Background
Imamura, Shohei was born on September 15, 1926 in Tokyo, Japan. He was a doctor’s son.
Imamura, Shohei was born on September 15, 1926 in Tokyo, Japan. He was a doctor’s son.
When he failed to gain admission to agricultural school, he studied Western history at Waseda University and then made another sideways leap to a film studio job.
In the seventies, he stepped aside from feature filmmaking to do a series of TV documentaries with a special interest in the lost soldiers of Japan and the prostitutes that the country had employed or dragooned. This period also crystallized his belligerent, ironic wariness with documentary—as evident in A Man Vanishes, an apparent documentary survey of missing persons in which the fiancée whose man has vanished begins to fall for the interviewer.
Similarly, in Intention of Murder, the raped woman develops a strange fascination with the rapist. Whether he really believes in such forces, or whether emotionally he prefers them to more rational schemes, Imamura is a gourmet of the dark, irrational underside. If he had made Kane, Thompson might have become the tyrant.
There’s no denying the energy of his best work, the unruly inventiveness, and the subversive attitudes. Thus, his Cannes prizewinner, Ballad of Narayama, is a brutally physical realization of a cherished Japanese legend. Imamura stood up for the modern Japan, as if to point to the genteel ways of Mizoguchi and Ozu. But the exposé works both ways. And there is no doubt as to who are the greater artists.
Director (films): Stolen Desire, 1958, In Front of West Ginza Station, 1958,Endless Desire, 1958, My Second Brother, 1959, Pigs and Battleships, 1961, Insect Woman, 1963, Vengeance is Mine, 1979, Why Not?, 1981, The Ballad of Narayama, 1983, Zegen, 1988, Black Rain, 1990, The Eel, 1997, Doctor Akagi, 1998, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, 2001 September 11, 2002.
He became an assistant to Ozu—only to declare that he wanted to explore a kind of cinema opposed to that of his master. He wanted more real turbulence or untidiness, less literary resignation and acceptance, more actual greed and desire. “I am interested in the relationship of (he lower part ol the human body and the lower part of the social structure,' he proclaimed.
Fair enough: Imamura came of age in a Japan of convulsions, and he has been fascinated by lowlife sexuality, prostitution, and television. He has exhibited a robust, sensual approach that is not unlike the stvle of Dennis Potter.