Pigs, Pimps and Other Friends of Shohei Imamura

Although he bowed out in 2006, at age 79, as a globally revered grand master of cinema—his nation's greatest living filmmaker—Shohei Imamura may have simply refined his touch over a 45-year career so that his gritty vision of Japanese society played more elegantly on the screen. He didn't stake his reputation on arthouse propriety. Not that you'd necessarily infer that from the somber, poetic tone of latter-day productions such as The Ballad of Narayama (1983). Over time, the director became so smoothly transgressive that his final feature, 2001's Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, could employ female ejaculation as a metaphor and not raise any eyebrows.

Because so many of his films from the 1960s—the period when Imamura broke with convention and boldly defined himself as a fearless observer of the human condition, mapping the gamier precincts of postwar Japan—have been out of circulation or otherwise hard to see, contemporary audiences have missed out on most of the ripe, juicy stuff.

Criterion delivers the goods with its new triple-disc set, Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes. Its an apt summary of some of the major players in these robust dramas, and also the title of a 2007 retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinematek that saw rare revivals of Pigs and Battleships (1961), The Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964), all included in the box, as well as the mad ethnography-on-crack epic The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968), and the decade-closing documentary, History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess. Those latter films would have made welcome additions to the package, which also serves as a fitting companion to Criterion's edition of The Pornographers (1966), the most commonly accessible of Imamura's '60s efforts.

Watched in sequence, the films show off the development of Imamura's unusual balance of objectivity and outrageousness. Every biographical note talks about the director's impulse to break away from the stately transcendence of Ozu, for whom he apprenticed, and surf the hurly-burly of the underclass. What makes his films so pleasurable, even when the camera seems to impose an almost clinical gaze, is that irrepressibly earthy sensibility. There's an often grimy, grindhouse candor that animates these social anatomies and their gallery of misfits. Pimps, prostitutes, and pigs were some of the director's best friends, not to mention serial killers, bar girls, rapists, conniving husbands, hapless pornographers, petty hoodlums and incestuous country bumpkins.

Those porkers are no mere symbol. Pigs and Battleships, which Nikkatsu's bosses despised on its release, is a broadly comic saga of occupied Japan. Its lowlife antics transpire in the port town of Yokosuka, whose black market thrives amid the influx of American servicemen. A series of unfortunate events turns a wannabe gangster's pork-vending scam into so much hogwash, as hundreds of pigs stampede, trampling the exploitative intents of the local crime syndicate and the Yankee arrivals alike. The film, in all its sordid vigor, represents Imamura at his most freewheeling. One memorable scene involves a yakuza version of the Three Stooges who, having whacked a rival and tossed him in the pigpen, later slaughter one of the swine for supper and discover... well, let's say they need a few extra toothpicks for this barbecue. Making splendid use of black-and-white Cinemascope shot in high contrast by Shinsaku Himeda, a restlessly mobile camera, a manufactured set of neon jazz dives and hive-like bordellos, and penumbral interior lighting that evokes noir-like intrigue even at the most mundane moments, Imamura enjoys a crackling pace. When the local punks leap into the air to dodge a round of accidental machine gun spray, it's as kinetic as a 15-second musical.

If he intended Pigs as a line in the sand, Imamura was slightly more inside the line with The Insect Woman. Rather than the drive-in movie implications of its English version, the film's original title translates as "Entomological Chronicle of Japan," which speaks more accurately to Imamura's almost scientific perspective. The movie opens with the image of a beetle painfully inching its way along an incline. The immediate parallel to a peasant girl (Sachiko Hidari’s Tomé Matsuki) who clambers out of her backwater farm life to become a Tokyo prostitute, then learns to manipulate her situation, is obvious but never gratuitous. No less than the heroine of James Brown's "Hot Pants," or porn star Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Tomé uses what she's got to get what she wants. When her own daughter, raised by the family's simple-minded (and creepily intimate) patriarch, beats Tomé at her own game, the narrative becomes a generational parable of empowerment. As in the later Profound Desire of the Gods, which matches Russ Meyer's Mudhoney for hormonally unhinged hillbilly mayhem, the men are variously boobs, cuckolds, molesters or moneybags. As soon as they discover their power, the women shirk their passive roles (and their demure place in Japanese cinema) and become crafty and indomitable, surviving by any means necessary and with no apology.

The feminist angle is more oblique in Intentions of Murder, which I'll take as Imamura's 1960s masterpiece, along with the sloppier, wild-at-heart Profound Desire. The story follows the awful life of Sadako Takahasi (Masumi Harakawa), trapped in a common-law marriage with a small child and an asthmatic husband who is more preoccupied with his longtime mistress. Dogged by a family curse and beset with suicidal and homicidal fantasies she clumsily fails to realize, Sadako discovers her only passion in the arms of an erstwhile rapist. Ever more anthropological, Imamura observes much of the action as a voyeur—the camera positioned at a remove, peering through empty bookshelves or past a cage of hamsters (one of whom eventually eats the other). The film's arty arsenal of techniques and motifs include freeze frames, dream sequences, and flashbacks, churning locomotives and spectral hoodoo, a tingly musique concrete score by Toshiro Mayuzumi, and the always brilliant black-and-white cinematography of Himeda, who captures a pivotal turn in a wintry mountain tunnel in the charcoal and salt tones of The Third Man. The pizzazz gets self-conscious at times (the reflection of Sadako's face in the bottom of an iron that the rapist uses to threaten her during one of his assaults), but it's never less than thrilling to watch such talent rise to its moment.

All in all, it's as singular and sustained a body of work as any filmmaker can aspire to, made by a prophet of his nation's subcultural funk: something that would propel many a lesser voyeuristic film or photography career for decades after the 1960s. Before Japan was shocking and extreme, Shohei Imamura was doing the dirty work.

[Brooklyn-based writer and pork enthusiast Steve Dollar has written for such outlets as the New York Sun, Newsday, Time Out New York, Playboy.com and Paste, and occasionally wallows in celluloid and pixels at 24xps.com.]

Posted by ahillis at May 18, 2009 3:43 PM