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Along with Oshima and Shinoda, Imamura began his filmmaking career as a member of the Japanese New Wave, singling out the cosmically serene Yasujiro Ozu as the antithesis of the directorial approach he wished to take. In contrast to Ozu's rigorously contained classicism, Imamura makes films that threaten to explode with uncontrolled chaos and energy.
He finds his heroes and (especially) heroines in the lower classes--bovine housewives, shamans, pornographers, carnies, thieves, and whores, explores taboo themes such as incest, and exposes the living power of primitive superstition. Imamura's characters frequently lack any raison d'etre beyond a deep-rooted, highly physicalized existential persistence, a kind of unconscious, armored "I-Amness"--not unlike the primal animal spirits that inform some of William Faulkner's most memorable (often female) types from the underclass of the American South.
Imamura has an eye for documentary detail, but he's given to juxtaposing realism and stylized imagery, further undercutting any comfortable containment of the worlds he creates in his unsettling, often blackly hilarious films. Erotic, kinetic, violent, vulgar, horrifying, ridiculous--all of these adjectives have been used to access the unique aesthetics of Imamura's movies. Once you give yourself up to the power of his images and themes, this is a director who will carry you away into foreign climes where wisdom of a sort can be smuggled out--not Ozu's elevating vision of universal order, but an exhilarating acknowledgment of the way things are and will always be at ground level--where everything in nature sits tight or moves fast in the determination to stay alive. --Kathleen Murphy
This series was organized, originated, and toured by the Cinematheque Ontario and sponsored by The Japan Foundation.
"You may think all this is real," Imamura said, pointing to the modern city. "But to me it is all illusion. The reality is those little shrines, the superstitions and irrationality that pervade the Japanese, under this veneer of business suits and advanced
technology."
Note: all films are subtitled in English.
STOLEN DESIRE / NUSUMARETA YOKUJO
1958; 92 minutes
Imamura began his filmmaking career with a ribald comedy cum self-portrait: he saw
himself in the young intellectual who takes up with an itinerant troupe of Kabuki players, seduced by their vulgar, unreflecting energy. His dream of shaping that low-down energy into art is eventually deep-sixed by his disillusionment with theater that's equal parts classical drama and stripshow. But in the meantime he has fallen in love with the wife of the troupe's director--and finds himself the object of her tough little sister's desire!
Wednesday, May 27: 2 & 6:35 pm
Thursday, May 28: 4:50 & 9:30 pm
NISHI GINZA STATION / NISHI GINZA EKIMAE
1958; 52 minutes
A vehicle for the popular singer Frank Nagai: around the studio's only instruction--that Nagai sing the title song three times--Imamura invented a preposterous plot line that had a melancholic Nagai constantly flashing back on a desert island idyll he enjoyed with a native girl during the war.-- Dave Kehr, Film Comment
The more Nagai's druggist fantasizes about his dream girl, the more his clerk begins to resemble her. Completely cowed by his spouse, he decides to try to make his daydreams come true, setting off a wave of comic complications.
and
ENDLESS DESIRE / HATESHINAKI YOKUBO
1958; 101 minutes
ENDLESS DESIRE matched Imamura for the first time with Shinsaku Himeda, his cinematographer for the next ten years. The story, which has a real Imamura flavor, centers on a group of five people searching for a cache of morphine buried in what was once an American air-raid shelter, and is now the basement of a butcher shop. As the search continues under the leadership of a ferocious widow, the characters fall in and out of a series of affairs.... -- Dave Kehr, Film Comment
Wednesday, May 27: 3:45 & 8:25 pm
Thursday, May 28: 2 & 6:40 pm
MY SECOND BROTHER / NIANCHAN
1959; 101 minutes
"...an earnest piece of social realism set among the impoverished coal miners of Kyushu...."
--Dave Kehr, Film Comment
A story told from diary entries kept by Sueko, a little girl with four older brothers--all orphans who live by their wits in a depressed mining town after World War II. BROTHER follows these loving siblings through their mostly abortive attempts to find family and economic security--helped and hindered by village folk of every stripe and class.
Friday, May 29: 2 & 6:10 pm
Saturday, May 30: 4 & 8:10 pm
PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS / BUTA TO GUNKAN
1961; 108 minutes
In this satire that bites the relations between Japan and occupying American forces with very sharp teeth, Imamura introduces us to Kinto, a young punk, and his pig-raising gang who scheme to feed their black-market swine on garbage from American warships. Critic Donald Ritchie calls the girlfriend who tries to draw Kinto away from his parasitic life "the first full-length portrait of the Imamura woman": strong and hungry for happiness, though her innocence has been "gang-banged into oblivion by the American military." PIGS climaxes in an hilariously surreal spectacle you won't soon forget!
Friday, May 29: 4 & 8:10 pm
Saturday, May 30: 6 & 10:10 pm
"Insects, animals and humans are similar in the sense that they are born, they excrete, reproduce and die. Nevertheless, I myself am a man. I ask myself what differentiates humans from other animals. What is a human being? I look for the answer by continuing to make films. I don't think I have found the answer." -- Imamura
"The only continuity that Imamura discovers is a continuity of chaos, embodied by the buzzing energy, beyond mind and spirit--that he sees in the Japanese underclass. This constant hum, which explodes now and then into violence or violent sexuality, is the only transcendent force in Imamura's films; yet it is a force not of religion but of superstition, not of
courtly love but carnality, not of spirit but of flesh."
-- Dave Kehr, Film Comment
THE INSECT WOMAN, aka ENTOMOLOGICAL CHRONICLES OF JAPAN / NIPPON KONCHUKI
1963; 123 minutes
Tome (Sachilo Hidari) comes down from her mountain village--like an ant heading for honey--to become a prostitute, and eventually a not very successful madam in Tokyo. Describing our reaction to the near-comedy of Tome's emotional cliches, Tadao Sato notes that our "laughter is not only a ridicule of her ignorance but also an expression of admiration for her tough vitality, since she...rids herself of frustration and goes on living, no matter how immoral her existence may appear.... Imamura portrays common people as leading an existence transcending traditional morality." And Donald Ritchie points out that Tome "bases her business (prostitution) upon the same considerations as do respectable Japanese business firms....The point, however, is not that she resembles the firm but that it resembles her--with the exception that she is, by comparison, the more open and honest."
Sunday, May 31: 4 & 9:10 pm
Monday, June 1: 4:45 pm
"Women generally outlive men, which among other things that means they're stronger than men. I certainly find them more interesting than men. The women who have marked me most in life are the lower-class women I met during my black market days. They weren't educated and they were vulgar and lusty, but they were also strongly affectionate and they instinctively confronted all their own sufferings."
-- Imamura
INTENTIONS OF MURDER / AKAI SATSUI
1964; 150 minutes
"Arresting and provocative."
-- Eugene Archer, The New York Times
"A minor masterpiece....the story of a woman
willing to kill to preserve her unhappiness."
-- Dave Kehr, Film Comment
The highly unusual heroine of INTENTIONS lives with the unloving father of her child, terrified that he will replace her with his "outside" mistress and disown his son. Then Sadako (Masumii Harukawa) is raped by a burgler--stealing money for heart medicine--and improbably becomes his heart's desire. But this stolid creature can't be carried away by passion; she seeks only to remain planted in one place, with as little disruption of her almost entirely mindless existence as possible. That "mindless" isn't necessarily a pejorative in Imamura's lexicon: Sadako is like some force of nature--say, the film's falling snow--that simply is, requiring no rationale or philosophy. And like falling snow, the passive power and weight of her desires eventually erase the impediments to Sadako's contentment. INTENTIONS OF MURDER is fascinating in the way it goes against our traditional expectations of "love stories" and female character.
Sunday, May 31: 6:20 pm
Monday, June 1: 2 & 7:15 pm
"In my work I want...to enter the character's heart. I want to capture the smallest action, the finest nuance, the most intimate psychological expression because filmmakers must concern themselves with more than facades....I love all the characters in my films, even the loutish and frivolous ones. I want every one of my shots to express this love."
-- Imamura
THE PORNOGRAPHERS / JINRUIGAKO NYUMON
1966; 128m
Working his audacious, ironic distancing effect, Imamura juxtaposes the inflammatory image of pornographer with a dryly academic subtitle ("Introduction to Anthropology"), the bizarre with the matter-of-fact. Here, a pathetic little Imamura Everyman invests his most heartfelt energy in shooting 8mm sex movies, while lusting guiltily after an unhappy young woman whose scarring he's responsible for. (Her mother keeps a carp she believes is her reincarnated husband.) When his harried life becomes too much for him, he swears off real women and starts working on an artificial but anatomically correct female. Outré and disquieting, the film's home-made porn sequences "are among the funniest...ever to appear in a Japanese film," according to Donald Richie.
Tuesday, June 2: 2 pm
Wednesday, June 3: 4:25 & 9:15 pm
A MAN VANISHES /
NINGEN JOHATSU
1967; 130m
VANISHES started out as a serious documentary investigation of the social phenomenon the Japanese call "Johatsu"--the large number of people who, each year, simply disappear in large cities. A (provocatively named) "Mr. Oshima" becomes the object of Imamura's case study--and his probing camera eye pursues the missing man's fiancée Yoshie everywhere she goes in her search. But documentary suddenly elides into something like fiction, when Yoshie falls for the professional actor (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, INTENTIONS OF MURDER's rapist) hired to conduct the film's interviews. Then, at a climactic moment, "real life" explodes onto the screen in the person of the director himself. An unsettling, exciting experiment in cinematic and existential, objective and manipulative POVs.
Tuesday, June 2:
4:25 pm
Wednesday, June 3:
2 & 6:50 pm
THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS: TALES FROM A SOUTHERN ISLAND /
KAMIGAMI NO FUKAKI YOKUBO
1968; 150m
On a tropical isle somewhere off Japan, an old man chants his "incest" version of an Adam and Eve myth: "brother and sister become man and wife, together they form an island." In Imamura's first color film, the scion of an incestuous union loves his high priestess sister, but believes the gods have punished him by casting an immense boulder onto the land--which he has spent 20 years trying to bury. While Nekichi grounds his natural passions in meaningless labor, a Tokyo engineer visiting the island is proclaimed a god, a natural when it comes to expressing primitive sexual energy. Critic Dave Kehr notes that "the blunt caricatures of hayseed greed and carnality suggest a Japanese Li'l Abner; yet the legends and landscapes...lend the film a genuine grandeur."
Thursday, June 4: 2 pm; Friday, June 5: 9 pm
Sunday, June 7: 4 pm
VENGEANCE IS MINE /
FUKUSHA SURA WA WARE IN ARI
1979; 128m
"An urban fantasy: a master criminal who violates all the laws of society with impunity, stealing, seducing, swindling, and killing his way across until...he is caught. Based on a true story, by way of a novel by Ryuzo Saki, VENGEANCE follows Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) through the course of a 78-day crime spree, beginning with the brutal hammer murder of a utilities repairman...and ending with [a] strangulation.... It is Imamura's ultimate refusal to either despise or forgive his protagonist that makes VENGEANCE a devastating experience. Like Sadako [the "heroine" of INTENTIONS OF MURDER], Enokizu is beyond judgment: He is a force in the world, a fact." --Dave Kehr, Film Comment
Friday, June 5: 2 & 6:30 pm
Saturday, June 6: 4 & 8:30 pm
Monday, June 8: 2 & 8:45 pm
A HISTORY OF POSTWAR JAPAN AS TOLD BY A BAR HOSTESS / NIPPON SENGO SHI: MADAME OMBORO NO SEIKATSU
1970; 105m
With HISTORY, Imamura launched a series of straight, yet typically "bent," documentaries made for Japanese television. Here he interviews Madame Omboro, owner of a bar and married to an American soldier after WWII. Her description of "how it was" during the American Occupation is intercut with newsrell footage that often contradicts her testimony. Madame Omboro soon expresses a yen for Imamura, her interviewer--like A MAN VANISHES, HISTORY turns into weirdly miscegenated fiction and documentary.
Friday, June 5: 4:30 pm;
Saturday, June 6: 6:30 pm
WHAT THE HELL! / EIJANAIKA
1981; 151m
"A delirious exercise in sex, crime, and weirdness...with an appalling, visionary beauty." -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Mid-19th century Japan: shogun clans war with the emperor for power, inflation soars, and Japan opens its doors to the West for the first time in centuries. In the midst of chaos, the poor and disenfranchised take as their motto, "Eijanaika!," or "What the hell!" Plunging into dizzyingly convoluted national politics and down-and-dirty life in a sleazy riverside carnival, Imamura escalates this widescreen epic's frenzied drive into total license--corruption, bloodshed, and eroticism--until it finally achieves orgasmic/kinetic release.
Sunday, June 7: 7:15 pm; Monday, June 8: 4:30 pm
THE MAKING OF A PROSTITUE / KARAYUKI-SAN
1975; 70m
Pursuing yet another documentary investigation, Imamura interviews a toothless 74-year-old former prostitute who dispassionately recalls her hellish life: sold, by her parents, at 17 into sexual servitude to Japanese troops stationed in Singapore, she has somehow clung to a sense of moral rectitude. The director also speaks to some of her fellow "comfort women," elderly folk who continue to live in exile, afraid to return to a modern Japan that has little to do with idealized memory. Imamura was plunged into creative soul-searching when he realized the presence of his camera could materially change people's lives..."thoughts like these scare me and make me acutely aware of the limitations of documentary filmmaking."
Monday, June 8, 7:15 pm
THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA / NARAYAMA-BUSHI KO
1983; 128m
Imamura's unflinchingly earthy masterpiece was named Best Film at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Late in the last century, members of another of Imamura's primitive communities practice ritual sex, premature burial for thievery, and the abandonment of the elderly on a mountaintop. The brutal story of a man forced by custom to carry his aged mother up the mountain unreels as fierce poetry, celebrating humanity's bedrock will to survive.
Wednesday, June 10, 2 & 7 pm
Thursday, June 11, 4:15 & 9 pm
PIMP / ZEGEN
1987; 124m
"Epic, energetic, sexually impudent and grotesquely funny, ZEGEN is the culmination of what can be seen as a trilogy of films starring the great Ken Ogata, the others being VENGEANCE IS MINE and THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA. A satire about colonialism, commerce and carnality, ZEGEN is the true story of a hairdresser, sent to Manchuria to spy on the Russian army. A born entrepreneur, he sets up a chain of brothels throughout Asia as a kind of fornication franchise--and becomes 'the Big Boss of the South Seas.' The 'zegen' is a decent but doltish and blindly patriotic businessman who views his development of a prostitution empire throughout Southeast Asia as the vanguard of Japan's military adventurism: 'For the sake of a great cause, I procure women!'" -- from Cinematheque Ontario program
Wednesday, June 10, 4:30 & 9:30 pm
Thursday, June 11,
2 pm
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