nwFilmCenter

A Man Vanishes: The Legacy of Shohei Imamura

Japanese director Shohei Imamura (1926-2006) was a true maverick. While his esteemed peers told idealized, classical humanist tales, Imamura had a preference for frank contemporary themes, particularly sensual stories of earthy, sexy, strong-willed women who disdained bourgeois Japanese morality. With a near-scientific,"anthropolgical" interest in Japanese society, Imamura entertainingly excelled at exposing the realities of the human condition and the basic instincts, rational and otherwise that drive human behavior. Famously quoted as saying "I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure," and "I like to make messy films," Imamura gradually took his place among the leading figures of post-war Japanese cinema with a body of films that are, in the words of director Jonathan Demme, "among the greatest ever made. Organized by Adam Sekuler, Northwest Film Forum and Tom Vick, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution. This touring program of rarely screened films, most not released on video, is made possible with the assistance and sponsorship of The Japan Foundation, Tokyo and Los Angeles; Imamura Productions, Tokyo; and Janus Films, New York.

Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 7 PM	VENGEANCE IS MINE DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Based on the true story of Iwao Enokizu and a murderous rampage in 1963 which generated a 78-day nationwide manhunt, Shohei Imamura's chilling gem won every major film award in Japan and remains one of the greatest Japanese films of recent decades. Imamura uncovers the seedy underbelly of civilized Japanese society as he follows Iwao, a day-laborer and smalltime con-artist, who embarks on a psychopathic spree of rape and murder after killing two of his co-workers. Eluding the police and public, Japan's infamous "King of Criminals" passes himself off as a Kyoto University professor, only to become entangled with an innkeeper and her perverted mother. "Starting out in Dragnet-noir style, Imamura's searching camera proceed 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."—Pacific Film Archive. ( 140 min ) ^ Top
Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 7 PM	THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA is a hauntingly poignant meditation on the nature of existence. Based on a folk-tale about a village where people over the age of 70 are taken to the mountains and left to die to make way for the young, Imamura finds cruelty—many of the villagers are portrayed as brutally vicious—but also warmth in this strange community. "Imamura realizes this vision with shocking humor and immediacy, and then challenges us to say whether this fictitious community is more or less humane than ours. Awe-inspiring. —TIME OUT LONDON."Cruel and exalting."—THE NEW YORK TIMES. ( 130 min ) ^ Top
Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 7 PM	INSECT WOMAN DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Tome, an uneducated farming woman, leaves near-poverty, rape and small town incest for better fortune in Tokyo. She soon becomes a factory worker and then a prostitute, so beat down by patriarchal society that she resorts to base, insect-like reflexes to survive. Though she commits many acts traditionally considered immoral by Japanese society, Imamura is less concerned with passing judgement than with portraying the woman as a survivor faced with few choices in the world of post World War II Japan. "An electrifying account . . .has been compared to both Fassbinder's THE MARRIAGRE OF MARIA BRAUN and Sirk's IMITATION OF LIFE."—Ontario Cinematheque. ( 123 min ) ^ Top
Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 6:30 PM	PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN The story of a young gang living outside of the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka, PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS follows their failed attempts to raise hogs on the trash thrown out by the military. As the small-time yakuzas' plans are hilariously thwarted, they, like the imperialist Americans, are the protagonists in a political satire where life revolves around money, sex and staying alive in the fray. Not so much critical of the occupiers as the Japanese who grow wealthy off their presence, Imamura creates "An expansive, loopy film of extravagant set pieces and distinctive dark humor."-J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE. ( 108 min ) ^ Top
Sat, Dec 1, 2007 at 7 PM	BLACK RAIN DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Adapted from a novel by Masuji Ibuse, the story follows the lives of three Hiroshima survivors after the war. Yasuko and her uncle Shigematsu and aunt Shigeko live in fear of death from radiation sickness. Imamura portrays the discrimination against them and the 370,000 bomb survivors by showing their psychological struggle to live normal lives. This is most evident in the repeated failure to find a husband for Yasuko, stigmatized for her exposure to "black rain," the mix of radioactive ash and precipitation caused by the explosion. "A masterwork...flawless...a profound chiller."-Vincent Canby, THE NEW YORK TIMES. ( 122 min ) ^ Top
Sun, Dec 2, 2007 at 7 PM	INTENTIONS OF MURDER DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Sadako, a neglected housewife, is married to weak-willed tyrant who treats her like a servant. When he is out of town, she is raped by a stranger, an act that shakes her passivity. Instead of following the traditional Japanese code that suggests committing suicide, she finds a new assertiveness from the violent act. Employing slow motion, jump cuts and handheld camera work to depict Sadako's mental transformation, Imamura again explores the role of women in Japanese society, constructing "A strange and fascinating film . . . an authentic shocker."-NEW YORK TIMES. ( 150 min ) ^ Top
Thu, Dec 6, 2007 at 7 PM	A MAN VANISHES DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN "An actor can become a real-life subject, and a real-life subject can become an actor."-Shohei Imamura. Perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of "documentary," A MAN VANISHES begins as a film about the thousands of people who go missing in Japan each year and follows the case of one man presumed murdered. Yet the veneer of objectivity starts to crumble as the fiancé of the missing man begins to fall in love with the film's director. This leads to a final sequence that questions the nature of documentary and of objectivity itself. "In a coup de cinéma that has been equalled only by Kiarostami's CLOSEUP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication."—James Quant, Cinematheque Ontario. ( 130 min ) ^ Top
Sun, Dec 9, 2007 at 7 PM	PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Imamura's first color (CinemaScope) film is an epic portrait of the near-primitive lives of the inhabitants of one of Japan's Southern Ryukyu Islands. An engineer comes to survey the island, only to be caught up in a web of family intrigue and myth when the natives regard him as a god. Presaging Werner Herzog in its examination of the collision of new and old cultures, this is one of Imamura's most unforgettable films. "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."—Pacific Film Archive. ( 172 min ) ^ Top
Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 7 PM	THE MAKING OF A PROSTITUTE DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Imamura explores a little known and discussed aspect of 20th-century Japanese history: the thousands of women who were sold into prostitution and sent abroad to service Japanese soldiers during World War II. After being horribly abused, many of these women were not welcomed back by their families, and remained un-repatriated after the war. The story focuses on Karayuki-san, a forgotten 73-year-old woman living in poverty in Malaysia. She takes Imamura on a tour of the prostitute quarter where she had arrived as a slave 54 years earlier, and reflects on the sad, often unspeakable events of her life. "Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura's fine documentaries."-Joan Mellen, THE WAVES AT GENJI'S DOOR. ( 70 min ) ^ Top
Sun, Dec 16, 2007 at 7 PM	EIJANAIKA DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN In Edo in 1867, Genji, having returned from America and finding only danger and decadence, tries to convince his reluctant wife, Ine, to sail back with him to "the land of golden opportunity. Swirling around this story is an exuberant carnival of activity: silk factory workers in rebellion, a clan plotting the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate, and exciting new possibilities beckoning as ancient traditions collapse. "A masterpiece...A delirious exercise in sex, crime and weirdness...with an appalling, visionary beauty."-J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE. A truly great film...to stand beside UGETSU, TOKYO STORY or THE SEVEN SAMURAI."-Michael Wilmington, WASHINGTON POST. ( 151 min ) ^ Top
Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 7 PM	ZEGEN DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN Imamura regular Ken Ogata stars in this comic satire on colonialism. The story follows a hairdresser who is sent to Manchuria to spy on the Russians, but ends up becoming the kingpin of a string of brothels throughout Southeast Asia. Wanting "to depict Meiji nationalism going recklessly out of control," Imamura offers an ironic commentary on the hopelessly insular outlook of the Japanese national character."ZEGEN is the most like his early masterworks: epic, energetic, sexually impudent, and grotesquely funny. A satire about colonialism, commerce, and carnality"-James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario. ( 124 min ) ^ Top
Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 7 PM	THE EEL DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN After spending eight years in prison for brutally knifing his adulterous wife, Yakusho moves to a small town and opens a barbershop, (accompanied only by his only friend, his pet eel). Taking a gentle, humorous approach to the issues of prison and reintegration into society, the film centers on Yakusho's shop, which soon becomes the crossroads for a group of quirky misfits. The shop also becomes Yakusho's sanctuary, where he avoids involvement with any more women and attempts to hide himself from intrusions from his past. "In telling his story, Mr. Imamura, who won his second Palm d'Or at Cannes, marshals a small cast of vivid characters that enable him not only to bare the passions that seethe beneath the surface and apparent conformity of Japanese life, but also to ponder emotions and issues that know no nationality."—THE NEW YORK TIMES. ( 117 min ) ^ Top
Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 7 PM	DR. AKAGI DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN DR. AKAGI is an irreverent black comedy and a humanistic portrait of a militarized, eve-of-Hiroshima Japan that bubbles over with doses of savage wit, kinky sexuality and apocalyptic uncertainty. Akagi, who lives on a small Japanese island in the waning days of World War II, Akagi is a decent, eccentric iconoclast whose determination to cure a hepatitis epidemic has earned him the nickname "Dr. Liver." Enlisting a motley crew of helpers: a dissolute monk, a nihilistic morphine-addict surgeon, a young ex-prostitute, and a wounded Dutch soldier, Akagi is tireless in his quixotic effort to locate the disease-causing microbes. "Brilliant! Brimming with humanity and humor tied to a darker, violent... sexually kinky undercurrent."-THE NEW YORK POST ( 129 min ) ^ Top
Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 7 PM	WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE DIRECTOR: SHOHEI IMAMURA JAPAN A combination of Keaton-esque whimsy, improvised mythology and Imamura's own facility with the underbelly of life, WARM WATER is a quirky, charming film about rebirth and renewal and a raucous cheering for the power of the feminine. Starring Koji Yakusho, star of THE EEL, Imamura's twentieth film is about a middle-aged man whose wife has left him. He then travels to a far-off village in search of a golden Buddha, but finds instead a woman with a strange case of kleptomania and a propensity for expressing pleasure with a shower of–well, on the big screen it comes across like fireworks."May well be Imamura's funniest film; it is also one of his most accomplished...A complex and risky work carried off with an effortlessness that comes only from wisdom and experience."-Kevin Thomas, LOS ANGELES TIMES. ( 120 min ) ^ Top