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The Insect Woman (1963)
While Imamura made his debut in 1958, his fifth film Pigs and Battleships (1961), a portrait of black marketers involved in a pork meat scam while living off the spoils of a nearby US naval base, is generally seen as marking the emergence of the director’s themes and style.
However, it was The Insect Woman that provided a watermark moment in both his oeuvre and Japanese cinema as a whole. It depicts a country girl who moves to Tokyo and, through little more than bloody-minded determination, rises up the ranks of the world’s oldest profession.
Significant here is Imamura’s fusion of documentary techniques with fiction, such as the use of on-location shooting and long telescopic lenses to keep the viewer at an objective distance from his characters. These both became hallmarks of the director’s style that saw French critic Max Tessier aptly describe him as ‘the entomologist of modern Japan.’
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A Man Vanishes (1967)
Imamura’s first independently produced film is an experimental deconstruction of the documentary form, which has seen him aligned with other key figures in the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, such as Ōshima Nagisa.
A Man Vanishes ostensibly takes the form of an investigation into a real-life missing person’s case. However, the relationship between the filmmaker and his subject (the vanished man’s wife) increasingly comes to the fore, leading to a rug-pulling climax where Imamura subverts all expectations of documentary authenticity.
Imamura pursued his unique documentary approach in a number of further works, including the self-explanatorily-titled History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) and Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute (1975), focussed on a woman coerced into working in overseas brothels in the early 20th century. This formed the basis of Imamura’s subsequent ‘flag follows the flesh’ alternate take on Japanese colonialism in the 1987 fictional feature Zegen.
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Profound Desires of the Gods (1968)
Profound Desires of the Gods is Imamura’s most ambitious portrait of the culture clash between the primal spirit of the Japanese people and its contemporary civilised (and civilising) veneer. It unfolds on the fictional remote southern Japanese island of Kurage-jima, whose inhabitants still live a rudimentary lifestyle that has persisted for centuries.
Still, all is not rosy in this timeless tropical paradise, even before a group of engineers from the mainland arrive with the aim of creating a new well for a sugar mill. The family that provides Imamura’s focus are ostracised and labelled as ‘beasts’ by their fellow islanders due to the incestuous antics of their patriarch. It’s a clear reference to Japan’s own foundational myth: according to the nation’s oldest surviving text, the Kojiki: Record of Ancient Matters, its landmasses were formed through the sexual union of the sibling gods Izanagi and Izanami.
The film was a costly box-office flop upon its initial release. Imamura found himself seduced by the locations during a shooting period that expanded dramatically from six to eighteen months and the budget rising accordingly. The island landscapes and the creatures within it are framed by Imamura as a bizarre alien world presented in all its messy splendour, irrational yet spontaneous and teeming with vitality. Modern-day viewers will find it fascinating. There is simply nothing else like it.
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The Ballad of Narayama (1983)
Imamura’s first Palme d’or winner deals with the mythical practice of obasute, of carrying elderly relatives to the top of a mountain and leaving them to die once they have ceased to have any productive value to the community.
It was not the first adaptation of Fukazawa Shichirō’s 1956 novel of the same name. Kinoshita Keisuke’s 1958 version adopted the stylised aesthetics of kabuki. Imamura’s portrait of his extended farming family eking out an existence in the harsh mountainous environment within Nagano prefecture at times feels like a David Attenborough nature documentary. He depicts his characters and the wider ecosystem on which they rely across the changing seasons.
It is Imamura at his peak, with a hint of the supernatural in the poignant closing scenes sure to linger in the mind long beyond the film’s ending.
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Black Rain (1989)
Most definitely not to be confused with Ridley Scott’s Tokyo-set action-thriller from the same year, Imamura’s adaptation of Ibuse Masuji’s 1965 novel about a couple’s attempts to marry off their adopted niece superficially betrays the shadow of his former mentor Ozu, a director famed for his portrayals of the dynamics of family life in films such as Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953).
There’s another shadow here: that of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, whose fallout, from which the film takes its name, the young woman is caught in at the beginning of the film. Shot in stark monochrome, those familiar with Imamura’s work will certainly notice similarities in his themes and style in this harrowing portrayal of innocent lives caught up in the blast.
This article was written by Jasper Sharp, a writer and curator specializing in Japanese cinema and the co-editor of the website Midnight Eye.