It's All Over - Go To Work!

As usual, I've waited to the last possible moment to come up with something for a blogathon - in this case, the Endings blogathon, being hosted by Joseph Judge - in fact, looking a bit closer, it's worse than that: he ended it on December 30, not 31 - I missed it. Well - not to be helped, without a working time machine. Since this is also an opportunity to finally say something about the big Imamura series that played at Harvard last month, I am going to post it anyway.

I want to write something about his 60s films - Pigs and Battleships, Insect Woman, Intentions of Murder, especially - which have truly remarkable endings. Of course, most of his endings are damned good, though it took him a while to figure out how to do it. The early films tend to take somewhat minor key endings - little codas: the college boy and younger sister heading off to Tokyo in Stolen Desire; the local kid and his girl commenting on the story in Endless Desire - Pigs and Battleships is the first to really step it up. And it does so in style, and in a way that really brings out his overarching philosophy. The climax - a huge gun battle, traffic jam and pig stampede that ends with the hero expiring with his head in a toilet - is strong enough: but it's followed by shots of the heroine walking through the train station, headed to Kawasaki, to take a job in a factory. This ending - a young woman going to work (instead of going to fuck an American, like the women she passes on her way into the station), is given a thunderously heroic treatment - musical crescendo, a soaring crane shot, telephoto shots of the girl crossing the station like Mifune.... And not a trace of irony in it: this is what it means to stop waiting for someone else to save you, to stop trying to weasel a living out of the Americans - she is heroic, and basically carries the fate of her country with her.

It's interesting that Imamura's great theme, those tough, unsentimental films about tough, nearly indestructible women, is really only on full display in three or four films he made in the 60s. In Pigs and Battleships, she's the second lead (though she gets out alive) - in Insect Woman and Intentions of Murder (and in the documentaries) she's the main character (or characters, since both mother and daughter have it in The Insect Woman). After those films, his attention usually turns to men, surrounded by tough women, but still... Insect Woman has two endings, in a way: it's the story of a woman from the country, who came of age during the war, and fights her way through life after the war, rising and falling over time. She has a daughter, whose life follows a similar pattern - though she (the daughter) bails out of the cycle as soon as she gets the money, and goes to work on a farm. The ending? it's complex, covering both women - first, we see the girl driving a bulldozer, then talking with her lover - she is pregnant, but he's worried it's not his - she insists it is, though we probably know better. And then her mother comes plowing up the hill, coming to visit, hoping to lure the girl back to Tokyo... both of them plowing on, doing what they do - though again, it's the girl who's more heroic, taking what she can, and stepping out of the cycle of dependence - looking to make her own life on her own terms, through hard work. A figure, maybe, of moving on - in the post-war period, maybe, Japan simply had to survive, and staying alive was heroic in itself, no matter what you had to do to do it. But in the 60s, it's time, maybe, for something more - it's not enough to survive, it's time to get to work.

Anyway - Intentions of Murder is a bit of a change from this. The heroine, Sadako, is less of an agent than any of the women in the other two films: though the story is, in fact, the story of how she becomes an agent of her own fate. The story is - she is the miserable mistress of a librarian, who has somehow never gotten around to marrying her, and whose parents somehow accidentally (cough) registered her son as their own... While her husband is out of town, a thief breaks in to rob and ends up raping her - he becomes infatuated, and keeps coming back. She can't tell anyone; she can't get rid of him; she can't kill herself. Things are terrible. But as the film continues - she starts acting: she tries to buy him off, she tries to run away with him, she tries to kill him, never quite managing it. But she does manage to file suit to be registered as the librarian's wife, and the mother of her child - she does manage to get around to learning to use a knitting machine, and later to start giving lessons on the machine. And all this builds to what has to be the happiest ending in any Imamura film: she gets the registrations changed, the family moves to the family farm, where she starts raising silkworms, giving knitting lessons and making things, making money - she beats them all. It allows, too, for a lovely joke.Everyone else in the film think she's a stupid, weak, lazy fool - her husband constantly calls her stupid, useless, and lords it over her with his education and erudition. But she runs rings around them - even early in the film, when we see that she's been making almost as much money as he does from her knitting, or when she corrects his math when he does the finances... though the best scene is at the end, when he receives the notice that she has filed suit against him and his parents to be registered as her son's mother. He and his mother whine and complain - she says she's sorry, if they want she could try to stop the suit - she never thought it would ever get to trial, she says. Never mind, says the husband, it's too late now - you can be so stupid sometimes.... comeuppance is seldom so sweet...

And so it goes. He kept ending films right after that - Shoichi Ozawa floating out to sea to end the Pornographers; the swarm of witnesses, cameramen, clappers ending A Man Vanishes; Ken Ogata's bones freezing in midair in Vengeance in Mine; The Bomb in Dr. Akagi; the snake-man in his section of September 11 (11'09'01) - "is being a human being so disgusting?" - but those 60s endings get it all.