Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 16, May 2001
Catherine Cullen
Carnival of the Unconscious: On Shohei Imamura
_Shohei Imamura_ Edited by James Quandt Toronto: Toronto International Film
Festival Group, 1997 ISBN 0-9682969-0-4 183 pp. An excellent companion to Shohei
Imamura's films, these essays and reviews collected by James
Quandt are thoughtful interpretations of a complex, thorny
body of filmwork. This is a book for the curious who are new
to Imamura's films and looking for an intense, somewhat
scattered introduction to this unpredictable observer of
human behavior. It will also be of great interest to the
scholar looking for hard to obtain articles, some translated
here for the first time. In his Introduction to the book,
Quandt points to the filmmaker's disregard for separations
between documentary and fiction conventions along with
'outsized performances, teeming energy, and grotesque
spectacle' (3) as the root means for producing the often
puzzling mix Imamura terms 'messy' films (39). Formally adventurous, Imamura rolls
fiction into documentary and documentary evolves into
fiction as he collapses distinctions between the two modes
of working. _A Man Vanishes_ begins in the style of
investigative journalism. The film becomes complex with
unexpected twists as the real life girlfriend of the
disappeared man forsakes his memory to flirt with the actor
hired to interview her, and ends with the walls of the set
falling in as Imamura himself appears to reveal the film as
a constructed premise. Rough, often vulgar, exuberantly
carnal, untidy, rife with folk superstitions, and exploding
with energy, Imamura's films 'seem the exact contradiction
of Mizoguchi's cosmic regret and Ozu's sublime acceptance',
as Dave Kehr writes (70). The families in Imamura's films
fumble for love, betray casually, turn to incest for
comfort, are defiantly self-serving, or break down
altogether -- decidedly not Confucianist! In spite of
daunting obstacles his protagonists, particularly his female
characters, project a physical energy that often fills the
screen like a life force. His 'juicy' (15) women (as the
filmmaker describes them) insist on inhabiting their
sexuality and use it when needed to navigate oppressive and
treacherous social terrains. At once sexual and maternal,
Imamura's women confound the separation old attitudes
maintain between mother and the sexual body. Donald Ritchie
writes: 'Mother is a sacred object and mother's vagina is
not a thought upon which many men dwell on. To mother
herself, however, her vagina is an important and connected
part of her body.' (15) Max Tessier describes an Imamurian
woman as 'freed from the family shackles, who uses her body
intuitively as a way of revealing her liberty' (48-9).
Living in the teeming chaos of lower class life, they are
pragmatists given to sensual pleasure, and possess a
tremendous will to survive rape, humiliation, and other
horrors. What feels 'irrationally dislocating', as Allan
Casebier notes (95), may be what feels right to the female
protagonist living true to her own nature. In reference to _Intentions of Murder_
Dave Kehr writes, 'if her sexuality is what has led Sadako
to her entrapment, attracting weak, frightened men who hope
to find strength and security in her, it is also the secret
of her survival and triumph. It is the sexuality of
procreation, perpetuation, the irresistible urge to exist'
(76). She 'trusts the physical force she contains' and 'lets
her vitality guide her life' (76). Tome's daughter in _The
Insect Woman_ willfully uses her sex to extract a large sum
of money from a corrupt businessman in order to purchase a
farm and begin a new life together with her
boyfriend. Donald Ritchie points out in his
survey 'Notes for a Study' that Imamura aims, through the
use of flashbacks and parallels, 'to create a 'critical position' so
that the spectator would also discover the truth about
women, undisturbed by empathy or identification . . .
Usually we are invited to commiserate with such women,
[women who are selfish, strong, amoral, poor,
lower-class, hedonistic, or deceitful] the implication
being that since they do not fit the (male-defined) female
role they will end up deserted and unfortunate.'
(14) Imamura's films view such women as
savvy about their environment and keen to survive. Imamura
once said: 'My heroines are true to life -- just look around
you at Japanese women.' (15) In the interview with Japanese
filmmaker Toichi Makata, Imamura traces his interest in
lower-class women to those he met working in the black
market after World War II: 'They weren't educated and they
were vulgar and lusty, but they were also strongly
affectionate and they instinctively confronted all their own
sufferings. I grew to admire them enormously. My wife is a
bold, strong woman, too, and I respect her a great deal.'
(117) Audie Bock describes Imamura's
detached, scrutinizing gaze as anthropological and his
portrayal of lower class women as politically feminist. He
elicits an intellectual sympathy, she says, rather than an
emotional one. Imamura views the human race, in
general, as predatory. One must devour or be devoured.
Through Imamura's rather pessimistic lens the self-serving,
grasping underclass is manipulated by ruthless, equally
self-serving merchants, samurai, criminals, family members,
spouses, or lovers. Ritchie writes: 'We must infer that the
subject is really ruthless power on one hand and feckless
hedonism on the other.' (31) In _Eijanaika_, Ine is caught
between the easy money of prostitution and her love for her
newly returned husband, Genji, a hapless idealist who dreams
of returning to America to start a farm. She loves Genji but
she loves money, too and cannot decide between the
two. As Antoine deBaecque points out, the
shark's consumption of a pig that falls into the water in
_The Profound Desire of the Gods_ explicitly illustrates
that 'the predator is at the heart of the story and nothing
ever saves its victims' (156), whether they be pigs, the
innocent victims of the serial killer in _Vengeance is
Mine_, the daughter who is sold and ends up as a prostitute
in _The Insect Woman_, or the townspeople in _Eijanaika_
mercilessly killed as they parade through town singing in
protest of life conditions. According to Kehr, _Eijanaika_,
which means 'what the hell', is the 'cry of a dangerous,
rock-bottom freedom, of the abrupt realization that
traditions are dead, laws arbitrary, society an empty
convention . . . For the poor, there is nothing left -- a
condition that makes everything possible. Why not wear wild
costumes, dance in the streets, loot stores, tear down
buildings? What the hell?' (83) A sense of desperation runs
through many of Imamura's films as characters are oppressed
by extreme poverty (_Ballad of Narayama_), betrayed by
family or lover (_The Eel_, _The Insect Woman_, _The
Pornographers_), or, like the killer in _Vengeance is Mine_,
driven by an unslakable hatred. Imamura describes the serial killer as
someone with 'no kokoro' (no heart, no self): 'Inside this
man, could there be nothing but hollowness? Then, I think I
can see the lonely inner stare of today's man.' (19) He
kills without motivation a truck driver who kindly gives him
a lift. The shot lasts a long time as if to demonstrate how
hard it is to kill another person. The violence is not
cathartic, glorious, or redemptive. It is gristly, slow,
senseless, shattering. Dave Kehr describes the 'carnival of
the unconscious' as Imamura's 'ruling metaphor and main
staging area' (83). Kinzo's carnival in
_Eijanaika_: 'isn't the whimsical playground of
illusions of the Frederico Fellini films; it's a malignant
illusion, an institutionalized fraud, recognized as such by
both the people who run it and the people who pay for
admission. Yet the need to believe in something is so strong
that the carnival has a positive social function. These
dreams may be shoddy and commercial, but they are dreams
after all, and everyone (the show people included) needs
something to hold on to. When paper charms begin to rain
down mysteriously over the carnival grounds -- a sign from
the sun goddess that she approves of the _Eijanaika_
movement -- the carnival people start making and selling
counterfeit charms, telling themselves that they're helping
out the gods. The fraud, which was probably started by some
showman in the next district anyway, has a divine origin and
a divine blessing; the gods are all for making a buck
themselves.' (83) Gilles Laprevotte writes that
Imamura's films are 'a type of counter-history' (104) at
odds with the official view of Japanese life. His characters
burst with energy, too big and too bold to fit in prescribed
social molds. Their robust actions confront the false
conception of a polite society of individuals who efface
themselves for the good of the whole. Linda Ehrlich calls
_Pigs and Battleships_ an 'encounter with the power of
memory' (176). She examines the film in the historical
framework of the American Occupation and lauds it as a raw
re-writing of a history that resists occupation of the
soul. By turns pitch black satire (_The
Pornographers_), oddly romantic (_The Eel_), or earthy,
pantheistic and folk-derived (_Ballad of Narayama_ (1983),
Imamura's films do not lend themselves easily to
puzzle-piece analysis. In fact, under a simple critical
dissection, they become oddly fitted irrational parts. In
this manner, his films establish their own particular
authority and point to a relationship between conscious and
unconscious that is pantheistic and not easily understood
through the lens of Western psychology without knowledge of
Shinto animism and Buddhist views of nature which do not
include Biblical expulsion from paradise, and subsequent
break with nature or the Cartesian mind/body split.
Especially privy to the unconscious as a vast river of
knowledge and experience, Imamura has a fantastic ability to
incorporate animals as metaphors of human ambition and basic
drives. Imamura dives into the dark and shining river and
holds up fish, redoubtable and not, that glimmer with the
knowledge we must know about ourselves. Pigs flood the ship
in _Pigs and Battleships _ as materialist greed loosed, and
as Charles Tesson notes, animals copulate everywhere in
_Ballad of Narayama_. A sea creature who lives in the mud
and darkness is taken as a soulmate in _The Eel_. A woman
imagines her dead husband lives on in the goldfish she keeps
in the aquarium by her bed in _The Pornographers_. Her lover
can't stand it and smashes the aquarium killing the fish,
foreshadowing further betrayals that eventually unhinge the
woman. Allan Casebier addresses at length the
important value Imamura places on irrational aspects of
human nature. Defined as 'instinct, intuition, emotional
response and other capacities possessed by humans
independent of the ability to use language', Casebier
suggests Imamura uses images to mine the unfathomable in
human character and actions to portray qualities not only
uniquely Japanese but also of value to Westerners who
naively 'equate rationality with reality' (90). In _The Eel_, a man who killed his
wife after finding her inflagrante delicto with her lover,
is released from prison. Lost to the ordinary world of human
relations, he keeps a pet eel as his sole confidante. His
plans for a quiet life as a barber in a small town are
disrupted when he rescues a suicide who looks uncannily like
his dead wife. Shady and manipulative characters from her
past and his, troubles in tow, arrive for a final scene
bursting with the energy familiar to Imamura fans. As
characters demand money and turn the tables on one another,
the man and the woman start and stumble their way around,
toward love. The ending is tentative, shy, and uncertain as
love can be. Though _Dr Akagi_ (1999) is not
featured in this book, it too addresses the soul through
images as odd and effective as that employed in _The Eel_.
Like an effective illusion, such images are not composed of
simple appearances. The protagonist of the title races
around town diagnosing all his patients with hepatitis as if
he's found some omnipresent sickness of the soul. A Dutch
prisoner of war, tormented horribly by his Japanese captor,
destroys the soldier through what is required to extinguish
the fire in the Dutchman's fierce soul. By the time the
Japanese soldier's sword finally fells him, the prisoner's
forbearance and fearless courage have sent the soldier into
a rage that will be his undoing. In his Introduction to Knut Hamsun's
_Hunger_, Robert Bly describes the author's approach to the
demonic that serves Shohei Imamura as well. He observes
demonic aspects of human character without the hysteria
which entraps both Billy Graham and William Burroughs. He
watches a cruel impulse come forward but does not become
moralistic like the former or lick his lips like the latter.
Rather he looks at the impulse straight on like an old Zen
master. [1] The Imamurian woman is an ungovernable
female who follows her own impulses, eschewing Confucianist
ideals of duty and obligation except where it suits her.
Refusing to take the road to suicide when dishonored, or
assume the role of the cast-aside victim, his female
characters explode narrow conceptions of female roles long
seen in Japanese cinema: geisha; infinitely patient, long
suffering wife and mother; or tough girlfriend who
sacrifices herself for a gangster boyfriend. He not only
confronts expectations within Japanese culture but also
challenges Western assumptions about Japanese
life. Finally, Imamura pays affectionate
tribute to his mentor, the anarchic filmmaker Yuko
Kawashima, in two short essays, and criticizes his
'anti-mentor', Yasujiro Ozu, in one of the two interviews
featured. Compiled in one volume, these essays
make a vigorous discussion offering multiple viewpoints,
presenting conflicting interpretations, overlapping one
another, paying tribute, confronting popular misconceptions
about Imamura, and taking the filmmaker to task on how he
describes his own work. Written over time and independently of
each other, there are gaps. The resultant discontinuity
makes a stimulating feast of approaches and conclusions
albeit each a basket to be unbundled and mulled over to
digest fully. This book is chock-a-block with illuminating
insights into Imamara's exploration of the psyche unique to
the Japanese, especially: the fluid interplay between the
unconscious and the conscious; his respect for all his
characters however loutish; his portrayal of highly
determined, sexually robust lower class female characters;
and his criticism of material greed. Bringing together a
range of voices, including the filmmaker, around one table,
it is a banquet. New York City, USA Footnote 1. Knut Hamsun, _Hunger_, trans.
Robert Bly (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1967), p.
xv. Filmography _Stolen Desire_ (Nusumareta Yokujo),
1958. _Nishi Ginza Station_ (Nishi Ginza
Eki-Mae), 1958. _Endless Desire_ (Hateshi Naki
Yokubo), 1958. _My Second Brother_ (Nianchan),
1959. _Pigs and Battleships_ (Buta to
Gunkan), 1961. _The Insect Woman_ (Nippon Konchuki),
1963. _Intentions of Murder_ (Akai Satsui),
1964. _The Pornographers: Introduction to
Anthropology_ (Jinruigaku Nyumon), 1966. _A Man Vanishes_ (Ningen Johatsu),
1967. _The Profound Desire of the Gods_
(Kamigami No Fukaki Yokubo), 1968. _A History of Postwar Japan as Told by
a Bar Hostess _ (Nippon Sengo Shi: Madamu Omboro No
Seikatsu), 1970. _Karayuki-san: The Making of A
Prostitute_ (Karayuki-San), 1975. _Vengeance is Mine _ (Fukushu Suru Wa
Ware Ni Ari), 1979. _Eijanaika_, 1981. _Ballad of Narayama_ (Narayama-Bushi
Ko), 1983. _Zegen_, 1987. _Black Rain_ (Kuroi Ame),
1989. _The Eel_ (Unagi), 1997. _Dr Akagi_ (Kanzo Sensei),
1999. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Catherine Cullen, 'Carnival of the
Unconscious: On Shohei Imamura', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5
no. 16, May 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n16cullen>.
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Join the Film-Philosophy salon,
and receive the journal articles via email as they are published. here
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
