Film
by Scott Foundas
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there—and as the late Shohei Imamura would have added, it’s usually a bird-eat-bird and a snake-eat-mouse one too. His movies are guttural epics bubbling over with rape and revenge, incest and adultery. In Imamura’s films, the work of a social anthropologist with an unapologetic Darwinian streak, modern Japan is but a simulacrum of its feudal past: the epochs separating civilized man from his animal forefathers are routinely collapsed in a heartbeat. To see these movies again today, in the Belcourt’s excellent six-film retrospective “A Man Vanishes: The Legacy of Shohei Imamura,” is to be reminded how timid most other Japanese cinema—to say nothing of cinema in general—looks by comparison.
To some extent, it was that very timidity—that intractable sense of Japanese decorum and decency—that encouraged Imamura toward his ultimate career. The son of a physician, he studied Western history at Waseda University and, for a while, made a living as a black marketeer—experiences that doubtless cultivated his gourmet appetite for enterprising underlings suckling at society’s moneyed teat. Despite aspirations to work in the theater, he took a job as an assistant director at the Shochiku film studio.
There, he was immediately assigned to work for the legendary Yasujiro Ozu, whose sedate portraits of Japanese family life would, on the surface, seem the antithesis of the lurid spectacles to which Imamura came to sign his name. In truth, though, both directors were striving for a similar effect: to show the real Japan seething beneath the emotionless, tea-and-tatami-mat facade.
After directing four features on assignment for the Nikkatsu studio, it was 1961’s Pigs and Battleships (Dec. 26, 28 & 29) that fully revealed Imamura the rhapsodic vulgarian. A delirious satire set in a port town during the U.S. occupation, it’s the story of a dim but well-meaning low-level yakuza named Kinta (the wonderfully loose-limbed Hiroyuki Nagato) who finds himself the unwitting fall guy in a hackneyed hog-farming scheme involving officers of the U.S. military. Meanwhile, Kinta’s girlfriend, Haruko, rejects the suggestion of her own mother and sister that she become the kept woman of a visiting American seaman.
That Haruko is the only one of the characters to meet with something close to a happy ending sets up a favorite Imamura theme: the indomitable Japanese woman outwitting and/or outlasting the sniveling, weak-willed representatives of patriarchal society. This holds true for the eponymous protagonist of Imamura’s subsequent Insect Woman (Dec. 27 & 29, Jan. 2), a prostitute whose amoral, roach-like tenacity holds the director’s gaze without him holding his nose.
Once he began producing independently—with 1965’s The Pornographers (Dec. 28, Jan. 1 & 3), perhaps his best-known film, and 1968’s three-hour color epic The Profound Desire of the Gods (Dec. 29-30 and Jan. 1), Imamura’s provocations only became greater. Yet in light of the “extreme” Japanese cinema of the 1990s and 2000s, it’s important to note that never does Imamura shock for shock’s sake. Though he is careful neither to condone nor condemn his characters’ actions, it’s clear that Imamura feels a profound kinship with the street life he films—a sense that these people are more vital and alive than the staid ruling class of which he himself nearly became a part.
Imamura died last year at the age of 80, and right up to the end his work never slackened. His brilliant 1979 Vengeance is Mine (Jan. 1-3) reconstructs the biography of a real-life Japanese serial killer; 1989’s Black Rain (Jan. 2-3) brings a stark lyricism to the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. There is also a rich period from the 1970s when Imamura devoted himself mostly to non-fiction works, including the deeply humane Karayuki-San: The Making of a Prostitute (1975), a feature-length interview with a Japanese woman who was abducted as a teenager and sold into Malaysian prostitution.
But I feel the strongest affection for Imamura’s films of the ’60s, almost none of which are available on DVD in this country—and which only the largest possible screens can even begin to do justice. Shot for shot, they are masterworks of organized chaos. They are movies in which the entire balance of society seems ready to tip at any given moment, as it does in the inspired anarchic climax of Pigs and Battleships, where the titular swine dupe their underworld captors and take control of the streets. It is Imamura’s reminder that, at the end of the day, we are all but hogs at the trough.
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