This last weekend The Japan Foundation put on a film festival called When Masters Were Young-60's. All films were screened with subtitles. There were several films that I wanted to see (Sing A Song Of Sex by Nagisa Oshima and The Toyko Wanderer by Seijun Suzuki). But I only made it to Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman:
IMAMURA Shohei is an internationally renowned director, having twice won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or for his “The Ballad of Narayama” (Narayamabushi-ko)(83) and “The Eel” (Unagi)(97). Imamura’s works in the 1960’s such as ”Pigs and Battleships” (Buta to Gunkan)(61) and “The Insect Woman” helped to define his unique style that came to be known as the “serious comedy”. This masterpiece depicts the life of a middle-aged woman with lots of vitality, but told with the detached clinical style similar to a scientific observation of an insect. The movie's portrayal of the lives of formidable women during and after the war reveals human nature and desire in their rawest form. HIDARI Sachiko won the Best Actress Award at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival for her role in this film.
I thought the themes(prostitution, women being kept as mistresses, women's sexuality, nontraditional families with children born out of wedlock, interacial marriage-one character had an American boyfriend and later married a Korean) must have been pretty shocking for 1963. It is an evocative social commentary on society and the hardships many women had to endure in the postwar struggle for survival. I'd be curious to see some of Imamura's other films, he doesn't flinch from controversial material
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