Shoehei Imamura has a retrospective showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Rose Theaters thsi month. I have long been interested in seeing more of his films ever since I came across a lively discussion of his themes and motifs. To date I have only seen The Insect Woman (the still above is from that film), but I would enjoy purusing his filmography, too bad I don't live in New York. Terrance Rafferty discusses the esteemed auteur's work in the NY Times:
THE great Japanese director Shohei Imamura died last year after nearly 80 years of living and of watching people and nearly 50 years of filming them, and there’s no indication that anything they did ever shocked him, even a little. He once told an interviewer, “I’m interested in people: strong, greedy, humorous, deceitful people who are very human in the qualities and their failings.” And the 20 films on view in “Pimps, Prostitutes, and Pigs: Shohei Imamura’s Japan,” a monthlong retrospective beginning Friday at the BAM Rose Cinemas at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, display a pretty spectacular variety of human qualities — mostly failings. It’s a compendium of barbarities, both primitive and thoroughly modern, a vision of life reduced to its brutal basics: violence is constant; sex is urgent, sloppy and profoundly unromantic; and the struggle to survive makes men and women appallingly creative in inventing ways to mistreat one another.Mr. Imamura’s movies are often funny, usually beautiful, and always — surprisingly — rather sweet-natured. His composure, in the face of so much terrible behavior, is genuinely touching.
This quality is not, however, to be confused with the serenity and formal rigor of older-generation masters like Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu (on three of whose pictures Mr. Imamura labored, unhappily, as an assistant). When Mr. Imamura hit his stride as a director, with the 1961 gangster farce “Pigs and Battleships,” it was immediately clear that tea ceremonies, polite bows and anxieties about the marriage prospects of proper young women would not loom large in his repertory, and that the moods and rhythms of his films would probably never be described as contemplative.
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