Shohei Imamura’s Japan
May 25, 2007 - June 30, 2007
"I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure."—Shohei Imamura
The Japanese master Shohei Imamura (1926–2006) is famous for the controversial subject matter and raw energy of his films. Imamura's Japan is a sensual and often cruel universe untouched by the tea ceremony, Zen, or conventional gentility. Imamura shared with his contemporary Nagisa Oshima a deep social commitment, and a fascination with time-fragmented narration and the ambiguities of illusion and reality. Yet his films look and feel nothing like those of Oshima, or any other director for that matter. At once sensuous and structured, outrageous and analytical, they forage in the primordial Japanese spirit, the ancient drives on which modern life thrives. In the world he observes, women are not the long-suffering, lovely Japanese female of many a screen and fan; rather, they are survivors—self-aware, self-serving, and sexual. ("My heroines are true to life—just look around you at Japanese women. They are strong, and they outlive men. Self-sacrificing women like the heroines of Naruse's Floating Clouds and Mizoguchi's Life of Oharu don't really exist," he said.) Imamura has been called the "anthropologist" among the Japanese New Wave directors, but the scientific method is in part a clever stylistic device contrasting with the irrational and instinctual forces his films ultimately celebrate.
Judy Bloch
Publications Director
Friday, May 25, 2007
9:05 p.m. The Ballad of Narayama
Imamura’s deeply felt retelling of a folk legend portrays the final months of a matriarch in the context of rural traditions that call for the elderly to make way for the young. “Made with Imamura’s customary black humor and brutal pageantry.”—Village Voice. “Cruel and exalting.”—N.Y. Times
Saturday, May 26, 2007
6:30 p.m. The Insect Woman
A potent portrait of a woman who “bounces back and forth, like a pinball, between a rural existence with her awful family and an ostensibly more independent urban existence. . . . Imamura's treatment is lucid, savagely economical, pathos-free . . . respecting the blind persistence with which she crawls and scrambles and slogs her way through.”—N.Y. Times
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
7:30 p.m. Vengeance Is Mine
Shown in a new print, Imamura’s portrait of a real-life serial killer reveals, “in starker definition than ever before, just what the human animal is capable of when it abandons the pretense of restraining—or even explaining—itself. . . . Through its very plainness and dire clarity, a dark poem of bottomless need.”—N.Y. Times. Repeated on June 23.
Friday, June 1, 2007
8:50 p.m. The Pornographers
The story of an Osaka man who makes pornographic films out of a sense of duty to society is the apex of Imamura’s incomparable dark wit. “Real and piquant eccentricity . . . bleakly funny . . . well ahead of its time.”—N.Y. Times
Saturday, June 2, 2007
8:20 p.m. Intentions of Murder
A neglected housewife is raped by an intruder with whom she develops a bizarre relationship, typical of Imamura characters who “keep moving the moral bar in order to stay alive and get what they need. . . . Imamura gazes at her in quiet awe.”—N.Y. Times
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
7:00 p.m. The Profound Desire of the Gods
This color masterpiece offers a fresh look at the clash between machine age and noble savage. An engineer who arrives to survey a remote island in the Ryukus finds a primitive culture unencumbered by society's complex rules—but with rules of their own.
Friday, June 8, 2007
7:30 p.m. Eijanaika
An epic depiction of the people’s uprising at the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 1860s—“a sprawling, superb-looking period piece charged with Imamura’s characteristically fevered eroticism and underplayed black humor. As spectacle, it’s stunning in its dynamism.”—Village Voice
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
7:30 p.m. Stolen Desire
A rare opportunity to see Imamura’s first film, a ribald depiction of a traveling theater troupe whose director, modeled after Imamura, is an intellectual and whose actors hail from the sleaziest section of Osaka.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
7:30 p.m. Endless Desire
In a rough, hilarious black comedy about the colorful underbelly of Osaka, five motley characters celebrate the tenth anniversary of Japan’s capitulation to the Allies by descending to a former air-raid shelter where they know a cache of morphine was buried.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
6:30 p.m. Pigs and Battleships
“A rambunctious carnival of postwar folly, set in the port city of Yokosuka during the American occupation: everybody's trying to make a buck, to find some fast, cheap sex, and to keep from getting killed by either poverty or the omnipresent yakuza gangs, which together rule the town.”—N.Y. Times
Saturday, June 16, 2007
8:45 p.m. A Man Vanishes
What began as a documentary on johatsu, the phenomenon of people going missing in overcrowded Japan, became a brilliant film years ahead of its time in its blurring of fact and fiction, “a coup de cinéma equaled only by Kiarostami’s Close-Up.”—Cinematheque Ontario
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
7:30 p.m. A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess
7:30 A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess
The title tells the premise of this “compulsively watchable (film) achieving quite casually what many films have labored to produce: the Toltsoyan sweep of historic events reflected in, or passing remotely by, the intimacy of individual lives.”—Sight & Sound
Friday, June 22, 2007
8:45 p.m. Black Rain
Beginning with the blast on August 6, 1945, and focusing on the psychological toll rather than the wholesale carnage, Imamura “treats the medical horrors of post-atomic Hiroshima with a tense, sorrowful reserve.”—N.Y. Times
Saturday, June 23, 2007
6:30 p.m. Vengeance Is Mine
Please see Tuesday, May 29.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
7:30 p.m. Zegen
Imamura regular Ken Ogata stars in this satire on colonialism about a hairdresser who is sent to Manchuria to spy on the Russians and becomes kingpin of a string of brothels throughout Southeast Asia. “Epic, energetic, sexually impudent, grotesquely funny” (Cinematheque Ontario)—and based on a true story.
Friday, June 29, 2007
7:00 p.m. Karayuki-san: The Making of a Prostitute
With compassion and irony, Imamura profiles a Japanese woman lured from her home to work in a Malaysian brothel, revealing the role of prostitution in Japan’s economic and military expansion. “Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura’s fine documentaries.”—Joan Mellen
Friday, June 29, 2007
8:30 p.m. The Eel
An alternately clinical and chaotic portrait of a paroled killer, his pet fish, and the gang of misfits they take refuge with, all lovingly rendered with Imamura's typical humor. "Unpredictable and captivating."—L.A. Times
Saturday, June 30, 2007
6:30 p.m. Dr. Akagi
Imamura turns war and liver disease into material for comedy in "a film about a Japanese country doctor and his patients scrambling to survive the final days of their disastrous Pacific War. As lively, irreverent, and bizarrely cheerful as any of Imamura's previous low-life sagas."—Village Voice
Saturday, June 30, 2007
9:00 p.m. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
In his final film, a "lovely, loopy sex comedy . . . Imamura gave free rein to both the demons and the better angels of his nature, and to both the expressive jaggedness and the extraordinary grace of which his masterly technique was capable."—N.Y. Times
Curated at PFA by Susan Oxtoby.
We thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with this retrospective: Mari Hiruta, The Japan Foundation, Tokyo; Yoshihiro Nihei, The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles; Imamura Productions, Tokyo; Florence Almozini, BAMCinematek, Brooklyn; and George Kaltsounakis, Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto.
