:
I despised them, and remember thinking that
they were the kind of people who would never get close to the fundamental
truths of life. Knowing them made me want to identify myself with
working-class people who were true to their own human natures. At
that age, though, I probably still thought of myself as being innately
superior to working-class people. (3)
Typical stuff for a middle-class youth of any time or place, perhaps, but
post-war Japan was a more unsettled time and place than most. Imamura enrolled
at Waseda University to study Western History, but by his account he neglected
his schoolwork in favor of student theater and radical politics; during
the immediate post-war years he hustled on the black market. He has described
this period as a personally liberating one:
When the emperor came on the radio to announce
our defeat, I was 18 years old. It was fantastic. Suddenly everything
became free. We could talk about our real thoughts and feelings without
hiding anything. Even sex became free, and the black market was brilliant.
(4)
I was strongly against the continuation of the
imperial system, and had many discussions with my friends about Hirohito's
responsibility for the war. But my greatest obsession was individual
freedom—the condition that the state had denied us absolutely
during the war years—and I became fascinated by existentialism.
At the time I was making a living from the black market: I bought
illicit liquor and cigarettes from soldiers of the American occupation
forces and sold them to my professors. That was the only time in my
whole life when I was well off, although I spent all I made on drink.
(5)
He associated with racketeers and thugs, and became friendly with prostitutes
and bar hostesses. These latter marked his view of women for life:
They weren't educated and they were vulgar and
lusty, but they were also strongly affectionate and they instinctively
confronted all their own sufferings. I grew to admire them enormously.
(6)
Such women became the “vulgar and lusty” heroines of many of his
films.
Soon after graduating from university in 1951, Imamura entered Shochiku's
assistant director's program at its Ofuna studios (as did his contemporaries
Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda). He assisted Yasujiro Ozu (“I was
basically just a clapper boy”) (7) on three films,
including the classic Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953).
Imamura was underwhelmed. Ozu's methods, especially his precise, regimented
direction of actors, were not to his taste, which is unsurprising, since
temperamentally no filmmaker could be farther from Ozu's quiet, measured
acceptance of life. He preferred to work under Yuzo Kawashima, a director
little known outside of Japan, whose interest in lower-class life appealed
to the younger man. In later years Imamura would write a memoir paying tribute
to his former mentor; he also cited Kawashima's rebellious attitude toward
his studio bosses as an important precursor to the Japanese New Wave. (8)
In 1954 Imamura transferred into the training program at Nikkatsu studios,
because the newly reactivated company was aggressively recruiting young
talent, and because he had begun dating the company administrator at Shochiku
(they later married). Kawashima soon joined him at Nikkatsu, and the apprenticeship
continued, with Imamura writing scripts and assistant-directing.
In the late 1950s he finally got his chance to move up the company ladder.
1958 saw the release of three movies directed by Shohei Imamura:
Stolen Desire, Nishi Ginza Station, and Endless Desire,
followed by My Second Brother in 1959. These were studio assignments,
and have rarely been screened outside of Japan. In 1961 came Pigs and
Battleships, generally acknowledged as the first distinctive Imamura
film—a vivid satire, set against the backdrop of the US military occupation,
about a young, not-so-innocent couple involved in an illicit scheme to raise
and sell pigs. Imamura's mature voice is heard clearly here, in the imagery
that equates humans with animals (the Yankee soldiers are pigs, and so are
the Japanese thugs chasing their money), in the heroine's quest for freedom,
and in the release of pent-up energy at the end—the pigs escape during
a gunfight, and stampede through the streets.
From Pigs and Battleships on Imamura gave onscreen
life to the worldview he had been cultivating during his dues-paying years.
He says that while writing scripts at Nikkatsu, he yearned to become a better
storyteller, and thought perhaps his understanding of the world was lacking.
So he began going to the library to test his own observations of people
against the theories of sociologists, ethnographers and anthropologists.
Presumably his reading of social science texts influenced the research-experiment
quality that characterizes his mature cinematic style: even as the characters
rush to and fro, caught up in their mad desires, the director observes them
with a scientist's coolness. (The Insect Woman's [1963] original
title translates as Entomological Chronicles of Japan, and the subtitle
of The Pornographers [1966] is Introduction to Anthropology.)
The films often feel as if Imamura concocted the scenario, set his actors
loose in the characters' environment, and then proceeded as a documentarian
would, capturing the weird reality taking place before him. Scenes are usually
filmed from wide- or medium-shot distance. There are infrequent close-ups
and few POV shots. (9) Editing is rarely used to expand
or contract time in order to build excitement in the viewer. Even the films'
most frenzied and violent moments play out as parts of an ongoing chronicle
or examination of behavior, not as dramatic highlights to be manipulated
by the director for maximum audience impact.
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The
Insect Woman
|
Throughout the 1960s Imamura continued to elaborate his vision. The Insect
Woman begins with the camera tracing the progress of an insect crawling
over the dirt as it attempts to climb a hill, falls back, regathers its
strength and pushes forward, stumbles back again. That blind animal struggle
is the whole movie in miniature, the life story of the heroine, Tome (Sachiko
Hidari). Tome is a rural peasant who moves to the city during wartime to
work in a factory, where she becomes a union activist, then an unmarried
mother, later a prostitute, and eventually a madam, before a series of reversals
finds her working as a domestic servant in late middle age. Lovers leave
her, employees betray her, her daughter deserts her, but she perseveres,
like the insect at the beginning. Though the tale sounds melodramatic in
outline, Imamura studiously denies us any prolonged emotional indulgence
in Tome's turns of fortune, keeping us at a distance from her suffering,
and pointing up her own pettiness and greed. Intentions of Murder
(also known as Unholy Desire, 1964) is the story of Sadako (Masumi
Harukawa), a country girl stuck in a bad marriage, who is raped by a burglar.
Her initial reaction is to do what society expects: expunge the shame of
her violation by committing suicide. But while preparing to kill herself,
Sadako grows hungry and proceeds to dig into a hot meal; the food awakens
a desire for more life. She develops an attachment to the rapist, a pathetic figure infatuated with her. They become lovers. In the end, the
rapist is dead of tuberculosis and Sadako has grown strong, dominating the
household which earlier dominated her.
Tome and Sadako are the first fully fleshed-out examples
of the Imamura heroine: sometimes crude and inarticulate, often unprincipled
and irrational, but possessing a sharp instinct for self-preservation and
a great zest for life. Imamura's women are a different breed from the noble
victims found in the usual “woman's film” of both East and West.
He has said, “Self-sacrificing women like the heroines of Naruse's
Floating Clouds [1955] and Mizoguchi's Life of Oharu [1952]
don't really exist.” (10) From Pigs and Battleships
to Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001), he presents women who are
earthy and passionate, and every bit as cruel, wanton, and selfish as the
men in their lives (weaklings, bounders, adolescents in adult bodies). Some
critics have hailed him as a feminist for breaking with the stereotypes
of an older generation and depicting women as sexual agents swimming against
the current of a patriarchal culture, but neither he nor his female characters
are flying the flag for social change or gender solidarity. These women
are simply out to survive in the world it was given to them to live in.
With The Pornographers, his first film made through
his own independent production company, Imamura took a satirical look at
male lust. The Pornographers is a black comedy about a maker of low-budget
porno films and part-time procurer named Subuyan Ogata (Shoichi Ozawa).
Subuyan lives with a widow and her two teenage children, a boy who crawls
into his mother's bed for comfort and a girl for whom Subuyan harbors not-so-hidden
desires. (Incest is a running theme in many of Imamura's films.) (11)
Haru (Sumiko Sakamoto), the widow, believes her dead husband's soul lives
on in a carp she keeps in a fishtank beside her bed, training its unblinking
eyes on her “sinful” liaison with Subuyan. At film's end, Haru
is dead, the makeshift family scattered. Crazed, impotent Subuyan resolves
to leave behind the treacherous world of women. He spends years building
a life-like sex doll in Haru's image, and the last shot finds him drifting
out to sea in his houseboat, oblivious to everything except the perfect
union he'll soon consummate with his ideal woman.
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A
Man Vanishes
|
Imamura made his first detour into documentary filmmaking with A Man
Vanishes (1967), a highly original blend of documentary and fiction
techniques (and a worthy precursor to Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf's later
experiments). Imamura was interested in studying a Japanese social phenomenon:
every year, many men disappear from the lives they've constructed, leaving
behind jobs and families, vanishing into anonymity. A Man Vanishes
follows Yoshie Hayakawa, the fiancée of one such man, as she tracks
down leads, pokes into rumors, searches for the truth about her missing
lover. Eventually she reveals that she has fallen in love with the “investigator”
Imamura has paired her with, a professional actor (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, the
rapist in Intentions of Murder). In the film's central scene, Imamura,
onscreen, provokes a confrontation in a teahouse between Hayakawa and her
sister, who she believes played a part in her fiancé's disappearance—and
then, at a moment of high tension, the director shouts a command to his
hidden crew as the walls of the “teahouse” collapse to reveal
a film set. “Real people” and actors, unmediated reality and staged
scenes, the world and its soundstage imitation: in this sly, provocative,
and puzzling film, Imamura muddies the boundaries and relishes the mess
that results.
In 1968 came the epic The Profound Desire of the Gods (also known
as Kuragejima: Tales from a Southern Island), set among a tribal
community whose remote island is visited by an engineer on a scouting mission
for a Tokyo construction company. The island's natives struggle to balance
their attachment to tradition against their fascination with the technological
and cultural wonders of modernity. For all its barbarism, the islanders'
way of life represents the harmony and homogeneity of the Japanese past,
a past that crumbles beneath the heedless industrializing energies of the
present. The natives begin to hunt fish with dynamite, to sell their land
to the corporation, to regard themselves as the primitives the mainlanders
consider them to be. In the conflict between old and new, everybody loses
something, and nobody wins. Factories and airports, tourism and Coca-Cola
arrive on the island, shattering the centuries-old order of things, and
the engineer learns too late to love what he helped destroy. Profound
Desire is a grand summation of Imamura's themes and concerns: civilization
versus savagery; science versus superstition; humans as animals; capitalism,
paganism, and incest (see endnote 11).
The film cost a great deal to make, and did not turn a
profit. Meanwhile, Imamura's old employer Nikkatsu, which provided backing
for his production company, was nearing collapse. Imamura retrenched, and
re-emerged as a full-time documentary filmmaker; this was how he spent most
of the 1970s. (12) The documentaries, most of them made
for television, maintain his earlier interest in Japanese society's outsiders,
the rebels and dropouts of the nation's recent history: a bar hostess in
the US military port town of Yokosuka; Japanese women sent to Southeast
Asia in the pre-war years to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military,
who decided not to return home once they had won their freedom; soldiers
who fought overseas for the Emperor and similarly chose to remain living
as expatriates.
During the late 1970s, Imamura began to move back to fictional filmmaking.
There were economic reasons: during his years as a documentarian, his family
was mainly supported by his wife's job as head of an animation company.
But there was also a growing dissatisfaction with the nature of the work
he was doing:
I… found myself wondering whether documentary
was really the best way to approach these matters. I came to realize
the presence of the camera could materially change people's lives.
Did I have the right to effect such changes? Was I playing God in
trying to control the lives of others? I'm no sentimental humanist,
but thoughts like these scared me and made me acutely aware of the
limitations of documentary filmmaking. (13)
And finally, he simply felt like going back to making up stories with actors:
“[T]here were many things I wanted to express that were beyond the
reach of a documentary.” (14) Whatever the reason,
he returned to fiction fully re-energized in the late '70s and '80s, with
a series of films that built upon and arguably surpassed his '60s work.
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Vengeance
Is Mine
|
First came Vengeance Is Mine (1979), starring Ken Ogata as Iwao Enokizu,
a character based on a real-life figure whose 78-day crime spree in 1963
captivated the nation. The story is related in an elaborate flashback structure,
jumping from Enokizu's capture to the manhunt that preceded it, back to
his youth, then forward to his series of bloody killings, and forward again
to the years after his execution by the state. As we chart Enokizu's descent
from theft and fraud to murder, we're introduced to the unlucky souls drawn
into his orbit: his despised father, a devout Christian; his deserted wife
(she and her father-in-law share a strong mutual attraction but religion
and decorum prevent their acting upon it); the fatalistic woman who falls
in love with him during his last weeks on the run and becomes his final
victim. Near the end Imamura borrows from Citizen Kane and Psycho
when he supplies a pocket-sized psychoanalytic explanation
for Enokizu's will to kill (issues with Dad), but this provides little illumination
and less comfort. Anchored by Ogata's mesmerizing performance, Vengeance
Is Mine is one of the director's great works, a true-crime thriller
that expands in the mind to become a frightening portrait of unappeasable
evil.
The film was a critical and commercial success, allowing Imamura to raise
a sizable budget to make Eijanaika (1981)—loosely translated
as “Why not?” or “What the hell?”—his first period
piece, an historical epic set in 1860s Edo (present-day Tokyo), soon after
Japan opened its doors to the West following centuries of isolation. (15)
Genji (Shigeru Izuyima), a peasant farmer, was rescued from a shipwreck
by an American boat crew; now, after several years in the US, he has returned
to Japan. He seeks to reclaim the hand of his wife Ine (Kaori Momoi), who
believes him to be dead; she is now a performer in a carnival sideshow and
the mistress of the carnival boss Kinzo (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi). Kinzo's connections
to the underworld and to various political players precipitate Genji and
Ine's involvement in the power struggle between the reigning Shogun clans
and those seeking to restore the Emperor's rule. The bulk of this lengthy
film details the machinations of the two factions, as Kinzo plays off one
side against the other and Genji tries to persuade Ine to return with him
to the USA. The film climaxes with an extraordinary explosion of energy,
as Edo's lower classes (“heedless, unmindful, frivolous, and strong”
in the words of the introductory caption), feeding off of the turbulence
and uncertainty swirling around them, erupt in a spontaneous revolt against
the Shogunate's rule, rioting, singing, dancing, donning makeup and costumes,
stripping naked and pissing in the streets. The sequence is like Eisenstein
on LSD: the crowd seems to move as one, then splinter into a chaotic sprawl
of thousands of crazed individuals, only to form a mass once more and press
forward, chanting joyously: “Eijanaika!” Rarely has the
widescreen format been used to such potent effect. The spectacular display
of color, movement, bodies rushing every which way, is exhilarating. The
forces of authority put down the revolt with guns, and the film closes on
an elegiac note, but the orgiastic frenzy of the riots will not be forgotten.
No scene in Imamura's work better sums up his vision of the amoral, apolitical,
anarchic life-force that pulses beneath the seeming stability of the social
order.
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The
Ballad of Narayama
|
Another historical film followed in 1983: The Ballad of Narayama,
based on the novel by Shichiro Fukazawa and previously filmed by Keisuke
Kinoshita in 1958. The film is set in a small, isolated mountain village
in northern Japan in the late 1800s. The story begins in the winter of Orin's
69th year. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) is a family matriarch facing the law of
the land—tribal custom demands that when villagers turn 70, they must
be taken up Mount Narayama by their offspring, to die. Death equals life:
in this harsh mountain world, the old must die to ensure there will be enough
food for the young to survive. Death equals life, and sex equals death:
each act of sex is a potential childbirth, and each childbirth brings a
family closer to starvation. But death, again, equals life: an unwanted
newborn is left outside to perish, but its corpse, rotting in the dirt,
will fertilize the tough soil and provide more food for the living. There
is no room for the sentimental idea of the world as a staging-ground for
the human drama. The wolf is always at the door. Nature is present in nearly
every shot; plants, animals, earth crowd the frame, indifferent to the human
struggle. The rhythm of the film is the rhythm of nature, the turn of the
seasons. A young couple fucks on the grass, while nearby, a pair of snakes
mirror their actions, frogs rest on a lily pad, birds nest in a tree. (Birds
do it, bees do it, Imamura's Japanese do it.) As Orin's 70th winter approaches,
her eldest son Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) prepares to fulfill his duty. At the
film's climax, a nearly wordless half-hour-long sequence, Tatsuhei carries
his mother up the mountain. As they ascend, we witness a heart-stopping
image: hundreds of skeletons, the bones of dead ancestors from generations
past. At the moment of goodbye, Tatsuhei refuses to leave. Orin slaps him
across the face, and sends him on his way. The first snow of winter falls.
The cycle turns: Tatsuhei knows that not too many winters from now, he'll
join his mother on Narayama. The movie is wholly characteristic of Imamura
in its ribaldry, its celebration of sex and survival, and its unsentimental
view of nature (human and non-human), but this final sequence brings a new
kind of shock. The Ballad of Narayama is Imamura's masterpiece.
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Black
Rain
|
Zegen (also known as The Pimp or A Pander [1987]),
was based on the autobiography of Iheji Muraoka (played by Ogata), a Japanese
expat who ran a string of brothels in Southeast Asia during the imperial-expansion
years of the early twentieth century. The film was never distributed in
the USA. Then Imamura adapted Black Rain (1989) from the novel by
Masuji Ibuse. Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka) is a young woman living with her aunt
Shigeko and uncle Shigematsu in Hiroshima when the Americans drop the atom
bomb. These early scenes are stark, direct, hard to watch and difficult
to forget. Imamura makes us see the flesh as it melts and drips off a man's
bones, the tiny charred corpse clutched by a mother. The family lives through
the post-war years, waiting to see if the dreaded radiation sickness affecting
so many survivors will claim them too. In the meantime, they try to get
on with their lives—Shigematsu wants to see Yasuko married off; she
wants to remain with them. Eventually, they all grow ill. That's it. Somber,
stately, and slowly paced, Black Rain was viewed by some critics
as Imamura's submission to classical rigor in his old age, even as his “reconciliation”
with Ozu. (The domestic-melodrama aspects of the story, which also recall
Ozu, are well handled; this is one of the few Imamura films that's effective
as a tearjerker.) The brisk, kinetic editing of the earlier works has given
way to a style of long unbroken takes captured from a chaste distance. But
though the tone is subdued, the film carries a current of political anger
at the suffering caused by the bomb, and a powerful sense of the devastation
engendered by the war. (Interestingly, the film was faulted by critics in
other Asian countries for depicting only the Japanese as the war's victims.)
Another hiatus followed, during which Imamura suffered a stroke, and had
trouble raising money for his next project, Dr. Akagi. But in 1997
he inaugurated a new period of creativity with The Eel, a mellow
comedy about a businessman (Koji Yakusho, the popular star of Shall We
Dance?[Masayuki Suo, 1996] and Cure [Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997])
who is sent to jail for killing his adulterous wife. Released from prison
after eight years, he attempts to build a quiet life amidst a clamorous
community of misfits and do-gooders, a pursuit further complicated by the
romantic attentions of a woman he rescues from a botched suicide. Some found
the film a tentative and even tepid work, but many greeted it as a return
to form: it shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Kiarostami's Taste of
Cherry (Imamura had won the prize earlier, for The Ballad of Narayama),
and its international success allowed Imamura to make two more films in
succession: Dr. Akagi (1998) and Warm Water under a Red Bridge.
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Dr.
Akagi
|
Dr. Akagi is an energetically rendered portrait of Japan in the last
year of World War Two. Japan's defeat is imminent. Akagi (Akira Emoto),
a family doctor, tries to help his patients and pursue his medical research
as the world falls apart around him. (Imamura may be working partly from
memory here: his father was a doctor, and he was a young man during this
period.) Akagi is a weird and original creation, part heroic crusader, part
buffoon. Selfless in his devotion to medicine and healing, he may also be
losing his mind. He diagnoses every one of his patients with hepatitis,
and is convinced, against all evidence that Japan will triumph over its
enemies. The war, in fact, may have driven him mad but, this being an Imamura
film, it's difficult to say. Hard times have pressed everyone to their limits.
Families sell their daughters into prostitution, sons die at the front,
doctors become drug addicts. Yet despite the bleakness of its setting, the
film is an ebullient entertainment, the director amused as ever with the
freaks and dreamers he puts on parade.
Warm Water stars Koji Yakusho as Sasano, a downsized
“salaryman” facing a divorce. He travels to the seaside Toyama
prefecture in search of rumored buried treasure, and becomes involved with
Saeko (Misa Shimizu), a local woman with a unique biological quirk: when
she orgasms, she unleashes a tide of warm fluid that soaks the floors, runs
out of the house, and spills into the nearby river, drawing the fish toward
it and delighting the local fishermen. Sasano searches for the treasure
as his strange romance takes flight. Saeko's gushing at first excites but
soon disturbs the conventional-minded Sasano, and he begins to withdraw.
At the end, he discovers that the “treasure” he had sought was
a metaphor—for a woman's love and lust. Here Imamura the aged libertine
is in Lawrencian seize-the-day mode, satirizing the timidity of the corporate-technocrat
generation. Taro, the recently deceased used-book seller whose spirit presides
over the film (he's the one who sends Sasano on the treasure quest), tells
the younger man in a flashback, “Enjoy life while you can still get
a hard-on,” and Imamura admits Taro speaks for him: “His message
is my own… I think we've lost our way. We've got this wonderful freedom
and nobody is doing anything with it.” (16)
All three of the recent features handle audacious shifts
in tone with terrific fluency. (The Eel begins as a bloody thriller,
turns into a drama of redemption, and finally becomes a knockabout comedy
with surrealist touches.) They also share an interest in utilizing acting
ensembles to create an onscreen community of misfits and outcasts: Imamura's
people, then and now. (17) In time, the late works may
grow in stature, though they lack the tension of an artist discovering new
things to say (or, as in late Buñuel, the excitement of an artist
finding new ways to say old things). But they constitute an impressive last
act in a major career, and certainly live up to Imamura's old declaration:
“I want to make messy, really human, Japanese, unsettling films.”
(18)
I've always wanted to ask questions about the Japanese, because
it's the only people I'm qualified to describe… I am surprised
by my reception in the west. I don't really think that people there
can possibly understand what I'm talking about. (19)
© Nelson Kim, June 2003
Endnotes:
- Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, updated
paperback edition, Tokyo and New York, Kodansha International Ltd.,
1985, pp. 293, 287
- Ibid., p. 287.
- Toichi Nakata, “Shohei Imamura Interview”
in James Quandt (ed.), Shohei Imamura, Toronto, Toronto International
Film Festival Group, 1997, p. 117
- Nigel Kendall, “All You Need Is Sex”, The
Guardian, March 14, 2002, http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,667028,00.html
- Nakata, ibid., p. 111
- Ibid., p. 117
- Ibid., p. 112
- The Nuberu Bagu (after the French Nouvelle
Vague) was the name given to the remarkably talented generation
of filmmakers that arose in the late 1950s and 1960s as the old studio
system was weakening. The grouping included Imamura, Nagisa Oshima,
Masahiro Shinoda, Seijun Suzuki and Yoshishige Yoshida, among others.
- One of Imamura's key collaborators during this period
was cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda, who shot all of the director's
films from Endless Desire through The Pornographers.
- David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction
to the Japanese New Wave, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana
University Press, 1988, p. 123
- Typically, Imamura depicts incest as a natural urge
indulged in by the “backward” provincials and repressed by
the “respectable” classes. Incest has a special resonance
in Japanese culture. According to the Shinto creation myth, the islands
of Japan were the “children” of the copulating brother-and-sister
deities Izanagi and Izanami, who also gave birth to the sun goddess
Amateratsu, mythical progenitor of the Yamato line of emperors. (See
http://ias.berkeley.edu/orias/hero/yamato/
and Ian Buruma, Behind The Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers,
Transvestites, Gangsters, and other Japanese Cultural Heroes, New
York, Pantheon Books, 1984.) This tale provides part of the background
to Imamura's later The Profound Desire of the Gods, which takes
place on a rural island. The film's protagonists include a pair of sibling
lovers; the sister is regarded as a shamaness by her tribe. In local
legend, a similar union spawned the island's early population. Here,
however, the encroachment of modern values makes the lovers' fellow
tribal folk ashamed of their customs, and they persecute the siblings
for their breaking of the taboo. Also see, besides The Pornographers,
The Insect Woman and Vengeance Is Mine.
- During this period he also established his film school,
called the first of its kind in Japan, as a way to provide aspiring
filmmakers with the training that earlier generations had received through
the now defunct studio-apprentice programs.
- Nakata, p. 120
- Ibid.
- Perhaps it was the experience of making documentaries
about the recent past, perhaps it was simply the result of aging, but
Imamura's return to fictional filmmaking in the late 1970s showed a
new interest in history. All of his 1950s and '60s films are set in
the present; of the seven features he has made since Vengeance Is
Mine, five are set in the past.
- Kendall, ibid.
- Incidentally, all three features, as well as Imamura's
contribution to the international omnibus film 11'09”01,
were co-written by his son Daisuke Tengan, also a director.
- Bock, p. 288
- Kendall, ibid.
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Shohei
Imamura
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Filmography
As
director:
Also screenwriter or co-screenwriter, except for (*):
Stolen Desire (Nusumareta Yokujo) (1958) *
Nishi Ginza Station (Nishi Ginza Eki-Mae) (1958)
Endless Desire (Hateshi Naki Yokubo) (1958)
My Second Brother (Nianchan) (1959)
Pigs and Battleships (Buta To Gunkan) (1961)
The Insect Woman (Nippon Konchuki) (1963)
Intentions of Murder (Unholy Desire, Akai Satsui)
(1964)
The Pornographers: Introduction to Anthropology (Jinruigaku
Nyumon) (1966)
A Man Vanishes (Ningen Johatsu) (1967) *
The Profound Desire of the Gods (Kuragejima: Tales from a
Southern Island, Kamigami No Fukaki Yokubo) (1968)
A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon
Sengo Shi: Madamu Omboro No Seikatsu) (1970) *
Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute (Karayuki-San)
(1975) *
Vengeance Is Mine (Fukushu Suru Wa Ware Ni Ari) (1979)
*
Eijankaika (1981)
The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama-Bushi Ko) (1983)
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Warm
Water Under a Red Bridge
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Zegen
(The Pimp, A Pander) (1987)
Black Rain (Kuroi Ame) (1989)
The Eel (Unagi) (1997)
Dr. Akagi (Kanzo Sensei) (1998)
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (Akai Hashi No Shita No Nurui
Mizu) (2001)
Japan segment in 11'09”01 omnibus film (2002)
Television documentaries:
In Search of Unreturned Soldiers (Mikikanhei O Otte)
Parts I and II (1971)
The Pirates of Bubuan (Bubuan No Kaizoku) (1972)
Muhomatsu Returns Home (Muhomatsu Kokyo Ni Kaeru)
(1973)
In Search of Unreturned Soldiers (Mikikanhei O Otte)
Part III (1975)
Two Men Named Yoshinobu (Tsuiseki/Futari No Yoshinobu)
(1975)
Bibliography
Joseph
L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry,
expanded edition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982
Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, updated paperback edition,
Tokyo and New York, Kodansha International Ltd., 1985
Ian Buruma, Behind The Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites,
Gangsters, and other Japanese Cultural Heroes, New York, Pantheon
Books, 1984
David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New
Wave, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1988
J. Hoberman, “The Pornographers” and Dave Kehr, “Eijanaika”
in Kathy Schulz Huffhines (ed.), Foreign Affairs: The National Society
of Film Critics' Video Guide to Foreign Films, San Francisco, Mercury
House Incorporated, 1991
Joan Mellen, The Waves at Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema,
New York, Pantheon Books, 1976
James Quandt (ed.), Shohei Imamura, Toronto, Toronto International
Film Festival Group, 1997
Terrence Rafferty, “Black Rain” in The Thing Happens:
Ten Years of Writing about the Movies, New York, Grove Press, 1993
Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema, trans. Gregory Barrett,
Tokyo and New York, Kodansha International Ltd., 1982
Web
Resources
All
You Need is Sex
Article and interview by Nigel Kendall, from The Guardian, March
14, 2002.
Free
to Roam
Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of Dr. Akagi, for the Chicago
Reader.
Japanese
Film Director Shohei Imamura Speaks to the World Socialist Web Site
A 2000 interview by Richard Phillips for World Socialist Web Site.
Monomyth
Website, UC Berkeley ORIAS (Office of Resources for International and
Area Studies)
Background information on the Shinto creation myth referred to in endnote
11.
Film Directors - Articles On the Internet
Link to online articles can be found her
Water
Under the Bridge for Japanese Cinematographer
A profile of Shigeru Komatsubara, Imamura's cinematographer since
The Eel, at Kodak.com.
Wriggling
Free of Perfection
Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of The Eel, for the Chicago
Reader.
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