Results tagged “Shohei Imamura”

And now for some thing(s) completely different.

So what's the most commonly-shoplifted book?

I asked Steve Bercu, BookPeople’s owner, what the most frequently stolen title was.

“The Bible,” he said, without pausing.

Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for.

My money was on The Catcher in the Rye for some odd reason, but they name-checked Steal This Book — the obvious choice — within the body of the article.

And a man who was a part of history twice over died at the age of 93: he survived both the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His family was also tainted with the social stigma that went with being a hibakusha (atomic bomb victim):

One of his daughters, Toshiko Yamasaki, who was born in 1948, said her mother had also been “soaked in black rain and was poisoned” by the fallout from the Nagasaki blast. Her mother died in 2008 from kidney and liver cancer. She was 88.

“We think she passed the poison on to us,” Ms. Yamasaki said, noting that her brother died of cancer at 59 and that her sister has been chronically ill throughout her life.

Robert Jay Lifton's scholarly but chilling Death in Life examines the whole issue from a scholarly perspective, but Imamura's movie (from Masuji Ibuse's novel), now that both are readily available again, are also worth it.

(Title of post is a Coil reference; harder to recommend since their work remains annoyingly difficult to find.)

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Kikutani does not look forward to leaving prison. For sixteen years he has been half-asleep in the womb of the state, grateful for his lack of freedom, since it means that many less decisions he has to make. He is obliged to apply for parole even if he doesn’t want it. The prospect of rejoining the outside world, even just provisionally, fills him with terror. It is not because of what the world might do to him, but what he fears he might do all over again when confronted with the world in all of its capriciousness and turmoil.

A decade and a half ago, Kikutani found his wife cheating on him with a friend. His response was to stab her to death and leave the other man permanently injured — and in the years since, he has not so much dealt with the emotional reasons for the crime as he has simply buried them. If everyone else around him is willing to believe the past is a dead place, then he might as well act like it. Uneasy, fearful of what he might find, and surprised at both how much and how little has changed, he leave prison and joins the population of a halfway house. At every step he is certain he is doomed, certain that the past will erupt once again in some form, whether inside him or outside of him.

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Maybe Eijanaika isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. That was one of the many competing theories I came up with after sitting through Shohei Imamura’s 1979 epic about Japan being transformed by Westernization in the latter half of the 19th century. Or maybe that’s not really what it’s about — maybe it’s just intended to be a picaresque series of adventures experienced by someone caught between Japan and the West in that turbulent period, and that we can draw out of it whatever interpretations we like. Or maybe it was intended to be something completely different, and in the decade or so that Imamura wrote and re-wrote the screenplay and tried to mount the production he lost sight of what was really supposed to be on the screen. What I saw was a deeply confused, meandering film that desperately needed a strong editorial hand to tighten it up and give it focus and clarity.

Let me back up a bit and describe the film itself, the better to demonstrate where the problems stem from. Eijanaika opens with Genji (Shigeru Izumiya) arriving rather unceremoniously in 19th-century Japan after having spent years abroad in the United States. He has learned English and understands all too well the congeries of forces that are threatening to come to Japan and remake it forever — the arms dealers, for instance, and he concludes that it might be best to deal directly with them now and get ahead of the game. But opportunities are few and far between, and he winds up drifting into crimes directed against a government that seems increasingly willing to collaborate with outsiders.

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The Pornographers is not so much about porn or sex as it is about frustration, and what better way to talk about frustration than through sex, or the lack thereof? It takes place in post-WWII Japan, where pornography is illegal, but "Subu" Ogata makes a decent living by selling black-market 8mm porno films to a steady stream of middle-aged and well-off clients. His clients are frustrated men, unable to get the sex they want except through porn, or through the young girls Ogata occasionally procures for them through friends of his. And Ogata himself is frustrated — Haru, the woman he's living with, doesn't want him sleeping with her because she's afraid that her dead husband's spirit won't rest easy if she's with another man.

This is the setup for The Pornographers, one of the best films made by Japanese director Shohei Imamura, who over the course of several decades has repeatedly found his subject in the oddball underbelly of Japan's everyday life. He focused on a quasi-quack WWII doctor in Dr. Akagi; he examined the lives of those forever tainted by the atomic bomb in Black Rain; and here, in his first film for Nikkatsu Studios, he turns his eye on a Japan strangled by decades of self-imposed sexual repression. Like many of the people in his movies, Subu is not seen as a hero or even a particularly sympathetic figure, but Imamura nevertheless makes him into the centerpiece of a fascinating story. Good movies do not have to be about good people, just interesting ones.

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The facts of the case are shocking enough. In 1964 a man named Iwao Enokizu was arrested after having been on the lam across Japan for several months, swindling, cheating, and murdering whoever crossed his path. He was snidely unremorseful, and on the way to the precinct house he complained that all his arresting officers would outlive him and deny him any chance to further enjoy his life. He sounded like a man who had been cheated out of something, and in his mind, he had been. Society for him, as for all sociopaths, was a big fat obstacle in the way of his pleasures.

But soon he began to talk, and talk, and talk, and before long the police were in possession of his whole sordid story. What they did not have, however, were motives. What possessed a man — undeniably bad to begin with, but hardly irredeemable — to murder his coworkers, rob them, do a runner, and then kill everyone else who got in his way?

Vengeance Is Mine, directed by Shohei Imamura, opens with Iwao's arrest and capture, and flashes back over the course of his confession to his crimes. No attempt at suspense is generated here; the only mystery Imamura wants on screen is the mystery of his main character's motives. Unlike the police who interrogate Iwao, however, Imamura doesn't claim to have any answers. This is not a vest-pocket psychoanalysis movie where everything is wrapped up in neat, Freudian terms, even though we see a great deal of material that could fuel such a theory. The movie doesn't put its credence one way or another. It simply shows a charming and utterly hateful sociopath at work, and presumes that we will be intelligent or observant enough to draw our own conclusions.

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The Eel is a very confused movie that has the best of intentions, but it’s a shame about the script. It's saddening, since The Eel was not made by some tyro but by Shohei Imamura, one of Japan's best directors of thoughtful movies about adult characters. He gave us Vengeance Is Mine, arguably the best movie ever made about the psychology of a serial killer; Black Rain, a chilling portrait of the survivors of the atomic bomb in Japan; and The Pornographers, a highly sardonic look at Japan's sexual underworld. He also gave us the controversial History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess, which divided critics as to whether it was farce or a serious sort of post-modern journalism.

All of these movies were smart and deftly made. The Eel is neither of these things; it's filled with the sorts of conceptual mistakes that an amateur filmmaker would avoid, and its philosophy is thimble-deep at best. And yet somehow it's garnered an incredible amount of critical acclaim. Thomas Weisser, usually one to sniff out a pretentious dud, gave the movie a three-star rating in his Japanese Cinema: Essential Handbook. The film garnered the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997, beating out the far superior L.A. Confidential and The Sweet Hereafter, and appeared on dozens of critics' Ten Best lists for that year. Is it that people are unwilling to single out mistakes in a foreign film that would be blasted on sight if it was in their own language? If nothing else it serves as a perfect example of how foreign audiences can be easily hoodwinked by what only looks profound from the outside.