Obit: Imamura Shohei

[Alexander Jacoby]

Here's another obit - from today's Guardian (for non-Brits, a London and Manchester-based daily paper).
   
  Shohei Imamura 

Film director of the Japanese new wave who championed the lower classes 

Ronald Bergan
Thursday June 1, 2006
The Guardian 


  The 1960s was a richly creative period for Japanese cinema which, at the same time as many other countries, produced its own new wave (nuberu bagu). Among its leading directors were Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes, 1964), Yoshishige Yoshida (Eros Plus Massacre, 1969), Nagisa Oshima (Death By Hanging, 1968), and Shohei Imamura, who has died of liver cancer aged 79. They all explored the link between eroticism and violence, and challenged the moral values of postwar Japanese society.                   
Imamura went deeper and further into these areas than his contemporaries, but took longer to become accepted in the west as the most important director of his generation. He once stated: "I want to make messy, really human, unsettling films," by which he probably meant that his often elaborate, anarchic narratives were intertwined with sociological, sexual and political themes, unlike the more classical films by the holy trinity of Japanese cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Early in his career, Imamura worked as assistant to Ozu ("I was basically just a clapper boy"), but when it came to making his own films he reacted against what he saw as Ozu's conservatism, rigid camerawork and overly formal relationship with his actors.   What separated Imamura most from many other Japanese directors was that his films focus mainly on the lower classes and social outcasts. Imamura's characters are often poverty-stricken women, prostitutes, pimps, pornographers
 and black marketeers.   Imamura himself was not from the kind of lower-class society he depicted. Born in Tokyo, he was the son of a doctor, and attended elite schools where, he said, he despised his fellow pupils. "I remember thinking that they were the kind of people who would never get close to the fundamental truths of life. Knowing them made me want to identify myself with working-class people who were true to their own human natures."   Imamura became interested in the theatre at an early age, and in 1945 enrolled in literature studies at Waseda university, where he wrote plays and acted. On graduation in 1951 he joined Shochiku Films, where he worked as assistant on several films before transferring to Nikkatsu studios, which was recruiting young talent. In 1958, Imamura got his chance to direct three films: Stolen Desire, Lights of Night and Endless Desire, all set in the underworld, followed by My Second Brother (1959), which dealt with the plight of four orphans
 in a poor Japanese mining town. Although these were studio projects, one could already detect Imamura's preoccupations and his depiction of what he describes as "very strong women who accept their fates even in an era when women had been believed to have no actual practical role in society, or were simply regarded as inferior to men".   At the centre of Pigs and Battleships (1961) is the quintessential Imamura heroine who retains her decency in the midst of corruption. This pungent allegory, set during the American occupation of Japan, revealed the director as a master of black-and-white images on the wide screen. (Imamura worked with the great cinematographer Sinsaku Himeda on many of his films.) The Insect Woman (1963) was an account of 45 years of the hard life of a woman (Sachiko Hidari) who survives working in a factory, as a cleaning woman and as a prostitute. The original Japanese title of Imamura's unsentimental but compassionate examination of fortitude and
 patience was Entomological Chronicles of Japan, which came from his reading of sociologists, ethnographers and anthropologists, allowing him to observe his characters with a scientist's objectivity.   The Pornographer (1966), the study of a man who devotes his energies to the purveying of sex aids in the committed belief that he is spreading happiness, was photographed and played in a matter-of-fact style, neither prurient nor judgmental in tone. In The Profound Desire of the Gods, also known as Tales From the Southern Islands (Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubo, 1968), a brother and sister on a small island fall in love and attempt to recreate the myth of Izanagi and Izanami, sibling gods whose union founded the Japanese race. Incest is treated as a natural phenomenon, only becoming taboo under the influence of westernised Japanese who have come to civilise the island. The film can be seen as a summation of Imamura's themes: civilisation versus primitivism; science versus
 superstition; humans as animals or insects.   After the commercial failure of The Profound Desire of the Gods, and the near collapse of Nikkatsu studios, Imamura spent the following eight years (from 1970 to 1978) concentrating exclusively on making a series of remarkable documentaries, mostly for television, one of which was The History of Postwar Japan As Told By a Bar Hostess (1970), an "unofficial" view of Japanese society. Other documentaries dealt with Japanese women sent to southeast Asia in the prewar years to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military, and with the war veterans who did not return home after the war had ended.   However, at the end of the 70s, Imamura returned to fiction films. "I found myself wondering whether documentary was really the best way to approach these matters. I came to realise the presence of the camera could materially change people's lives. Did I have the right to effect such changes? Was I playing God in trying to control the
 lives of others? I'm no sentimental humanist, but thoughts like these scared me and made me acutely aware of the limitations of documentary film making."   He brought a documentary approach to bear on Vengeance Is Mine (1979), an absorbing study of a serial killer. but his best film after his eight-year "retirement" was Black Rain (1989), set in 1950 in a small village near Hiroshima where the health of most of the villagers has been affected by the dropping of the A-bomb five years before. There are devastating flashbacks to the nuclear holocaust, yet the film contains a balancing strain of black humour and a meticulous examination of Japanese postwar rural society.   In the 1980s, Imamura finally took his rightful place among the internationally renowned Japanese directors, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes for both The Ballad of Narayama (1983) and The Eel (1997), ironically not among his best films. His last film was one of 11 segments of 11'09"01 - September 11 (2002)
 in which a Japanese soldier in the second world war thinks he is a snake, and concludes by saying, "There is no such thing as a holy war."   Imamura was invited to the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1994 for a retrospective of his work. Mark Cousins, the festival's former artistic director, remembers Imamura being "as brash and ironic in person as in his films. He wanted to talk about sex as much as art. He was as deadpan as Buster Keaton. What he said was usually sly or irreverent. To his amazement, the cinema for the opening screening was full. I said: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome one of the world's greatest film makers, and there was loud cheering. As he took to the stage I saw he had tears in his eyes." Imamura is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.   ? Shohei Imamura, film director, born September 15 1926; died May 30 2006




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