nishing Points: The Films of Shohei Imamura at the Harvard Film Archive

[Aaron Gerow]

Vanishing Points: The Films of Shohei Imamura at the Harvard Film  
Archive
December 1 - December 14, 2007

?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.? ? Shohei Imamura

Shohei Imamura is widely recognized today as one of the most  
important directors to emerge from the Japanese New Wave of the  
1960s, together with Oshima, Suzuki, and Shinoda. While Imamura?s  
work quickly gained recognition on the international festival  
circuit, box office success overseas proved elusive, with Western  
audiences seeming to prefer the exquisite melodrama of Ozu and  
Mizoguchi, the action of Kurosawa or, eventually, the modernist art  
films of Oshima.

Imamura?s work is typically ribald, bawdy, and earthy, revealing and  
reveling in the underpinnings of Japanese society: not the code of  
the samurai or the rigor of the tea ceremony, but something more  
primal and fecund. Imamura discovers this primal element in the  
coarser side of life ? not the working class so much as the sub- 
proletariat (similarly beloved by Pasolini) made up of criminals,  
pimps, and pornographers ? and especially in his indomitable, and  
decidedly unelegant, heroines. This search for the primal gives  
Imamura?s films both an anthropological aspect and an implicit  
critique of modernity and consumer capitalism. While Imamura?s 1960s  
films are now acknowldged as bracingly idiosyncratic masterpieces,  
many of them bewildered critics and alienated audiences at the time,  
rendering Imamura?s career especially vulnerable to the recession  
that struck the Japanese film industry in the 1970s. No longer able  
to make features, he founded a film school and made television  
documentaries before his triumphant comeback to the big screen with  
Vengeance Is Mine. In the last decades of his life, Imamura made  
films irregularly, but each film was regarded as an event.

This retrospective, which includes almost all of Imamura?s  
theatrical features,  was organized by Adam Sekuler, Northwest Film  
Forum, and Tom Vick, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian  
Institution. Special thanks to Mari Hiruta, The Japan Foundation  
(Tokyo); Yoshihiro Nihei, The Japan Foundation (Los Angeles); Imamura  
Productions; and Brian Belovarac, Janus Films. Selected text adapted  
from program notes by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Vengeance Is Mine (Fukushu suru wa ware ni are)
Saturday December 1 at 7pm

A Man Vanishes (Ningen johatsu)
Saturday December 1 at 9:30pm

The Profound Desire of the Gods (Kamigami no fukaki yokubo)
Sunday December 2 at 3pm

Why Not? (Eijanaika)
Sunday December 2 at 7:30pm

The Pornographers (Jinruigaku nyumon)
Monday December 3 at 7pm

Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute (Karayuki-san)
Monday December 3 at 9:30pm

The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama-bushi ko)
Friday December 7 at 7pm

Zegen
Friday December 7 at 9:30pm

Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan)
Saturday December 8 at 7pm

The Insect Woman (Nippon konchuki)
Saturday December 8 at 9:15pm

Lights of Night (Nishi Ginza eki-mae) and My Second Brother (Nianchan)
Sunday December 9 at 3pm

Stolen Desire (Nusumareta yokujo)
Sunday December 9 at 7pm

Endless Desire (Hateshi naki yokubo)
Sunday December 9 at 9pm

Black Rain (Kuroi ame)
Monday December 10 at 7pm

The Eel (Unagi)
Monday December 10 at 9:15pm

Intentions of Murder (Akai satsui)
Friday December 14 at 7pm

A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengo- 
shi: Madamu Omboro no seikatsu)
Friday December 14 at 9:45pm

The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center for the  
Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
For a complete listing of films, please visit: http://hcl.harvard.edu/ 
hfa/films/2007novedec/imamura.html
Admission is $8 General, $6 Students and Seniors
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa or 617-795-4700 for information