As promised, here is the schedule of the Imamura film series that the
Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has scheduled
for May. This information was pulled directly from the Film Center
Gazette. First a short schedule with dates, times, and titles and then a
longer schedule with brief descriptions of each film.
The Film Center
The School of the Art Insitute of Chicago
280 S. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, Illinois 60603
(312) 443-3733
(312) 443-3737 for recorded program information
MAY CALENDAR
Friday 1
6:00 Endless Desire
8:00 Pigs and Battleships
Saturday 2
8:00 Nishi Ginza Station + Stolen Desire
Friday 8
6:00 My Second Brother
8:00 The Insect Woman
Saturday 9
4:30 The Profound Desire of the Gods
Friday 15
6:00 A history of Post-war Japan as Told to a Bar Hostess
8:00 Karayuki-san, The Making of a Prostitute
Saturday 16
1:00 Intentions of Murder
4:00 A Man Vanishes
Tuesday 19
6:00 The Profound Desire of the Gods
Friday 22
6:00 The Pornographers
8:15 Vengeance Is Mine
Saturday 23
3:00 Eijanaika
6:00 Zegen
Friday 29
6:00 and 8:15 The Ballad of Narayama
Saturday 30
3:00 Eijanaika
--
1 Friday
ENDLESS DESIRE
(HATESHI NAKI YOKUBO)
1958, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 100 min.
With Hiroyuki Nagato, Sanae Nakahara
6:00
ENDLESS DESIRE is a black comedy on the spoils of war much extended and
enhanced by the greed, treachery, laziness, and lust of the postwar
decade. Five motley characters celebrate the tenth anniversary of
Japan's capitulation to the Allies by descending on a wartime air-raid
shelter where they know a cache of morphine was buried. The
conspirators consist of the widow of the man who buried it, the owner of
a Chinese restaurant, a gangster, a pharmacist, and a teacher. As a
butcher shop now sits on the site of the shelter, funds must be raised
to begin the excavation. The ferocious widow, while not the youngest or
the prettiest of the women on hand, is the center of desire and
deception, becoming the first of Imamura's ruthlessly determined women
protagonists. A rough, hilarious film about the colorful Osaka
underbelly--and a country perhaps going (like the poisoned fish in the
last scene) belly-up.--Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS
(BUTA TO GUNKAN)
1961, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 108 min.
With Hiroyuki Nagato, Jitsuko Yoshimura
8:00
PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS is set in the harbor town of Yokosuka, host to the
U.S. Naval base, along narrow streets with prostitutes, pimps, and
assorted yakuza all lurking for the Yankee dollar. Kinta is a young
street punk who joins the small-time Himori gang in their ambitious
scheme to sell black market hogs to the American fleet. In the
gangland-style war that ensues, Kinta finds himself the fall guy for
those he trusted. His girlfriend Haruko meanwhile does what she must to
avoid the fate of the battleship babes. Allegory is too kind a word for
Imamura's brilliant protest against the American military presence in
Japan. His compositions emphasize evidence of American paraphernalia in
even the most intimate details of Japanese life. Lives human and
porcine are equally expendable, and if the Americans behave like pigs to
the Japanese, the local thugs follow their example. The shot of pigs
thundering down the narrow streets has no equal for black
humoresque.--Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
--
2 Saturday
NISHI GINZA STATION
(NISHI GINZA EKI-MAE)
1958, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 56 min.
With Frank Nagai, Shinichi Yanagisawa
STOLEN DESIRE
(NUSUMARETA YOKUJO)
1958, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 92 min.
With Osamu Takizawa, Hiroyuki Nagato
8:00
"NISHI GINZA STATION has to be seen to be believed . . . too bizarre for
words."--James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario
Never before screened outside of Japan, NISHI GINZA STATION is a film
disdained by its own director, yet it reveals foreshadowings of the
excess and quirkiness of his major works, especially THE PROFOUND DESIRE
OF THE GODS. This studio assignment required Imamura to showcase pop
singer Frank Nagai as a meek drugstore owner who escapes in his
daydreams to hot love on a tropical island.
Imamura's debut film [STOLEN DESIRE] was a ribald depiction of a
traveling theater troupe whose director (modeled after Imamura) is an
intellectual who has quit college for the theater. He is secretly in
love with the wife of the lead actor but is forced to settle for her
younger sister, who pursues him relentlessly. The actors, who hail from
a sleazy section of Osaka, travel to a small village where "theater" is
dictated by the boisterous demands of the audience: striptease
alternates with Kabuki, and both are received with raucous humor.--Judy
Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
Retrospective curator James Quandt comments, "Fabulous--the film in
which Imamura becomes Imamura . . . a huge crowd pleaser."
--
8 Friday
Shohei Imamura
MY SECOND BROTHER
(NIANCHAN)
1959, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 101 min.
With Hiroyuki Nagato, Akiko Maeda
6:00
This is the most uncharacteristic film in the series, an exuberant and
touching account of people struggling optimistically under dire
circumstances. Says Imamura, "Never before had I filmed such a pure
story. I was nervous." Based on ten-year-old Sueko's best-selling
diary, it chronicles the fight for survival of four orphaned siblings
during a 1953 coal-mining strike in the Saga region of Kyushu. Himeda's
photography lends a peculiar beauty to the poverty-stricken
surroundings, and Imamura's approach to childhood, as seen through the
two youngest family members, is refreshingly unsentimental.--Japan
Society
THE INSECT WOMAN (NIPPON KONCHUKI)
1963, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 123 min.
With Sachiko Hidari, Kazuo Kitamura
8:00
THE INSECT WOMAN follows the trail of a rural woman who survives the war
years and the difficult postwar reconstruction period by primordial
instinct, impervious to all direction or restraint imposed from
without. Tome (Sachiko Hidari in an obsessive, spellbinding
performance), at home in the tall grasses of her native Tohoku village,
migrates to the city and takes up a life of prostitution, eventually
becoming a tyrannical madam. From early shots of her innocently
incestuous relationship with her retarded stepfather, to later scenes of
her in bed with a lover while the emperor is announcing Japan's defeat,
Imamura establishes Tome as a woman who survives an oppressive
patriarchy with "insectlike" values that are irrelevant to modern
notions of intelligence, beauty, or nobility. Shooting, like all of
Imamura's films, entirely on location using natural sound gives this
film's rigorous structure the illusion of spontaneity.--Judy Bloch,
Pacific Film Archive
--
9 Saturday
Shohei Imamura
THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS
(KAMIGAMI NO FUKAKI YOKUBO)
1968, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 175 min.)
With Rentaro Mikuni, Choichiro Kawarazaki
4:30
Imamura's first color masterpiece offers a fresh look at the
confrontation between the machine age and a waning primitive culture.
The film was photographed entirely in the southern Ryukyu Islands.
Imamura once again plays with illusion and reality in combining
extravagant epic, documentary, and philosophical dissertation. A
construction company engineer arrives on a remote island to survey the
possibilities for development. With all his modern gadgetry, the
villagers regard him as something of a god. For his part, he is
befuddled by the primitive conditions and strange ways he finds among
the natives, and all the more so when they present him with a girl,
Toriko, who is totally unencumbered by modern society's complex rules of
behavior. Setting his film at the likely geographical source of the
Japanese people and, according to myth, of human society, Imamura
studies not the primitives, but the survival of primitive beliefs in
civilized Japan.--Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
--
15 Friday
A HISTORY OF POSTWAR JAPAN AS TOLD BY A BAR HOSTESS
(NIPPON SENGOSHI: MADAMU ONBORU NO SEIKATSU) 1970, Shohei Imamura,
Japan, 105 min.
With Emiko Akaza, Etsuko Akaza
6:00
Imamura returned to Yokosuka, scene of PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS, ten years
after the making of that film to record this unusual documentary. As
the central figure of the film he selected Emiko Akaza, proprietress of
the "Onboro Bar" which catered to American sailors, and showed her
newsreel footage of major postwar events while recording her comments.
Born into the historically outcast burakumin class, "Madame Onboro" fell
easily into the socially frowned-upon behavior of catering to, and
marrying, Americans. But she has no pity for either herself or her
country, asserting that "the people did not cry" when the Emperor
announced Japan's defeat on the radio, even though the newsreel footage
contradicts her. . . On making this film, Imamura remarks that while ten
years earlier the American soldiers had gladly performed for his camera,
"This time they called me a communist and ran away."--Japan Society
KARAYUKI-SAN, THE MAKING OF A PROSTITUTE
(KARAYUKI-SAN)
1975, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 70 min.
8:00
The term karayuki-san refers to poor young Japanese girls shipped to
Southeast Asia in the early part of this century to serve as prostitutes
for Japanese soldiers. They were savagely treated by their
slave-masters abroad, and after the war many were not welcomed back by
their families in Japan, who were ashamed and preferred to ignore them.
In this made-for-television documentary, Imamura seeks out and
interviews a karayuki-san still living in poverty in Malaysia at the age
of seventy-three. The film is at once a moving portrait of human
dignity and a condemnation of Japan's failure to do anything for these
women sacrificed to the cause of military expansion.--Japan Society
--
16 Saturday
INTENTIONS OF MURDER
(AKAI SATSUI)
1964, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 152 min.
With Masuki Harukawa, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
1:00
A complex tale of a "simple" woman who, like Tome in THE INSECT WOMAN,
has nothing in the world except an indomitable instinct for survival.
Sadako was raised as a maid in the household of her husband, who
continues to treat her as a serf. While the husband is away, Sadako is
raped--an act that jars loose long-surpressed memories of childhood
sexuality, but also precipitates an awareness in Sadako of her
somnambulistic, bovine existence. A bizarre relationship develops
between the rapist, who continues to stalk the frightened woman with
both tender and violent professions of love, and Sadako, whose
intentions to murder him lead to a remarkable denouement. In what many
consider to be Imamura's masterpiece, his "explosive" style introduces
handheld camera, slow motion, and extreme close-ups where they are least
expected, allowing him his distanced, atypical view of violence and
sensuality--what critic Joan Mellen characterizes as "Imamura's belief
in the basic irrationality of human existence."--Judy Bloch, Pacific
Film Archive
--
A MAN VANISHES
(NINGEN JOHATSU)
1967, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 130 min.
With Yoshie Hayakawa, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
4:00
What at first purports to be a documentary on the missing person problem
in overcrowded Japan develops into Imamura's most brilliant illustration
of the absurdity of "objective cinema." Using only a small crew and no
cast as such, Imamura follows up on one of hundreds of missing persons
reports filed with the police. He interviews the missing man's family,
employers, acquaintances, and his fianc?e who has filed the report
thinking that her own sister has murdered the man. The film takes on a
surreal aspect when the fianc?e loses interest in the murder and takes a
strong liking to the interviewer himself. Using sync-sound and hidden
camera techniques to blur fact and fiction filmmaking long before it was
trendy to do so, Imamura effects the final breakdown of cinema verit? in
the film's audacious final sequence.--Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
--
19 Tuesday
Shohei Imamura
THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS
6:00
see May 9
--
22 Friday
THE PORNOGRAPHERS
(JINRUIGAKU NYUMON)
1966, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 128 min.
With Shoichi Ozawa, Sumiko Sakamoto
6:00
THE PORNOGRAPHERS is a funny and perverse social satire centering around
Subuyan Ogata, small-time producer of 8mm porno loops. Ogata's private
menage, with his mistress Haru and her two children, is as kinky as
anything in his films. He loves Haru but lusts after her daughter
Keiko, while Haru dotes excessively on her son Koichi. Haru and Ogata's
lovemaking is constantly interrupted by the noisy splashing of her pet
carp, which she insists embodies her late husband's spirit. When Haru
falls ill, goes mad, and finally dies, Ogata turns first to hedonism,
then to the pursuit of the perfect mate--a "Dutch wife" sex-surrogate
toy. Imamura's lack of a conventional moral point of view towards the
proceedings makes the film both raucously funny and oddly
touching.--Japan Society
VENGEANCE IS MINE
(FUKUSHU SURU WARE NI ARI)
1979, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 140 min.
With Ken Ogata, Rentaro Mikuni
8:15
Imamura's retelling of the true case of Japan's "King of Criminals," who
seduced and murdered his way through the autumn of 1963, is a brilliant
examination of anomie and the unregenerate criminal mind. Imamura takes
a tack opposite to the killer Enokizu's: the film first repels with the
graphic force of its gruesome premise, then seduces and holds the viewer
with the sheer mystery of the filmmaking. Ken Ogata plays the killer in
Clark Kent glasses--the uneducated son of Catholic innkeepers, raised
amid the aggressive humiliations of prewar militarism--who poses now as
a university professor, now as a lawyer, to insinuate himself into
others' beds and lives with intentions of murder. Starting out in
Dragnet-noir style, Imamura's searching camera proceeds to investigate
its subject--Enokizu's dissociation--in a pastiche in which the past
runs like a train through the present. Motivation, like narrative, is
not linear.--Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
--
23 Saturday
EIJANAIKA
1981, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 151 min.
With Shigeru Izumiya, Kaori Momoi, Ken Ogata
3:00
The title translates roughly as "What the hell?" or "Why not?" and it
gives a good idea of the approach Imamura takes to the historical
epic--a broad canvas indeed, as viewed from the worm's-eye perspective.
The so-called eijanaika riots of 1867 were a brief flash of people-power
as the Tokugawa Shogunate gave way to the Meiji Restoration. While the
aristocracy fight the deadly sword of Business, the underclasses scurry
about in an effort not to be crushed by the weight of the revolution.
("The world is cruel when it's changing," mutters one observer.) It is
among the plebes that we find Genji, a would-be farmer returned from the
West to find an unrecognizable Japan, and his wife Ine, now cavorting in
a libidinal sideshow. Theirs is an irrepressible energy, ribald and
criminal, and magical in the Shinto sense (as opposed to the refined
Buddhist culture of the aristocracy). The climactic riot--dancing,
flower-throwing masses charging across the river separating Edo's rich
and poor districts--offers an exhilarating picture of progress, linking
sexual energy to the flow of history.--Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
ZEGEN
(a.k.a. THE PIMP)
1987, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 124 min.
With Ken Ogata, Matsuko Baisho
6:00
"Japanese 'comfort girls' were the first line of invasion prior to World
War II"--Shohei Imamura
Of Imamura's late films, ZEGEN is the most like his early masterworks:
epic, energetic, sexually impudent, and grotesquely funny. A satire
about colonialism, commerce, and carnality, ZEGEN is based on the true
story of a hairdresser, Iheiji Muraoka (Ogata), sent to Manchuria to spy
on the Russian army. A born entrepreneur, Muraoka set up a chain of
brothels throughout Asia--a kind of fornication franchise--and became
"the big boss of the South Seas." As Imamura portrays him, the "zegen"
is a decent but doltish and blindly patriotic businessman who views his
development of a prostitution empire throughout Southeast Asia as the
vanguard of Japan's military adventurism: "For the sake of a great
cause, I procure women."--James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario
--
29 Friday
THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA
(NARAYAMA-BUSHI KO)
1983, Shohei Imamura, Japan, 128 min.
With Sumiko Sakamoto, Ken Ogata
6:00 and 8:15
Imamura's deeply felt retelling of a classic Japanese folk legend brings
forth the primordial cruelty and beauty of nature and human nature
alike. He recreates in exquisite detail the violence, sex, and bawdy
humor in a remote society whose values mirror the ways of the
animals--rats and rabbits, snakes and toads, and carrion birds--with
whom they frequently share the screen. Narayama is the mountain where
the elderly from nearby villages are left to die in order to make room
for a new generation and maintain the economic and social balance. When
a determined grandmother, Orin (portrayed by forty-seven-year-old Sumiko
Sakamoto) demands to be taken to the mountain while she is still hale,
her eldest son Tatsuhei (Ogata), is torn with grief. In late autumn,
the presence of the gods is palpable as mother and son climb the
mountain, in one of the most breathtakingly affecting sequences in
Japanese cinema.--Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
--
30 Saturday
EIJANAIKA
3:00
see May 23
__
Alan M?kinen
Chicago