WHO is he?
Japanese film director, producer and screen writer who directed close to two dozen documentary and fictional features between the late fifties and the early 2000s. Imamura studied history before taking to film and assisting Yasujiro Ozu. He is one of the few directors to have won the Golden Palm at Cannes Film Festival twice: for The Ballad of Narayama in 1983 and for The Eel in 1997.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Imamura wanted to move away from what he thought was a tidy, middle-class view of post-war Japan presented by Ozu’s films. His films, instead, focussed on the shadier corners of contemporary Japanese society and the bedrock of lust and violence simmering beneath it, with humour and sans moral judgment. Sex workers, procurers, pornographers and psychotics abound in the landscape of his films and, in their own twisted way, become testaments to the resilience and irreducibility of the single individual.
Style
Imamura liked to see himself as an entomologist putting his cruel, dastardly and oversexed characters under the microscope for dissection. This distanced attitude towards his characters’ gratuitous behaviour is achieved through an ironic, deadpan approach to the narrative. These intentionally rough-edged films are marked by a cinéma vérité-inspired photographic style, episodic narration, dilapidated locations consisting of slums, warehouses, seedy inns and black markets, framing patterns through architecture, surrealist image interjections and a poker-faced, darkly humorous acting style.
WHY is he of interest?
Imamura was one of the most prominent members of the Japanese New Wave which ushered in a new generation of youth-centred cinema in Japan. This cinema largely rejected a complacent fascination with the distant past and instead dealt with the immediate cultural climate. Imamura’s films, in particular, defy categorisation and can neither be labelled a politically charged, agenda-driven cinema nor a purely formalist repertoire. What Luis Buñuel’s films were for the Catholic Occident, Imamura’s were for post-war Japan.
WHERE to discover him?
The chilling Vengeance Is Mine (1979) is arguably Imamura’s best work and deals with a compulsive murderer on the run, who, like Albert Camus’ stranger, will not conform to the popular narrative of a condemned man. An unapologetic, amoral portrait of sociopathic behaviour, the film is partly a parody of institutional accounts of crime in its dogged rejection of reductive psychological and sociological explanations of the depths of the human mind.
