Introduction to Japanese Film
Japanese cinema has a history spanning over 100 years, and the film industry in Japan is one of the largest and oldest globally. The purpose of this paper is to examine three Japanese films from the same director and discuss the trajectory that the career of that director followed. This is discussed by showing how the director worked in different genres. The three films are Endless Desire (1958), Vengeance is Mine (1979) and The Ballad of Narayama (1983) all directed by Shohei Imamura.
Endless Desire (1958) was set 10 years following Japan’s surrender and it satirizes a wild era fast economic growth when corporate cartels known as Keiretsu held sway and behind each great affluence was an equally greater transgression. Here, Shohei Imamura serves as a comic director albeit in a satirical manner in this movie whose genre is drama. As per Imamura’s style, he makes use of the slums of Shinmachi Shopping District – a domestic no-man’s land with the rich and the poor alike packed together as the backdrop for the story. The film begins with shot of rail tires speeding through the rocky terrain of postwar Japan.
Endless Desire is a darkly humorous heist movie. Imamura serves as a comic director in this film. The five greedy pigs in this movie are reduced to the level of sub-human animals as they claw and dig their way through mud, clay and dirt to achieve their intended aim, which is an oil drum filled with morphine (Hansen, 2000, p2). Even before the digging commences, the five crooks already exhibit animal-like traits, for instance Ryoji’s open-mouthed food chewing resembles that of a cow munching some cud, Onuma’s pig-like facial features, and Shima Hashimito who is the Machiavellian seductress moves like peacock as she attracts men with her swaying hips and flashy kimonos. Whereas the conservative crime movie would lucidly delineate between the innocent law-abiding citizens and criminals, Imamura who has a reputation for his shrewd observations of human behavior would never let such simplified generalizations (Hansen, 2000,1). As such, he lays some of his vindictive observations regarding humankind on the residents of the commercial slum, and casts them as greedy, lewd and beings that are not rational.
The overlying theme summing up the entire film is that man is no better than animals which also roam the planet; the only difference is that humans are just far more neurotic. Therefore, the inhabitants of the Shinmachi district, though separated from the modern and urban comforts of present-day Japan, are somewhat contented and exude a natural earthiness as they go about their everyday activities. Generally, the film explores the innate greed and savagery that people are capable of. Produced at a time when Japan was eventually withdrawing itself out of the financially desperate period of the occupation, Endless Desire illustrates how, in this era of prosperity, a vast majority of individuals turned into rapacious pigs who had the willingness to forfeit their humanity as they dug through the literal and moral searching for golden truffles. Imamura depicts this with a sense of humor as well as cosmic justice.
Shohei Imamura’s 1979 Vengeance Is Mine is themed around the attitude toward violence and the genre of crime. This title also appears in the King James Version, and could as well be read as the act of vengeance is I. This interpretation equates the protagonist Enokizu Iwao’s very being with violence. The violence as depicted in this movie is an extreme challenge to the norms of social behavior – an effort in arresting the progression of social time so as to secure values which are timeless and genuine. In the movie, the director changes individual acts of violence into sacred wrongdoings by giving them both a mythical and ideological significance that is born out of a concern with attaining real and genuine culture (Steel, 2003,p1). This aesthetic and artistic depiction of violence as an expression of desire rebuffs the modern culture and inscribes its desires and goals – it acts as a critique of modern culture yet it is profoundly implicated in it (Washburn, 1979, 319). Close to the end of the film, Enokizu Iwao who is the convicted serial killer is visited by his father in prison. As expected in such a situation, the meeting is very tense. The film’s narrative momentum, with its overt depiction of Iwao’s offenses, has created an expectation of violence. With this expectation comes a feeling of suspense and dread which is further intensified by the primal psychological confrontation between the son and his father. This chilling confrontation provides both an intellectual and emotional culmination to a very charged movie.
The desire of Iwao, his longing for an ideal autonomy, is conveyed as bitterness against the desires of others and the inexorable passing of human time, he resents both being unable to control. Iwao’s antisocial rebellion and his desire for freedom is a demonstration of a mythic notion of the subject which acts as the foundation for the director’s critique of postwar Japanese society (Washburn, 1979, 322). In the film, Iwao is scapegoated effectively insofar as his own impulses to violence, which on one level happen to be reactions to the violence and hypocrisy of his culture/society, are turned back on him by that same society which is condemning him to death because of the several murders he has committed. Eventually, not being able to act on his deep desire to avenge himself on the ontological ground of his identity, Iwao is left only with the empty language of violence.
Vengeance Is Mine is highly graphic graphic, which has the unsettling effect of making the movie both difficult and compelling to watch. Iwao’s transgressions are particularly disturbing because they are depicted in a way that strips them some kind of overt and clear stylization. The order of events in the film presents the first two killings to the viewer early on with slight explanation, before the viewer has the time to understand the motives of Iwao, forcing the viewer to confront usually invisible assumptions regarding the aesthetics and nature of violence. The shock to see realistic violence interrupts expectations of both ethical and representational norms. Imamura, by presenting to the viewer violence which at first appears to be without motive or meaning, brings the viewer squarely into a serial killer’s worldview. This disruption of expectations though unpleasant, is in a strange way vital to the aesthetic appeal of the film. Compared to his earlier films such as Endless Desire (1958), the formal structure in the film Vengeance Is Mine (1979) is noteworthy and points to a new trajectory taken by the director. Moreover, the disruptive erasure of the boundary between the techniques of fiction and documentary is something that the director did not explore in his earlier film Endless Desire. The director has also taken the trajectory of employing flashback as a key narrative element, something that is missing in his previous movie, the Endless Desire. Nonetheless, the director maintains the tendency toward myth-making just like in his earlier film.
The third movie is The Ballad of Narayama which was shot and released in 1983, also directed by Shohei Imamura. This film lucidly portrays the author working in a different genre as a horror director given its graphic nature when expressing death and scenes of death. The theme of this sensuous and haunting film is death and what death means (Schumann, 2002, p3). Generally, the movie is about a culture which has evolved to deal with the scarcity of food. Food is difficult to obtain and keep and as such, the very young and the very old have to leave. Due to its graphic nature, this film might be difficult for some people to watch. It shows the viewer a far-flung Japanese village in the late 19th century where poverty is so persistent and immediate that the culture of the village entails the sale of baby girls and killing of excess male babies. Since rice crop in the village is scanty and starvation remains a persistent threat, according to the custom of the village, the elderly or adults who reach 70 years of age are carried to Mt. Narayama in order to die of hunger and cold (Rao, 2008, p1). Group survival relies on it and in this village, death is accepted as a fact of life. Matters of sex, death and birth are all dealt with graphically, and the movie serves as a reminder of how close in time people are to the desperate hard scrabble life of the peasants not just in Japan, but in Europe and North America as well. In one highly graphic scene, villagers gather to punish a family which had stolen potatoes – each individual of the offending family is thrown into a large pit then covered with earth.
The film director cuts back and forth between the everyday lives of the people in the village to the nature around them. The life and death of the snakes, rats, insects are all depicted as part of a continuum of the reality of that place and time. The director lucidly draws direct parallel between basic drives and instincts including envy, anger, greed, hunger and lust of people and other animals. In this film, the director has focused on the trajectory of struggle for survival and prospering in the unsympathetic and callous environment of 19th century Japan. In exploring this topic, Imamura takes the viewer into a study of survival by means of strict rules and prospering through sexual relationships. In this motion picture, sexual intercourse scenes depict that even in sexual situations; the people of Japan have never considered nature and animals as separate from themselves.
Conclusion
Shohei Imamura is reputed to being a sardonic and sharp critic of postwar Japanese culture and society (Rao, 2008, 118). His attempts to expose by means of art – and film in particular – the effects of political corruption and social inequality display a considerate interest in people who live on the edges of mainstream culture. Moreover, it also shows the trajectory that his career followed from the three films Endless Desire (1958), Vengeance is Mine (1979) and The Ballad of Narayama (1983). He maintained the trajectory/course of using art to depict political corruption, poverty, social inequality and other social ills in Japanese culture and society. The director has lucidly employed dissimilar themes and genres in the three films. In the Endless Desire (1958), he is a comic director although in a satirical manner in this movie with a drama genre. He exemplifies how, in an era of prosperity, most people turned into rapacious pigs who had the willingness to sacrifice their humanity as they dug through the literal and moral searching for golden truffles. He clearly depicts this with a sense of humor and cosmic justice. In Vengeance is Mine (1979), the director themed the film on the attitude toward violence and its genre is crime. He took the trajectory of employing flashback as a key narrative element, something that misses in the earlier film Endless Desire. The third motion picture, The Ballad of Narayama (1983) clearly portrays the director working in a dissimilar genre as a horror director given the graphic nature of this movie particularly when expressing death and scenes of death. Imamura centered the theme of this third film on death and what death means.
Works Cited
Hansen, Alex. Endless Desire. Letterboxd. Auckland. 2000. Ligaya Recordings. Available at https://secure.imdb.com/signup/index.html?d=tt_details_contact
Rao, Lalit. 2008. Paris. The Ballad of Narayama. . 2008. Available on http://www.tudou.com/albumtop/person/m96786-c0-p1.html
Schumann, Howard. The Ballad of Narayama. 2002. Available on http://www.tudou.com/albumtop/person/m96786-c0-p1.html
Steel, Dick. Vengeance Is Mine. Singapore. 2003. Available on http://www.tudou.com/albumtop/person/m96786-c0-p1.html
Washburn, Dennis. The Arrest of Time: The Mythic Transgressions of Vengeance Is Mine. 1979. Columbia University Press, 978-0231138925
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