When Japanese writer-director Shohei Imamura was announced as the co-winner of the Palm D’Or at the 1997 Cannes film festival, a lot of people in the audience—the TV audience at least—probably thought “who?” North American knowledge of Japanese film generally begins and ends with Akira Kurosawa (not least because so many of his films have been remade by western filmmakers—Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven; Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars, and so on). Imamura, even though three of his last four movies have won major prizes at Cannes, remains unknown—virtually none of his films have enjoyed even a reasonably-sized North American release.
That is about to change. “Pigs, Pimps and Pornographers”, a complete retrospective of Imamura’s pre-1997 theatrical features, begins an 11-city tour tonight at Cinematheque Ontario. Cinematheque is also concurrently launching the first English-language book of essays by and about the director, called, simply, “Shohei Imamura”.
The man is worth the hoopla: Imamura surely belongs in the pantheon of the world’s leading filmmakers—he is certainly the greatest one that nobody seems to have heard of. Over four decades, Imamura has produced a consistently excellent body of work peppered with half-a-dozen masterpieces; his persistent absence from the art-house repertory is a crime. It’s an omission on the order of magnitude of ignoring Fellini—and I’m not certain that the comparison doesn’t favour Imamura.
After taking in a few of his movies—one doesn’t so much watch as be taken hostage by them—it is possible to scrape up some sympathy for a distributor. They are a tough sell: they are in a language that is not only foreign but utterly foreign, they deal with a culture with few connecting points to our own, and the occidental neophyte may simply have trouble keeping track of Asian faces. (Following the action sometimes requires heroic attention: the ensemble of characters in Eijanaika makes Ben-Hur feel like My Dinner With Andre). Most obviously though, they are movies about people or groups of people who, frankly, just ain’t very nice—or as Imamura puts it: “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure”.
In the right combination, both turn out to be pretty interesting places. The idea seems to be that the best way to get at the heart of a society is to sniff around at the edges, so Imamura movies tend to be peopled with hideous husbands and murderous wives, prostitutes, radiation victims, and people on the outer reaches of civil society with no desire to get to the inside. “You’re old-fashioned,” declares a character in The Pornographers. “We all want to be animals. No one wants to be human; we want to be free but society won’t let us.”
There is a hint through all of Imamura’s work that we aren’t really all that much more than animals—albeit animals with the gift of consciousness—and he seems to delight in showing us how little progress we’ve made as a society, or even as a species. Life’s chief preoccupation is simply getting by, and “food and sex are life’s only pleasures” according to another character in The Pornographers.
Food, sex, and what people do to get by are certainly Imamura’s chief preoccupations. The simple struggle for food is the centre of community existence in The Ballad of Narayama, the story of a village in northern Japan where in a tough year children get tossed into snowbanks or sold, and the aged are hauled up to the local mountaintop to die. In The Insect Woman, a woman struggling to escape a Narayama-like rural existence moves to Tokyo and finds her calling as the boss of a call-girl service. In Intentions of Murder, a housewife struggles against a violent, unfaithful husband, his mistress, her spiteful in-laws and a burglar who first rapes her and then falls obsessively in love with her. (She wins.) In The Pornographers, a little man is driven mad by his life in the porn business. In Black Rain, Hiroshima survivors muddle through a class system where social standing is now based on health rather than wealth. It’s all just getting by.
All this leads to a paradox: There may not be a single noble act on any character’s part in the entire Imamura canon—morally it’s all on about the level of home movies of Stalin wrestling alligators—yet they are the most elevating movies imaginable. How does he pull that one off? There is of course the awful possibility that he’s simply right and our pleasure is simply the joy of self-recognition.
I prefer to think he’s got making movies down right. Imamura makes films like an anthropologist raised on Aristotle’s Poetics: even though there isn’t a hint of tragedy in his work—sometimes it feels like there’s nobody behind the camera—he gets from his characters what Aristotle demanded of tragedy. They arouse pity and fear in you: pity for creatures at the edge of human existence; fear that you aren’t so very different from them. You feel a great intimacy with that which was until recently strange, and you are moved by it. His characters take a rough journey and it’s we who are left feeling a basic humanity as a result.
This is not to ignore all the other miscellaneous delights of Imamura’s films: The marvelous 60’s feel to the gorgeous black-and-white widescreen photography of the early movies; their deadpan wallowing in the unacceptable; their irrepressible humour even at what seems the end of the world (parts of Black Rain, a movie about Hiroshima, suggest what Fellini’s Amarcord might have looked like if the bomb had been dropped on Italy) and their farcical delight in depravity (by comparison to The Pornographers, Boogie Nights is an exercise in wholesomeness and good taste.) They are a complex experience, as life is: profound, exciting, moving, funny and ultimately, exhausting.
Mostly exhausting. Shohei Imamura is one of cinema’s greatest artists for perhaps the simplest reason in the world: he gives you everything. His films are complete—the whole story of life in every package. They fill you up and you leave the theatre suffused with gratitude for this vision of a civilization heretofore a mystery to you. Indeed, the best subtitle I can think of for this series is “everything I ever needed to know about Japan, I learned from Shohei Imamura”.
—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997
