Happy Birthday, Shôhei Imamura! Born today in 1926, this Japanese film director was a key figure in the Japanese New Wave who continued working into the 21st century.
Born to a comfortably upper-middle-class physician's family in Tokyo, Japan, Imamura, for a short time years later after 1945, participated in the black-market selling cigarettes and liquor when Japan was in a devastated condition following the war.
Reflecting this period of his life, Imamura's interests as a filmmaker were usually focused on the lower strata of Japanese society.
His films dug beneath the surface of Japanese society to reveal a wellspring of sensual, often irrational, energy that lies beneath.
Imamura later studied Western history at Waseda University, but spent more time participating in theatrical and political activities.
Though Imamura knew that he was not born into the kind of lower-class society he depicts in his work. he was eventually drawn toward film, and particularly toward the kinds of films he would eventually make, by his love of the avant-garde theater.
He cited a viewing of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Japanese black and white crime drama/mystery film 'Rashomon' in the year of its release.
Post screening, Imamura saw this as an early inspiration. He said that he also saw it as an indication of the new freedom of expression possible in Japan in the post-war era.
Upon graduation from Waseda the following year in 1951, Imamura began his film career working as an assistant to Japanese film director and screenwriter Yasujirō Ozu ('Tokyo Story', 'Floating Weeds', 'An Autumn Afternoon') at Shochiku Studios.
Most notably, this include working on Ozu's 1953 Japanese black and white drama film 'Tokyo Monogatari' ('Tokyo Story'). Imamura served as second assistant director, but went uncredited.
Later, Imamura reacted against the studio system, and particularly against the style of Ozu.
Eventually, 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.
In the early 1980s, Imamura wrote and directed the film of which he is best known. This was the 1983 Japanese drama film 'Narayama bushikō' ('The Ballad of Narayama').
The film is an adaptation of Japanese author and guitarist Shichirō Fukazawa's 1957 fiction book Narayama bushikō.
Still strong at the age of sixty-nine, Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) prepares herself for an inevitable yet frightening ritual. In her village, where food is scarce, life is harsh and people are desperate and cruel.
Despite anyone who lives for seventy years is hauled to the mountaintop by their children and left to die in the dead of winter of starvation, a practice known as "ubasute" ("abandoning an old woman").
Nonetheless, Orin is prepared to accept her fate, but she also has one last, all-important task -- she must find a suitable wife for her son, Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata).
Imamura's 'Narayama' is slightly inspired by Japanese film director Keisuke Kinoshita's titular 1958 Japanese Fujicolor historical period drama film.
Later that same year, Imamura's 'Narayama' won the Palme d'Or at the 36th Cannes Film Festival. This occurred in May of that same year.
In the late 1990s, Imamura won the Palme d'Or again. This was for his 1997 Japanese drama film 'Unagi' ('The Eel'). This occurred at the 50th Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year.
To explore this level of Japanese consciousness, Imamura had focused 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.
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.
With a career that spanned over four decades, Imamura is one of only seven filmmakers ever to have been awarded the Palme d'Or twice.
Throughout his filmmaking career, Imamura has proven himself unafraid to explore themes usually considered taboo, particularly those of incest and superstition.
His ribald, darkly comic films about messy human relationships and coarse, indomitable women repelled early European critics who had grown to cherish the graceful, exotic image of Japan.
This was typified by the features of Japanese film director and screenwriter. Kenji Mizoguchi ('The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums', 'Ugetsu Monogatri', 'Sansho the Bailiff').
Yet Imamura remains a critically important director, both as one of the seminal Japanese New Wave directors.
This were along with Japanese film director and screenwriter Nagisa Ōshima ('In the Ralm of the Senses', 'Taboo') and Japanese film director Masahiro Shinoda.
This was and also as a chronicler of a side of Japan rarely seen in Mizoguchi movies or tourist brochures.
Imamura was a master storyteller whose themes followed the lives of people on the lower rungs of society, whether they were gangsters, a traveling group of actors, or children of poverty-stricken parents.
Displaying a particular interest in the lower strata of society — what Imamura considers the consciousness of Japan — the director populates the screen with impoverished women and social outcasts such as crooks, prostitutes, and pimps.
Dark, messy, and bawdy, Imamura’s films observe the primal elements of human behavior and are quasi-anthropological studies of postwar Japan.
Imamura had been active from 1951–2002.
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