Shohei Imamura

The anthropologist of the lower body

If Ozu filmed the Japan that wished to be admired, Imamura filmed the one it kept in the back room. He apprenticed under Ozu at Shochiku in 1951, worked on Tokyo Story, and came away actively repelled by the master's serene, idealized households — a rebellion that became a whole career. His stated interest was the lower strata of Japanese society, and he pursued it with the cold curiosity of a field researcher, calling himself a cultural anthropologist and preferring, in his own phrase, to make messy films. His heroines are bar hostesses, prostitutes, insect-women who survive everything; against Mizoguchi's and Naruse's exquisite martyrs he insisted his were the ones that actually existed. He is the great corrective to the polite image of the Japanese cinema — and the only director from Japan to win two Palme d'Or.

Waseda to two Palmes

Born in Tokyo on September 15, 1926, he studied Western history at Waseda, graduated in 1951, and entered film under Ozu before defecting to Nikkatsu in 1954 to work with Yūzō Kawashima, whose taste for amoral protagonists suited him better. He debuted in 1958. Pigs and Battleships (1961), his satire of the American-base black market, so overran its budget that Nikkatsu benched him for two years; he answered with the ferocious The Insect Woman (1963) and Unholy Desire (1964). After founding his own production company in 1965 he pushed into pseudo-documentary — A Man Vanishes (1967) dissolves the line between staged and found entirely — and when The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) failed commercially he retreated to television documentary for most of the 1970s. The comeback was total: Vengeance Is Mine (1979), then The Ballad of Narayama (1983), which took the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and The Eel (1997), which took a second, shared that year with Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry. In between he founded the film school now called the Japan Institute of the Moving Image, and gave Takashi Miike his first credit as an assistant director on Zegen (1987).

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Imamura #33 among all directors, composite 16.53 across fifteen films — and the two Palme films sit exactly where you would hope, at the top of his curve: The Eel at #154 (3.00) and The Ballad of Narayama at #256 (2.39). The order is the interesting part. The Eel draws the most citations of any Imamura film in our sources — it appears on five lists to Narayama's three — and here the aggregate agrees, placing it clearly ahead. Breadth of mention and depth of regard, so often at odds, for once point the same way. Below the peaks the fall is steep: Black Rain (1989) at #356, Vengeance Is Mine at #371, then a long tail down to Pigs and Battleships at #2588 and The Pornographers (1966), his best-known film in the West, stranded at #5488 on a single citation. A ranking this back-loaded describes a director the West met late, through Cannes, and is still catching up on.

Where to start

The Ballad of Narayama for the anthropology at full, unsparing scale. Then The Eel for the quieter, redemptive late manner, and Vengeance Is Mine for the cold procedural nerve in between. Save The Insect Woman for when you want the early ferocity undiluted.