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Imamura

“The films of Shohei Imamura are among the greatest ever made.”--Jonathan Demme

“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.”--Shohei Imamura

From January 5 through March 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents 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 son of a prosperous doctor, Imamura abandoned a comfortable career path in order to pursue a more uncertain living in the arts--first in theater and then in film. After serving as assistant to such directors as Ozu and Kawashima, he directed his first film, STOLEN DESIRE, in 1958.

With such groundbreaking works as PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS, THE INSECT WOMAN, and THE PORNOGRAPHER, Imamura came to prominence in the 1960s, at the same time as other young Turks of the 1960s Japanese New Wave, such as Oshima, Suzuki, Yoshida, and Shinoda. Imamura’s filmmaking activity tailed off in the 1970s, as he devoted himself to founding a successful film school. After rejuvenating his career in 1979 with VENGEANCE IS MINE, he continued to make important films with undiminished vigor until a few years before his death, including two Cannes Palme d’Or winners, THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA and THE EEL.

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--a stampede of squealing pigs through a red-light district (PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS), a war party of grotesquely masked canoeists in pursuit of a red-sailed boat (THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS), a murderer’s bones that refuse to be laid to rest (VENGEANCE IS MINE).

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 perversion. 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.

ENDLESS DESIRE
(HATESHI NAKI YOKUBO)
1958, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 100 min.
With Sanae Nakahara, Hiruki Nagato

A blend of film noir and black comedy, ENDLESS DESIRE is the mordant tale of five people who join forces to find a stash of morphine that had been buried in a wartime air-raid shelter. Imamura’s third film is considered his first full-fledged treatment of the dog-eat-dog world of postwar Japan, and the character of the ruthless widow who eliminates her partners is the first of his ferociously determined “insect women.” In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Saturday, January 12, 5:15 pm

THE INSECT WOMAN
(NIPPON KONCHUKI)
1963, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 123 min.
With Sachiko Hidari, Jitsuko Yoshimura

The Japanese title translates as ENTOMOLOGICAL CHRONICLES OF JAPAN, and the film begins with a beetle doggedly making its way across the ground. Viewed through Imamura’s unsentimental and nonjudgmental lens, the subject under scrutiny is Tome, whose instinctual drives carry her through a life of rural poverty, paternal incest, wartime factory work, unwed motherhood, prostitution, and management of a Tokyo call-girl racket. The film’s intertwining of postwar Japan history with the life of a tenacious woman has led several critics to compare it to Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN. In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Saturday, January 12, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, January 15, 6:00 pm

A MAN VANISHES
(NINGEN JOHATSU)
1967, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 130 min.
With Yoshie Hayakawa, Shigeru Tsuruguchi

Formerly among Imamura’s lesser-known films, A MAN VANISHES has emerged in recent years as one of his most fascinating and widely discussed works. Its blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction anticipates such meta-documentaries as Kiarostami’s CLOSEUP and Zhang’s QUITTING. The film begins as a general investigation of the missing-persons phenomenon in Japan, than focuses on Yoshie, a young woman whose fiancé has disappeared. When she falls in love with Tsuruguchi, the actor hired to interview her, all bets are off. Imamura says, “I like the fact that everyone showed his worst in this film--Yoshie became an actress, and Tsuruguchi became an amateur.” In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

Sunday, January 27, 3:00 pm

MY SECOND BROTHER
(NIANCHAN)
1959, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 101 min.
With Hiroyuki Nagato, Kayo Matsuo

One of Imamura’s most atypical and rarely seen films, MY SECOND BROTHER is a true story adapted from the best-selling diary of a ten-year-old Korean girl. The film examines the plight of the Korean minority in Japan through the story of four orphaned siblings struggling to survive in a recession-blighted coal-mining town. The story focuses on the girl’s younger brother, whose determination to escape poverty leads him to run away to Tokyo. In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

Saturday, January 19, 5:30 pm

PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS
(BUTA TO GUKAN)
1961, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 108 min.
With Hiroyuki Nagato, Jitsuko Yoshimura

Ranked by many critics as Imamura’s first masterpiece, PIGS is set amid the shadow economy of whoring and black-marketeering that thrives alongside a U.S. naval base at Yokosuka. A young punk plans to get rich by unloading a cargo of contraband hogs, while his spunky girlfriend wants to get out of town before she becomes just another sailors’ prostitute. Dynamic camerawork and outrageous humor mark this caustic satire of Japanese dependence on American dollars. In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Saturday, January 5, 3:00 pm
Wednesday, January 9, 6:00 pm

THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS
(KAMIGAMI NO FUKAKI YOKUBO)
1968, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 170 min.
With Rentaro Mikuni, Hideko Okiyamo

A highlight of the Imamura series is this eye-popping, mind-blowing tropical fable that demands big-screen viewing in a widescreen color print. Past and present exist side by side on the lush island of Kuragejima, which is being groomed for tourist-trade modernization while the locals continue to observe age-old and often bizarre superstitions. An engineer sent from Tokyo is thoroughly distracted by a lusty nymphet, while a brother and sister of the island’s oldest family yearn to consummate their life-long love in the manner of their ancestral gods (any resemblance to Japan’s creation myth is less than coincidental). In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Note: There will be a 10-minute intermission.

Saturday, January 26, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, January 29, 6:30 pm

STOLEN DESIRE
(NUSUMARETA YOKUJO)
1958, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 92 min.
With Osamu Takizawa, Hiroyuki Nagato

The subject of Imamura’s first film--a troupe of itinerant actors struggling to make ends meet--recalls Ozu’s STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS, but the treatment is already markedly different. While plying their trade in a tawdry section of Osaka, the actors find that traditional Kabuki is too refined for local taste, so they begin interspersing the drama with striptease acts. Imamura’s vigorous depiction of the vital, vulgar urban underclass anticipates such later works as PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS and WHY NOT? In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (MR)

Saturday, January 5, 5:15 pm

VENGEANCE IS MINE
(FUKUSHA SURU WA WARE NI ARI)
1979, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 128 min.
With Ken Ogata, Mitsuko Baisho

Imamura reignited his career with this acclaimed, fact-based study of a multiple murderer. Related in a complex but lucid flashback structure, it concentrates on a 78-day spree in which the killer eludes the police while engaging in homicide, rough sex, and robbery. Compared by critics to such works as Crime and Punishment and In Cold Blood, this chilling and compelling film is notable for its challenging presentation of the killer himself, who equally resists either sympathy or rejection, and ultimately seems a manifestation of the hypocritical society around him. In Japanese with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

Saturday, January 19, 3:00 pm
Wednesday, January 23, 6:00 pm

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Upcoming films in Imamura:
Complete descriptions of these remaining Imamura films will be included in our February Gazette. Please note: February show times are subject to change; please check our Gazette or website for confirmation.

INTENTIONS OF MURDER (1964, 150 min.)
Saturday, February 2, 3:00 pm
Monday, February 4, 6:30 pm

LIGHTS OF NIGHT (1958, 52 min.)
Saturday, February 2, 5:45 pm

THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (1983, 128 min.)
Saturday, February 9, 3:00 pm

WHY NOT? (EIJANAIKA) (1981, 151 min.)
Sunday, February 10, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, February 12, 6:30 pm

THE EEL (1997, 116 min.)
Saturday, February 16, TBA
Monday, February 19, TBA

ZEGEN (PIMP) (1987, 124 min.)
Saturday, February 16, TBA

THE PORNOGRAPHERS (1966, 127 min.)
Saturday, February 23, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, February 26, TBA

DR. AKAGI (1998, 128 min.)
Sunday, February 24, 3:00 pm

WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (2001, 119 min.)
Saturday, March 1, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, March 4, TBA

BLACK RAIN (1989, 123 min.)
Sunday, March 2, 3:00 pm