Shohei Imamura, 1926 - 2006.

Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura, a two-time winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, has died at the age of 79....

Imamura, a pioneer of his country's New Wave movement, won the Cannes Film Festival's top award for The Ballad of Narayama in 1983 and The Eel in 1997. His other films include 1989's Black Rain, which depicted the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.

The BBC.

In nineteen feature films over 45 years Imamura has probed the lower depths of Japanese society and "the Japanese consciousness." Not for him the tourist-friendly vision of Japan as the post-war economic powerhouse of Asia, the land of kimono-clad elegance, Zen serenity, and harmonious Confucian social hierarchies. Instead he has put onscreen a world populated by prostitutes, pimps, and petty thieves, peasant farmers and middle-class pornographers, serial killers and shamen. This is the irrepressibly "real" Japan of his bawdy, ragged, sensual films.

Nelson Kim at Senses of Cinema.

Updated through 6/2.

As great as Ballad of Narayama is, I've always felt that his true masterpiece is The Profound Desire of the Gods (aka Kuragejima - Legends from a Southern Island). This epic portrait of the near-primitive and incestuous lives of the inhabitants of one of Japan's Southern Islands is Imamura's most powerful and disturbing work, and easily one of the ten greatest (and most unforgettable) films of all time.

Filmbrain.

[T]wo of his early movies, Stolen Desire and Endless Desire, are two of my favorite Japanese movies of all time.

Grady Hendrix.

See also acquarello's reviews and Richard Phillips's interview for WSWS.

Updates, 6/1: Pigs and Battleships "contains most of the seeds of Mr Imamura's mature work: the black-and-white widescreen frames throb with an animalistic vitality, and his protagonists are unabashedly amoral and self-centered, concerned only with personal survival," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "For Mr Imamura, these were the positive traits of an island nation of limited resources."

The Japanese New Wave "explored the link between eroticism and violence, and challenged the moral values of postwar Japanese society," writes Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. "Imamura went deeper and further into these areas than his contemporaries, but took longer to become accepted in the west as the most important director of his generation."

"As far as I know, he's the first major post-humanist to emerge in Japan, getting his feet wet just before the other great rebel of Japanese cinema, Nagisa Oshima, went into feature filmmaking," writes Ryan Wu at Pigs and Battleships. "While his peers busied themselves telling classical humanist tales with such lofty titles as The Human Condition and The Burmese Harp, Imamura picked at our festering scabs."

Update, 6/2: "Like the veteran director Kenji Mizoguchi, he was a champion of women's rights. Many of his films, from The Insect Woman (1963) to The History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970), were searching studies of what it meant to be a woman in a society in which she was required at all times to be subservient to her husband and walk several paces behind him," writes the Telegraph. "He tackled subjects the authorities would have preferred to be left undisturbed - such as the fate of atom bomb victims in Black Rain (1989) and, obliquely, suicide in The Eel (1997); and, alone among his contemporaries, he emphasised the unbroken line between modern Japan and its often barbaric past."

Posted by dwhudson at May 30, 2006 11:40 AM