{Inter} Cultural Japan

Last week Japanese film director Imamura Shohei has died at the age of 79.

Imamura belonged to a group of New Wave directors who broke through in the early sixties and he went on to become one of Japan’s major film makers.

In his 45 films, Imamura has tried to find the essence of Japanese culture, of the Japanese consciousness, and of what of means to be Japanese.

He did this from what I would call a vibrant Shinto-mentality, from the boisterous spirit of the Matsuri, the Shinto festivals.

At the same time, he probed the lower depths of Japanese society in connnection with the lower part of the human body.

His world is populated by prostitutes, thieves, serial killers, and when in his last film his hero is a salaryman, it is someone who has lost his job and lives among the homeless.

Women are central to his films, always big women with a great zest for life, vulgar perhaps, but also with a sharp instinct for self-preservation. They are like Shinto goddesses, like Ame-no-Uzume dancing on the tub in front of the Cave of the Sun Goddess. Such women appear in his early masterworks Insect Woman and Intentions of Murder, and all the way to his last film, the mellow Warm Water under a Red Bridge. In Profound Desire of the Gods, a film situated on Okinawa and symbolizing the clash between nature and technology, the two main characters are female shamans.

[Some Imamura Shohei movies. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

Imamura twice won a Palme d’Or at Cannes, for The Eel and The Balled of Narayama.

Imamura Shohei made messy, human films. The man who looked for the essence of Japaneseness, was surprised by his enthousiastic reception in the West.

How, he used to say, could people there understand what he as talking about?

Note: Also read this article by film critic Mark Schilling in the Japan Times.

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