Shōhei Imamura(1926-2006)
- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Shohei Imamura's films dig beneath the surface of Japanese society to
reveal a wellspring of sensual, often irrational, energy that lies
beneath. Along with his colleagues
Nagisa Ōshima and
Masahiro Shinoda, Imamura began his
serious directorial career as a member of the New Wave movement in
Japan. Reacting against the studio system, and particularly against the
style of Yasujirō Ozu, the director he
first assisted, Imamura moved away from the subtlety and understated
nature of the classical masters to a celebration of the primitive and
spontaneous aspects of Japanese life. To explore this level of Japanese
consciousness, Imamura focuses on the lower classes, with characters
who range from bovine housewives to shamans, and from producers of blue
movies to troupes of third-rate traveling actors. He has proven himself
unafraid to explore themes usually considered taboo, particularly those
of incest and superstition. Imamura himself was not born into the kind
of lower-class society he depicts. The college-educated son of a
physician, he was drawn toward film, and particularly toward the kinds
of films he would eventually make, by his love of the avant-garde
theater. Imamura has worked as a documentarist, recording the
statements of Japanese who remained in other parts of Asia after the
end of WWII, and of the "karayuki-san"--Japanese women sent to
accompany the army as prostitutes during the war period. His heroines
tend to be remarkably strong and resilient, able to outlast, and even
to combat, the exploitative situations in which they find themselves.
This is a stance that would have seemed impossible for the
long-suffering heroines of classical Japanese films. In 1983, Imamura
won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for
The Ballad of Narayama (1983), based
on a Shichirô Fukazawa novel about a
village where the elderly are abandoned on a sacred mountaintop to die.
Unlike director Keisuke Kinoshita's
earlier version of the same story, Imamura's film, shot on location in
a remote mountain village, highlights the more disturbing aspects of
the tale through its harsh realism. In his attempt to capture what is
real in Japanese society, and what it means to be Japanese, Imamura
used an actual 40-year-old former prostitute in his
The Insect Woman (1963); a woman
who was searching for her missing fiancé in
A Man Vanishes (1967); and a
non-actress bar hostess as the protagonist of his
History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970).
Despite this anthropological bent, Imamura has cleverly mixed the real
with the fictional, even within what seems to be a documentary. This is
most notable in his
A Man Vanishes (1967), in which
the fiancée becomes more interested in an actor playing in the film
than with her missing lover. In a time when the word "Japanese" is
often considered synonymous with "coldly efficient," Imamura's vision
of a more robust and intuitive Japanese character adds an especially
welcome cinematic dimension.
