My film series is fortunate enough to currently be hosting a small retrospective of films by Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), made possible thanks to the hard work of various individuals at the Northwest Film Forum, The Japan Foundation, and Janus Films. As part of this touring retrospective, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, with support from the Toshiba International Foundation, put out a customized booklet to distribute to the nine participating venues.

Both the tour and booklet share the same title: A Man Vanishes. I just finished reading this informative booklet full of great snippets from various contributors. I remember programming Imamura right at the start of my current job, starting with The Eel (1997), followed by Dr. Akagi (1998), and then Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001). So it was interesting reading in the booklet Joan Mellen’s appraisal of these last three features:

“Imamura’s last three films – The Eel, Dr. Akagi, and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge – enjoy modified happy endings. In each, the director highlights the solidarity of his marginal people, who band together to defeat inevitable threats to their well-being.”

Having just seen Pigs and Battleships (aka: Hogs and Warships, 1961), The Insect Woman (1963), and The Pornographers (1966), the concept of the “modified happy ending” is now clear. His early work spared no prisoners. This quality, among many others, attracted Martin Scorsese to Imamura. Scorsese contributes to the booklet and adds:

“Every time I watch one of Imamura’s pictures, I learn something. And every time I’m enthralled. He brings us up close, very close, to aspects of humanity that most of us, perhaps all of us at times, would prefer be kept hidden away. That’s why his pictures are so frightening, so unnerving, and finally so freeing.”

During a scene in Hogs and Warships (to use the onscreen title of the print we used), I couldn’t help but think of a moment wherein a prostitute takes on more than she can handle with several drunken U.S. soldiers and the camera suddenly whirls about from a ceiling-perspective, and how it evoked in me thoughts of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Suddenly the fact that Scorsese mentioned Imamura three times in a recent hour-long address to film critics made sense, even if he was referring specifically to The Insect Woman, which covers 45 years of one Japanese Woman’s hardships (most of which is spent in a brothel). Regarding this film, Rob Nelson, another contributor to the booklet, adds this:

“His original title for the film – Entomology – came to him while beholding a bug’s relentless circling of an ashtray. ‘My character found herself in somewhat of the same situation,’ the director surmised.”

But Imamura is not all gloom and doom, as Joan Mellen, again, reports:

“ ‘Do you know what satori means?’ Shohei Imamura asked me as soon as I had seated myself opposite him on the tatami at his studio on a hot summer day in Tokyo in 1974. All his films were a search for satori, the sudden flash, the Zen revelation of truth unpredicted. Imamura’s characters are people, as he put it, ‘at the bottom of society’: fishermen and prostitutes, homeless tramps, and ex-cons grown old in wisdom. Persuaded that what they say is true, he vowed early on to ‘write only about oppressed people.’”

We’ve only got two more films to show, as part of our mini-retrospective: The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) and Vengeance is Mine (1979). Our ability to relive the cinematic past is a treat, but when considering a lifetime of work that covered several decades there comes a realization that this is, ultimately, a small representation of his oeuvre. Still: I look to the final note for what it reveals and it is this: at my program we also screened the episodic and international omnibus release of 11’09”01 – which we screened in 2002 and which had a short film contribution by Imamura to represent Japan. Worth noting, especially for its poignant and bittersweet tone as an unexpected swansong, is this excerpt by Mellen with Imamura’s final cinematic quote:

“Tellingly, in his 11’09”01 episode, Imamura conjoins Japan’s Pacific War with a twenty-first-century Jihad, both heralded as ‘holy war(s).’ ‘There is no such thing as a holy war’ is the final line Imamura ever conveyed on film.”