Imamura
“The films of Shohei Imamura are among the greatest ever made.”--Jonathan Demme
Continuing through March 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents the second part of Imamura, a two-month series of 18 rarely screened films, many in specially imported prints from Japan.
Idiosyncratic and iconoclastic, Shohei Imamura (1926-2006) was the most provocative Japanese director of his era and, in the eyes of many, the most important. The scabrous, scruffy, often scandalous world of Imamura’s films is a far cry from the more elegant visions of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Kurosawa. “I like to make messy films,” he once declared, and his movies are filled with abrupt transitions, tangled narratives, and startling set pieces.
Imamura is renowned, even notorious, for focusing on the underbelly, in both a carnal and a social sense. Sexuality is an ever-present force in his films, undermining social constraints and often spilling over into such taboo areas as incest, rape, and bestiality. His grasping, vital, self-destructive, but tenaciously resilient characters--prostitutes, pornographers, hustlers, killers--scrabble for survival on the margins of Japanese society, although Imamura’s point is that the marginal, underacknowledged underside of Japan is actually its most essential and revealing side. As he said, “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 supports itself.”
This series is made possible by a generous gift from The Charlie & Jane Fink Foundation.
Touring program assembled by Adam Sekuler, Northwest Film Forum; Tom Vick, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution. 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; Brian Belovarac, Janus Films.
--Martin Rubin
Reduced admission!
Members of The Japan America Society of Chicago admitted for $7 to any Imamura screenings.
Saturday double-bill discount!
Buy a ticket for the first Imamura film on February 2, 16, or 23, and get a ticket for the second Imamura film that day at this discount rate (tickets must be purchased at the same time): General Admission $7; Students $5; Members $4.
THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA
(NARAYAMA-BUSHI KO)
1983, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 128 min.
With Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto
“A truly great film... A masterpiece of Japanese cinema to stand beside UGETSU, TOKYO STORY or THE SEVEN SAMURAI.”--Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
The first of Imamura’s Cannes Palme d’Or winners, this wintry companion-piece to the balmy THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS bridges the anthropological and the poetic to depict a 19th-century mountain village where the ever-present threat of starvation imposes a harsh code of survival. Both shocking and startlingly beautiful, NARAYAMA builds to an unforgettable climax that defines humanity in the starkest and most essential terms. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Saturday, February 9, 3:00 pm
BLACK RAIN
(KUROI AME)
1989, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 123 min.
With Kazuo Kitamura, Yoshiko Tanaka
“An epic so fine and self-effacing that it seems to work less as a conventional movie than as something received intravenously.”--Vincent Canby, The New York Times.
Based on Masuji Ibuse’s celebrated novel, BLACK RAIN opens with a terse, harrowing recreation of the Hiroshima bombing, then shifts its scene to the early 1950s in a peaceful farming village, where three survivors of the blast attempt to carry on their lives despite the ever-present threat of radiation sickness. Altering his customarily rambunctious style to one of Ozu-like restraint, Imamura creates a haunting drama that ranks with HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR as one of the cinema’s most valid treatments of an almost unfilmable subject. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Sunday, March 2, 3:00 pm
DR. AKAGI
(KANZO SENSEI)
1998, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 128 min.
With Akira Emoto, Kumiko Aso
“Beautifully realized on every level, this is a masterpiece that manages to combine low comedy and earthy humanity with apocalyptic profundity and terse wisdom.”--Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Imamura’s penultimate film is set in the waning days of World War II, as Japan gears for a last-ditch defense, but any somber expectations are undercut by the film’s jazzy score and sunny weather. The title character is a dedicated small-town physician, nicknamed “Doctor Liver” because of his obsession with hepatitis, who becomes the reluctant head of an unorthodox “family” that includes a nurse-cum-prostitute, a morphine-addicted surgeon, a tiplling monk, and an escaped Dutch P.O.W. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Saturday, February 24, 5:30 pm
THE EEL
(UNAGI)
1997, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 116 min.
With Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu
In Imamura’s second Cannes Palme d’Or winner, a paroled murderer settles in a remote seaside community, where he confounds his neighbors with his intense attachment to his sole friend and confidant: a pet eel. His reclusive, eel-like existence is disrupted by a young woman whose life he reluctantly saves. Calling the film “funny, lyrical, provocative, imaginative, and consistently entertaining,” Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compared its warmly comic sense of community to such John Ford films as JUDGE PRIEST and DONOVAN’S REEF. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Saturday, February 16, 3:00 pm
Monday, February 18, 8:00 pm
INTENTIONS OF MURDER
(AKAI SATSUI)
1964, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 150 min.
With Masumi Harukawa, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
“Remarkable... One of the director’s major works, it’s a confirmation of his belief in the basic irrationality of human existence.”--Elliott Stein, Village Voice.
Trains, white mice, silk worms, and snow, snow, snow are the key images of this early Imamura masterpiece. Beset by a boorish, stingy husband, his nosy, malicious mistress, and a slovenly, sniveling rapist, the plump heroine Sadako contemplates suicide, but her stubborn life-force wins out, in a love story that is memorably perverse even by Imamura’s standards. 35mm widescreen. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Saturday, February 2, 3:00 pm
Monday, February 4, 6:30 pm
LIGHTS OF NIGHT
(NISHI GINZA EKI-MAE)
(aka NISHI GINZA STATION)
1958, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 52 min.
With Frank Nagai, Shinichi Yanagisawa
Rare and bizarre, this flamboyant pop-culture artifact has been compared to Frank Tashlin’s THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT. Assigned by his studio to make a film with then-popular singer Frank Nagai, Imamura was told he could do whatever he wanted, as long as the title song was performed three times. The result was a nearly surreal farce about a henpecked husband who escapes in flashbacks to a wartime romance on a tropical island. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Saturday, February 2, 5:45 pm
THE PORNOGRAPHERS
(JINRUIGAKU NYUMON)
1966, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 127 min.
With Shoichi Ozawa, Sumiko Sakamoto
“Some of the funniest sequences ever to appear in a Japanese film.”--Donald Richie
This full-throttle black comedy centers on a purveyor of low-budget porn films. The harassed hero struggles to satisfy his customers’ demands while eluding the authorities and maintaining his odd household, which includes a lusty widow, a carp that she believes to be her reincarnated husband, and her pouty but alluring teenage daughter. The intricate widescreen compositions, featuring a voyeuristic profusion of frames within the frame, are best appreciated on the big screen. 35mm widescreen. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Saturday, February 23, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, February 26, 6:00 pm
WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE
(AKAI HASHI NOSHITANO NURUI MIZU)
2001, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 119 min.
With Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu
“Nonchalantly freaky and uncommonly pleasurable, WARM WATER may well be the year’s best and most unpredictable comedy... several of the most ebullient sex scenes in any movie”--Michael Atkinson, Village Voice
Imamura’s final film is fittingly a tribute to the interrelated themes of female strength, the life force, and uninhibited sexuality. A down-and-out Tokyo businessman journeys to a seaside village where he meets a young woman with a most unusual condition: orgasms that release a veritable flood of regenerative fluid into the surrounding waters. The story of the businessman’s personal redemption is interwoven with the rich gallery of characters also characteristic of the previous two films in this unofficial trilogy, THE EEL and DR. AKAGI. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Saturday, March 1, 3:30 pm
Tuesday, March 4, 7:45 pm
WHY NOT?
(EIJANAIKA)
1981, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 151 min.
With Kaori Momoi, Shigeru Izumiya
“Witty, grotesque, relentless, and beautifully engineered... A very important film, and possibly a great one.”--Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Kinetic, bawdy, exhilarating, and unnerving, WHY NOT? paints a tumultuous fresco of Japan in 1866, a time of upheaval caused by the imminent fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate. As various factions plot to exploit the vacuum of power, the story centers on the demimonde of prostitutes and popular entertainers, who rise up in delirious anarchy in the film’s spectacular climax. 35mm widescreen. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)
Sunday, February 10, 2:30 pm
Tuesday, February 12, 6:30 pm
ZEGEN
(PIMP)
1987, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 124 min.
With Ken Ogata, Mitsuko Baisho
A successor to PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS and WHY NOT?, this sardonic history lesson (based on a true story) centers on a Japanese hairdresser (Ogata of VENGEANCE IS MINE and THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA) who is sent to Manchuria as a spy in the early 1900s. Foreseeing the future spread of Japanese militarism, he sets up brothels throughout Asia--an enterprise he sees as both profitable and patriotic (“For the sake of a great cause, I procure women!”). 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. (MR)