July director of the Month - Shohei Imamura

Well, it is not July anymore, but that isn't going to stop me: it's time for another Director of the Month. (And it's going up as July's director - August's will come at the end of the month.) This month, we are back on track with my countdown of the greatest Japanese directors (as I see it) - we are up to #3 - Shohei Imamura.

Imamura is one of my favorites, in the sense that favorites sometimes get separated from the best. He just makes me happy. I saw Pigs and Batteships as part of a series of classic Japanese films, and it was revelatory. Even then, before I was all that committed a Japanophile, I had an idea about Japanese films - as either gorgeous, serious art works, or lively, exciting genre works, that also worked as art - Kurosawa and Kobayashi, say. Or as perfectly rowdy genre works, sword fighters, gangsters and anime, that kind of thing. Imamura was none of those things. Pigs & Battleships is sort of a yakuza film, but it had none of the usual tropes of a Yakuza film, none of that sentimental manliness you get in so much Japanese genre work (even the highbrow ones). Imamura was certainly not making melodrama, like you saw in Mizoguchi. He was transgressive and funny, but it didn't come off as someone trying to freak the squares. (I'd seen a couple Oshima films, and I got that impression - of trying to be "transgressive" or something of the sort.) It was different. Funny, direct, unapologetically contemptuous of gangsters and Americans, while being more sympathetic to the low lives trying to be gangsters without every letting them off the hook (just look at how the hero ends up in that film). And saving its real respect and affection for the women, and especially the women who decided to get jobs and earn their keep. (A factor you see more of in his other films of the period, but it's there in Pigs and Battleships too.) And finally - fucking hell, what a spectacular looking film! all those cranes and angles and camera moves, the deep focus, the complicated, detailed sets and framings, the staging and composition and lighting - I was floored, and am now, every time I look at one of his films. Imamura came out of nowhere - someone I hadn't just not seen, but never heard of, knew nothing about, and found to be better than almost anything I had ever seen, so much better I could barely make sense of it.



A couple years later I saw the rest of his films, one of the first complete retrospectives I saw, and I got the full measure of his thematic interests. His cool tough women, his political edge, and, I suppose most of all, the full measure of just what magnificently baroque frames and sequences he could put on a screen. The full measure of his artistry - his willingness to use everything he has: composition, editing, tricks - freeze frames and shock cuts and breaking the fourth wall, intertextual references and jokes, all the resources of the 60s, the new wave (as an international phenomenon, all the filmmaking devices it added to world cinema) - which reach a kind of giddy apotheosis in The Pornographers and A Man Vanishes. But all his 60s films take fullest advantage of the new ways of working in films. He is awe inspiring. He is almost as thrilling as Ozu sometimes, for the sheer formal brilliance of it all.

He is. And I suppose, for all my adoration of Ozu, Imamura almost comes closer to my heart because I did discover him almost blind - I was told by all the literature what a great filmmaker Ozu was before I had seen any of his films. Ditto Mizoguchi, ditto Kurosawa, ditto even Oshima or Naruse or what have you. Imamura, I heard, was someone who was supposed to be an important Japanese new wave director, like Teshigahara and Oshima - but who, when I saw him, knocked me over on the spot. He was mine... that's what I wanted films to look like. I still do.

All right. Here then, let me rank the 10 best of his works. I have written a fair amount about these in the past on this blog. I will try not to be too redundant...

1. The Pornographers - A small time pornographer and procuror with a lover whose dead husband has become a fish and a daughter with a scar and a son with a mother fixation. Plus Yakuza and faithless friends and some delicious parodies of Euro art films, and the most astonishing cinematography ever. Every angle, every composition, every cut is startling and thrilling, and usually funny as hell...



2. The Insect Woman - Story of a poor girl surviving after WWII, going through jobs, drifting into prostitution, where she proceeds to take over the business, find a patron, lose both, but keep going. Her daughter meanwhile becomes a farmer, just as tough as mom. This is probably the quintessential Imamura, the one that presents his main themes in their clearest form - tough women, whose suffering and misery is never in the service of weaker, but somehow more important men; they exist for themselves, and win or lose through perseverance and work, nothing else; and through it all, the value of work, endurance, and - well - work. All this is told in episodic fashion, handsomely shot, experimentally editing. Told in self-contained sequences that usually end in freeze frames, jump ahead years at a time, without making transitions clear. Tends to be organized around parallels - repetitive, rather than dialectic: she sleeps with her father - her daughter does; she works for Midori, then Midori works for her; she steals from the madame, then becomes the madame, just as cruel and selfish, and suffers the same fate; her daughter, like her, gets taken in by Karasawa, an old rake - though the kid escapes. Scenes as well as situations are repeated, like the madame/Tome meeting in a police station, then Tome/her maid meeting in the same place. A very great film.



3. Pigs and Battleships - Yakuza, whores, and sailors, pigs and battleships. A boy wants to be a big gangster; his girl has an abortion then tries to convince him to leave and get a job. He pulls one last heist and dies of course. She calls him a fool, runs out on the American who wants to buy her, and gets a job in Kawasaki. The story itself is dense and complicated, though - the main plot line follows Kinta, or Kinta and Haruko (complicated already since it is about both of them, his chance to leave, her chance to leave, which aren't the same), but with strong subplots - Tetsu, the sick gangster; the disposition of the hogs - all of it with a host of characters coming and going, scheming among one another. Not quite a "network narrative" but almost complicated enough, with all the plot lines runnning more or less simultaneously, and all interconnected. And the look - the deep focus, the complex, articulated spaces that run through all of Imamura's films, give a kind of visual equivalent to this kind of plotting.

4. Intentions of Murder - A sickly musician rapes a pudgy mousy woman, who after thinking of suicide, spends most of the movie moping about her misfortunes without (apparently) acting. In the end the musician tries to get her to run away, she thinks about poisoning him, but instead he just dies; though there are photos of the two of them together, she simply denies the affair to her husband, and gets what she wants. That's not quite doing it justice. The family life is complicated - she's married to a librarian, who hasn't managed to get around to registering her as his wife, or their son as her son, so she has almost no rights. She's bullied by him and his family, though in fact, for all her passivity and supposed weakness, she is smarter than the lot of them. (We get it early: she corrects her husband's math, while doing the books; during the film she starts giving lessons in weaving, and by the end is making more money than the rest of them.) It ends up with one of Imamura's best jokes: having eluded the musician and a blackmailing librarian, she sues to have her son registered in her name, and wins - the family huffing and puffing about how stupid she is to sue them, she protesting that she never thought it would reach the courts - a great joke, as she has just gotten exactly what she wanted, and tops it off by moving to their silk farm, where she knits and raises the worms... It's the happiest ending in any Imamura film, by far. As for style - it's as magnificent as the rest of Imamura's work; for some reason too, it's always struck me as providing an excellent illustration of the definition of metaphor and metonymy - it uses Trains symbolically, in both ways: metaphorically as a figure of Sex; metonymically as a figure of Escape. Not sure why that seems to important, but there it is...



5. A Man Vanishes - A documentary of sorts about a man who disappears (a rather common occurance in 1960s Japan, I think). Imamura investigates and soon hooks up with the man's fiancé, who searches (along with an actor) for traces of the missing man, though she also starts falling in love with the actor.... Imamura films, often with hidden cameras, but also stages scenes, reenacts scenes, and so on. I wrote it up a few years back - it really is a remarkable film.

6. Vengeance is Mine - Ken Ogata as a killer; he kills a professor, takes on her identity, then kills a lawyer, an inn-keeper and her mother, as well as a co-worker. All this flips back and forth in time, starting with his arrest, moving to his killings, then his childhood and background, wife and father, then the recent past, the inn, the lawyers, his frauds, and so on. Though this film (like most of Imamura's later films) stays closer to the male lead, he is surrounded by tough women: the wife, who falls for his dad; mom, who for all her religion refuses to die; the lusty inn-keeper, and even more than her, her old mother, just out of jail for murder herself. All this quite wonderful looking, and handled with Imamura;s customary panache, which might hit its peak in the scenes where he jumps between time frames in the same shot...

7. Black Rain - A somewhat restrained film for Imamura, telling the story of a family living in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Starts with the bomb - the uncle was on a train, the aunt in her house - their niece was out of town, saw the bomb, went back through the rain, then crossed the town with the others.... 5 years later - they live in the country (they have money), but the niece can't get a husband, her uncle is ill, her grandmother thinks she's her daughter... The uncle is sick, but survives - while everyone around them dies. A friend dies, two more friends die, right after each other (funerals marked by a wipe), then the aunt, finally the girl. The plot is driven by the girl's search for a husband, which is complicated by her war experience - one man turns her down, despite a doctor's certificate; another says he doesn't care about her health, but his family is not so casual; there is also a war vet, who carves Buddhas and attacks cars as if they were American tanks, likes her and might have married her if she didn't die.... Over all, this is much more classical than anything else Imamura did - slower paced, with spare composition and staging, though as always, composed carefully in depth. This increased classicism is accompanied by a few Imamura touches - the knockabout comedy with the veteran; a couple bursts of anti-naturalism: the vet acting out his experiences; and the end... Uncle and girl are at a pond: she sees visions of jumping fish - he says, 5 minutes to go, we have to get back to the house - sure, he means, before they announce the time on the radio (clocks are a motif, ticking off the hours until everyone dies), but it's the end of the film as well...

8 Eijenaika - Set at the end of the Tokogawa regime, and as the government crumbles, all hell breaks loose among the froth and scum. It is another brilliant film - full of mixed motives, complicated relationships, complex shots - windows giving onto deep focus worlds, glimpses of things, of whole worlds, going on in the background, and sometimes the foreground, of a shot, unrelated tot he story. Of his later, color films, it's probably the closest in tone to the 60s films, especially Pigs and Battleships - comic, chaotic, another network narrative - with politics and history running through it all the way...

9. Endless Desire - Imamura's first completely characteristic film, a black comic neo-noir about 4 war buddies convening, 10 years later, to dig up buried treasure (a drum of morphine.) 4 were supposed to meet - 5 show up - one of them no one remembers, another says she is the sister of the leader of the group. They are a typical comically diverse crew - a businessman, a teacher that everyone bullies, a thug, a pharmacist, and the woman. They go to the slums of Osaka, rent a place where they can start their tunnel, but have to take a local kid into their confidence. They agree to reconvene in a month, but all of them show up early to start digging on their own. From there, things unravel in the usual way; they all start killing one another, dying absurdly, and so on - the woman manipulates one and all, but ends up falling in the river.... It's very funny, dark and bitter, an excellent entry into this kind of film, and already starting to take on the cinematographic brilliance that would be Imamura's trademark in the 60s.

10. Profound Desire of the Gods - Imamura's last film in the 1960s, his first color film, this is Imamura at his most mythic. It is set on a remote island in the Ryukyus, and mostly follows a family, the Futoris. They are inbred and brutal, but mythical: they were always the head of the religions of the island, and sometimes take the legends of brother and sister gods founding islands a bit too literally. Myth abounds - the nature photography, the brother digging a pit to make a boulder fall over, the retarded girl, the priestess, the old man... The film starts with the Futoris as outcasts, since Nekichi (the older brother) dynamited fish and (maybe) banged his sister - he's digging the pit, trying to keep the women under control... An engineer arrives on the island and hires the younger brother, they look for water, they start mowing down a sacred forest, but here Nekichi and the women (and the island headman) start sabotaging the engineer's work... The engineer, as one would expect in an Imamura film, gets pulled into the Futoris' doings, being seduced by the women (he resists the mother, but not the daughter), and even helping Nekichi dig his pit; while the younger brother is pulled into the modern world. Well - it all ends in Myth, with brother and sister sailing away to found a new race and all, though that doesn't quite go to plan. All told - it's a gorgeous film, and sometimes very highly praised, though I have to admit that I don't quite buy it. There's a bit of a shift here - it's full of Imamura's usual obsessions, his usual tough women - but it's changed a bit. He starts to mythologize his characters, those tough, earth women. The earlier ones are tough, independent, characters, and always protagonists in their stories - in control or fighting like hell to be in control. Here, they are transformed into a retarded sex fiend and a plot device: Nekichi's sister/lover, Ryugen's priestess/lover. They become symbols, not characters. For me, it turns a bit sour - it seems misogynist in ways, as it takes character types who had been fully characters, agents, and makes them symbols, only there as a foil to the men. It's a tendency that pops up a bit more in his later films - in general his later films follow men more than women... Fortunately, in the better ones (the ones listed above), the women remain interesting and independent characters - but it's not such a given anymore.

I don't want to end on a down note, though. Because Profound Desire of the Gods is, mythology or not, still a great film - and there are still a lot of damned fine movies to go in Imamura's career. Second Brother, Stolen Desire, The Eel, Dr. Akagi are all outstanding - there's plenty to admire in all of them. And finally - he was an extraordinary documentarian. The box set of A Man Vanishes contains several of his television documentaries, along with that masterpiece - an important body of work.

Mother's Day Nihon no Eiga Style

If I were going to start posting something like a Sunday Screen Shot, this would be the place to start - Happy Mother's Day! and if there's a richer source of mother's on film than Japanese film, I'm not sure what it is... there is no limit, I think, to the number of pictures I could fine here.

Japanese Cinematography Sampler

I've been pointing to Wildgrounds' Japanese Cinema Blogathon for a while now - I suppose it's time to add something of my own. It should come as no surprise (just look at the top of the page) that this is a subject near and very dear to my heart. I've been working on a somewhat more - uh, what's the word? geeky? cerebral? wordy? - essay for a while - that's taking a while to get right... So let's jump in with something a bit simpler - a fairly quick celebration of one of the most wonderful aspects of Japanese film - their utterly unapologetic love for extravagant cinematography and compositions...

And where better to start than the director/DP combination that for my money created the most consistently astonishing images in cinema: Shohei Imamura and Shinsaku Himeda. I mean, look at that fish on the banner! look at the composition, the lighting, through water even! Damn... and look at these shots:







That last shot reminds me - contemporary Japanese filmmakers still know their way around the image - compare it to this shor from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (and Akiko Ashizawa's) Retribution:



There's plenty more where that came from...




I can do this for pretty much any Japanese films I can put my hands on - I may before I'm done. (I haven't been collecting screenshots off my (Akira) Kurosawas, my Mizoguchis, my Suzukis - I may be back here with some more of this...) Right now, I'll leave you all with a hint of the essay to come - shot from a filmmaker perhaps not noted for his stylistic extravagance, this shot - it's almost worthy of Yoshida, or Oshima - it's the man you can see going down the stairs in the window that makes the shot...

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.

Keeping a Toe in

The weather outside is frightful, but blogging is delightful, no particular place to go, let it snow etc. Be glad this is not a vlog, or you would be hearing me croon away... yes, that is a horrible thing to contemplate. But - resolving, once more, to try to post more often, here we are, on a Monday, with nothing in particular to blog about, so we shall blog about everything. The weather is frightful indeed - sleet, snow, cold; the power has been blinking on and off the last couple days. Twice this evening, making using the computer something of a gamble. Overnight last night - though I have programmed by brain and body too well, and woke up at my usual time even without an alarm. Bloody thing.

Anyway: don't forget the Short Film Blogathon at Ed Howard's place and Culture Snob.... I, however, have to settle for some long film blogging - for it was a productive weekend on the moviegoing front: Dylan and Imamura... While I hope to come back to Imamura, especially, let me offer up some quick thoughts...

I'm Not There is getting a lot of praise it seems, and I suppose it deserves some of it - it's intermittently inspired, maybe brilliant, but not so much taken as a whole, I'm afraid. All the hype about Cate Blanchett seems right - the film comes alive when it switches to her, or to the kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) - it goes flat when it switches to Heath Ledger or Christian Bale (despite the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg - hey! when's the Serge Gainsbourgh biopic coming?) - I have no idea what Richard Gere and Ben Whishaw were in the film for. It's one of those films that flips back and forth among a bunch of stories for no particular reason, except, I suppose, to avoid the necessity to work any of them out. I guess it doesn't pay to think too much about it. It's enjoyable enough to watch: and the music is outstanding. It's Dylan, so it's got a leg up - but the performances are worthy of the music (unlike that misbegotten Beatles movie that blighted the world a couple months ago.) But other than the Blanchett parts, there's nothing here really worth seeing again.

That was good and harsh! Whatever virtues the Haynes film had, they were blotted out by the mastery on display later that day.... An Imamura double bill - Vengeance is Mine and A Man Vanishes. The former is one of Imamura's better known and easily available films - it's on DVD, people have seen it. Ken Ogata stars as a petty crook, a con man, I guess, who turns violent - killing a couple ex-co-workers, then going on the run, impersonating randy professors and lawyers for profit, only to end up killing his benefactors, since he can't kill the ones who actually hurt him... This story, told out of sequence for fairly good reasons, is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood - a bullied minority! turned delinquent! a mama's boy! - and very Imamura-esque home life (his wife takes up with his father, under mom's nose - maybe...) pre-crime spree. The centerpiece of the film is the time the villain spends at a seedy inn, seducing the madame, and facing down her mother, an extravagantly tough old bird, just out of the clink herself, where she'd served 15 years for murder - here, Imamura gets into his element, with sex and violence and primitive instincts for survival - and the chance to indulge in some maginifent filmmaking: one shot, where the killer and his mother seem to pass each other on the stairs, and Imamura shifts from one inn to another without cutting, is as glorious as it gets...

Meanwhile... A Man Vanishes is, perhaps, a documentary, about one of Japan's 91,000 (adult) runaways (I think that's the number cited by an expert toward the end,though by that time, things are well out of control; 5,000 a year, if I remember the Takeshi Kaiko story right) - it is a strange documentary, starts strange and gets stranger, and becomes something quite different from a documentary. The "plot" so to speak is this - Imamura and crew start looking for a man named Tadashi Oshima - the point people in this search are an actor and Oshima's fiancee, Yoshie (known as the rat) [no, really - that's what the crew calls her: part of the manipulation is the way we hear the crew talking about the woman they call the rat without naming her - that could be a trick of the translation I suppose, but I don't think so - I don't think they name her until later...] - as they pass through several months (it seems) of unsuccessful investigation, Yoshie starts to fall for the actor... and suspect her sister of murder. Leading to a scene where Yoshie and a fishmonger who saw Oshima and the sister together confront and accuse the sister - who flatly denies it. This eventually brings Imamura himself into the conversation - he lectures them a bit on the nature of truth then has the crew strike the set. Then the gang of them adjourn to the street [or - appear to adjourn to the street: like any movie, this could have been shot at any time - it's only the vestigial traces of documentary rhetoric that even suggests that this is literally just outside the sound stage where the previous scene was shot] where, well - a couple experts come in to talk about the 91,000 Japanese runaways, more witnesses argue and speculate on what happened and what it meant, and eventually Yoshie and her sister and the fishmonger get back into it, yelling at each other and carrying on. All of this, of course, is being filmed by three or four cameras, with sound gear everywhere - a kid keeps running into the shot with a clapper - Imamura mixes the sound and visuals here, as throughout the film, in strange, provocative ways. (There's a post to be written about the sound design of the film: I may, if I ever get any energy.) And then, it ends, with a flourish: a kid laughs - someone askas Yoshie what she will do now and she says she doesn't know - and Imamura freezes on the clapper...

I can't do it justice, not here, not tonight. It's still one of the most disruptive, surprising, strange films I have ever seen. That - I should note - works perfectly well as a documentary about a man who has disappeared without a trace... and as an Imamura film (complete with tough, strange women, possibly fighting over men, maybe killing men, and flatly denying what they may or may not have done - worth noting that the actor is the male lead of Intentions of Murder, which also features a woman murdering a man and flatly denying it in the face of overwhelming evidence - coincidence?)... and, heck - as a parody of L'Avventura... It's very hard to track down, but it's a film that needs to be seen.

Finally - one more Imamura: Profound Desire of the Gods... I can't describe it, so I won't. I have heard people call this his masterpiece - I can't buy it. It is gorgeously shot and made, but it's pretty damned silly, when you get down to it. It's full of mythical stuff - brothers and sisters marrying and founding races and the like - all very sordid, and I suppose that's part of the joke, the depiction of the beginnings of Japan itself as a bunch of inbred hillbillies - but still.... I also fear that this marks a kind of turn for Imamura, where those tough, earthy women he idolizes start to get too symbolic, and too mythological. The earlier ones are tough, independent, and always protagonists - in control or fighting like hell to be in control. But in this film, they become a retarded sex fiend and a plot device: Nekichi's sister/lover, Ryugen's priestess/lover. They are symbols, not characters. This turns sour - this film ends up being misogynist in ways not even Mizoguchi (if you insist on reading him that way) managed: Mizoguchi's women were always agents, one way or other - as were Imamura's earlier women. The women in this film are not, they're just embodiments of Imamura's ideas about what women represent...

That proved to be more substantial a post than I expected coming in, though there is a lot more to be said about any of those films.... There are more Imamura's coming - I hope I can write them up as well, maybe work out a more coherent treatment of some of it. He was one of the great ones, and the run of films he made in the 60s stands with anyone.

Is Being a Human Being So Disgusting?

Shohei Imamura has died. One of my favorite directors, very possibly my favorite living director over the last 7-8 years. I saw the retrospective of his films that toured in 1998, and came away more than a fan. Right up to the last thing he did, his section of the 11'09''01 film, itself a mini-masterpiece. He set it at the end of WWII -a returned soldier thinks he is a snake, crawls around, eats rats, and finally crawls off into the jungle... it struck me then as being to Imamura's career what David Lynch's piece in Lumiere and Company was - both for being a stunning short film in the middle of an inconsistent, though interesting, project - and for being a distillation of their work: "is being a human being so disgusting?" Well - no, not when some people make films like he did.