The reason that Japanese New Wave filmmaker Shohei Imamura, who died last year at 79, never made a big splash in American is simple: Western audiences tend to enjoy their Far East entertainment with a strong dose of Orientalism.
The director, whose massive body of work gets showcased in a comprehensive retrospective at the BAMcinematek starting this week March 2, handled sordid themes that could qualify him as Japan’s Martin Scorsese. Although such a comparison doesn’t take into account that Imamura emerged a generation earlier than his American equivalent and built a steady filmography that continued into the 21st century.
His first major accomplishment, Pigs and Battleships (March 9), revealed Imamura’s specific panache: prostitution during wartime. Sex, murder and betrayal all figure prominently in Imamura’s strongest accomplishments; you won’t find a single samurai warrior to feed the American imagination. His films mend the corruption caused by The Last Samurai and Memoirs of a Geisha. It’s a vision not suited for the multiplexes.
Then again, the brilliant ways that Imamura implicates violence in his stories match and surpass the bite-sized shocks served up in the typical American thriller. The dissection of a relentless serial killer in Vengeance is Mine, which kicks off the retrospective with a weeklong run beginning March 2, grows more Hitchcockian than Hitchcock. The story opens with the killer’s capture and incorporates his discomfiting childhood memories of an estranged parental relationship to highlight the evolution of his psychopathic mindset. Imamura has the audacity to nearly—but not entirely—justify the murders.
Barely released overseas in 1980, Vengeance is Mine was widely considered the finest accomplishment of Japanese cinema in the previous decade. Imamura, however, had already been trained on the country’s rigorous studio system, as documented in 1958’s Nishi Ginza Station (March 5), a light comedy harboring surrealist undertones. Like his contemporary Seijun Suzuki, Imamura used his studio experience to implement an increasingly singular outlook.
Vengeance is Mine arrived reasonably late in his career, but it signaled the completion of the director’s self-defined style. While other earlier entries, such as 1963’s The Insect Woman (March 11 & 12) and the terrifically unsettling dark comedy The Pornographers (March 17) suggest the trajectory that soon followed, Imamura’s later entries form his original tone. Two years later, the epic Eijanaika (March 23) put a realistic spin on the typical period drama, tackling pro-Western riots of 1867 through the setting’s unbridled sexual energy. The award-winning 1997 entry The Eel (March 27) was one of Imamura’s most popular accomplishments, a bleak and funny exploration of a former murderer released from prison and attempting to rebuild his life. Ten years earlier, The Pimp (March 22) mocked the determination of a Japanese spy who establishes a prostitution ring for Imperial forces. Like most of Imamura’s movies, the story is disarmingly humorous, and a world apart from Risky Business—although that could serve as an alternate title for this fascinating showcase.
