Running in `no-man's land'
GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN
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Shohei Imamura, who died recently, was one of Japan's great filmmakers. He focused on the dark and forbidden aspects of society.
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Shohei Imamura
Shohei Imamura, who died recently, was arguably one of the most important Japanese directors, along with Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, to have engaged the world.
While Kurosawa made films about Japan's happier/spiritual segments of society, Imamura was obsessed with the downtrodden, the social outcasts and the seedy characteristics of his community.
Imamura's work in the late 1950s completely changed the perspective of Japanese cinema, known for its self-sacrificing women and honourable, heroic men.
Imamura broke this image by tackling subjects that were taboo in Japanese cinema: incest and superstition were two among the many.
Taboo themes
Imamura's `The Insect Woman' (1963) is one classic example that tells the story of a villager who trades a woman for a factory job.
`The Pornographer' (1966) focuses on a man who purveys sex aids in the belief that they spread joy, and Imamura was neither judgmental nor prurient here.
Similarly he was not either, when he made in 1968 `Tales from the Southern Islands.' Here, a brother and sister fall in love and try to recreate the myth of sibling gods whose union produced the Japanese race.
Incest is treated as natural in the film till the advent of western civilisation.Imamura was invariably questioning such themes in his work.
His movies deal with the concepts of primitivism versus civilisation, superstition versus science and man versus animals or insects.
That Imamura, who was 79 when he died of liver cancer, never got an Oscar seems hardly surprising. The Americans could never understand his cinema or the subjects he chose.
But he found an appreciative audience in Europe, and Cannes honoured him twice with the Palm d'Or in 1983 and 1987. His `The Ballad of Narayama' (1983) picturises the painful custom in a mythical Japanese village of abandoning its old people on a mountain top to die.
`The Eel' (1987) is a brilliant study of a former convict (who murders his wife when he sees her in bed with his best friend) who struggles to link up with his community, and finds that friendship with an eel is the most satisfying relationship he can have.
Imamura painstakingly researched his subjects, and familiarised himself with regional vocabularies and accents since his movies were set in Japan's remote regions.
Sometimes called the `cultural anthropologist of Japanese cinema' because of his passion for the country's far-flung areas, Imamura, however, grew up in Tokyo. His roots had little in common with what he painted on the screen.
Imamura, the third son of a doctor, was born on September 15, 1926.
He went to elite schools, joined a technical institution to avoid getting into the army during World War II, and finally studied western history and literature in Japan's Waseda University.
Misadventures
But his first forays into life outside academics were marked by shameful misadventures. He distilled illicit liquor, sold cigarettes and gasoline.Perhaps, he was impressed by what he read: Ango Sakaguchi's essay, "Darakuron" ("On Decadence"), first published in 1946, profoundly influenced Japan's youth of the period. One passage reads: "Young men have perished in their bloom of youth (referring to WW-II), but those of the same generation who have survived have become black marketers."
Imamura later wrote in his book, "Eiga wa Kyoki no Tabi de aru" (The Cinema Takes One on an Insane Journey): "For me, the black market was a microcosm of freedom where people of all backgrounds exposed their naked desire and lived just as their hearts dictated."
Documentaries and fiction
In the 1970s, he made a series of brilliant documentaries about sex slaves, war veterans and bar hostesses before returning to fiction in 1979 with `Vengeance is Mine,' one of the first films on a serial killer. But it was `Black Rain' in 1989 that proved to be an excellent attempt.
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