The Shôhei Imamura Masterpiece Collection - The Masters Of... [DVD]

This is an outstanding box set collection of 8 Imamura Shōhei films. Well up to Masters of Cinema’s high production standards, all films except for A Man Vanishes are presented on BD as well as DVD in 6 slim double-pack ‘Blu-ray’ sized boxes held together in a very sturdy cardboard case. The DVD of A Man Vanishes is coupled with a CD-rom which contains extensive documentation from the original booklets on all the films. There are also copious extras on the discs themselves including an outstanding commentary track (I have never heard Tony Rayns sound so excited!) on Vengeance is Mine. The transfer quality of all films is superlative on DVD. Not having a Blu-ray player I can’t comment on the BD discs, but from this source I imagine the quality also to be top-notch. I was going to add, “Best buy this set while it’s cheap,” but I have been slow to write and in the interim I see the price has shot up indicating MoC’s distribution license has already expired. It is unlikely we will have these films available again on DVD (with the possible exceptions of the famous Vengeance is Mine and The Ballad of Narayama), so my advice is to hunt around and try to pick the box up before it disappears forever. If the films appear for streaming on the net the quality won’t be the same and you will be denied the quite superb documentation that accompanies these discs.For most people in the western world Japanese cinema = Kurosawa Akira. Some might also know Ozu Yasujirō and Mizoguchi Kenji, but only a few will be familiar with the generation coming after Kurosawa and before Kitano Takeshi. In the period stretching from the late 60s through to the 90s Imamura Shōhei was Japan’s greatest director. The only Japanese director to have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes twice (for The Ballad of Narayama [1983] and The Eel [Unagi, 1998]), for most of his career his work was unseen outside Japan and when he was honored at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1994 he professed astonishment that non-Japanese people could appreciate his films. Any accusations of obscurity are unjustified really as his work communicates readily to those with open minds and a willingness to explore the possibilities of what film can do.Knowing some biographical information guides us to an appreciation. First and foremost, Imamura was a rebel. He was born into a well-off upper middle class doctor’s family and was sent to a posh high school but rebelled against his peers. He studied Western history at Waseda (one of Japan’s top universities) but he spent his time dabbling in postwar student radicalism and left-wing theater. Like his contemporary fellow director Ōshima Nagisa he was against the furthering of the Imperial system and the presence of the US in Japan, but never joined the communist party. Unlike Ōshima however, Imamura during the American occupation got involved in black marketeering selling cigarettes and alcohol and made himself at home in the world of pimps, whores and petty gangsters. Where Ōshima’s films stay somewhat pretentiously above the riff-raff he purports to represent, Imamura’s films focus obsessively on social outcasts, people living on the fringes of society, people who struggle against the odds, and because he lived with and knew such people at first hand, his work is endorsed with honesty and truth.Imamura cited Kurosawa as a major influence (especially Drunken Angel [1948] and Rashōmon [1950]) and he esteemed Ozu, but typical of him his ‘respect’ was shown not in an aping of their style, but in rebellion and a determination to go in the totally opposite direction. We see Kurosawa’s influence most obviously in his first major feature Pigs and Battleships (1961) where a ‘tubercular’ gangster riffs off the Mifune Toshirō character in Drunken Angel. Imamura was proud at the time to have made a film in the Kurosawa style, but on being told everyone was still waiting for ‘the first Imamura picture’ he decided to go his own way. Similarly, Imamura had assisted Ozu on three films at Shochiku (Early Summer [1951], The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice [1952] and Tokyo Story [1953]), but despite admiring him he found the Ozu aesthetic to be the antithesis of everything that he later came to value in filmmaking. By going in the opposite direction of Ozu in particular he hammered out his own unique style. We can understand this by doing a simple compare and contrast.Ozu was a right wing conservative company ‘sarariman’ who spent his whole career at Shochiku churning out successful films under budget and always on time. Imamura was a left-wing loose cannon who hopped over to Nikkatsu to eventually make Pigs and Battleships which spiraled over-budget and over-schedule much to the studio’s annoyance, then founded his own production company which went bust because Profound Desires of the Gods (1968) also went over-budget and took 18 months (instead of the agreed 6) to make. He spent the whole of the 70s making small scale TV documentaries while living off his wife’s salary and only bounced back into public attention with the very popular critically acclaimed Vengeance is Mine (1979) and The Ballad of Narayama. Like Ozu, he may have taken the usual employee entrance exam to enter the film business, but a company sarariman Imamura certainly was not.Ozu made shōmingeki films about everyday family home life in which violence, sex and dynamic action of any kind is played down. Whether in his pre-war working class films or his post-war middle class works, the emphasis is always on the fundamental goodness of people with elegant melodrama etched in poignant and restrained tones. Imamura on the other hand made radical films about life’s outcasts, especially criminals (Pigs and Battleships, Vengeance is Mine), misfits (A Man Vanishes, The Profound Desires of the Gods), settlers in remote communities (Profound Desires, The Ballad of Narayama) and women struggling against unjust patriarchy. The Insect Woman and his documentaries on prostitutes and the comfort women who refused to come home from South-East Asia after the war are notable for their feminist outlook, continuing what Mizoguchi had begun in terms of theme if not in style. Rather than focusing on comfortable middle class home-life as Ozu did Imamura focused on life’s forgotten while developing his own brand of anthropological cinema which examined the roots of Japanese society in basic terms comparing ancient myth with present day reality and humans with animals. Nelson Kim sums up Imamura’s themes as: “Civilization versus savagery; science versus superstition; humans as animals; capitalism, paganism, and incest.” Frank sexuality is an ever-present theme and Imamura is famously quoted as saying: “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of daily Japanese life obstinately supports itself.”Ozu’s films were scripted down to the very last detail with actors ordered to move, speak and emote in very precise terms which in total add up to the very tight visually austere aesthetic which is unique to him. The camera would always be low especially in tatami interior shots and great emphasis is made on what lies outside the shot with a tremendous sense of off-camera space. Characters almost never move into or out of frame. They are almost always in the frame from beginning to end, centrally composed and perfectly proportioned. This aesthetic amounted to control-freak straight-jacketing for Imamura whose films are the exact opposite. He said: “I show true things using fictional techniques but maintaining truthfulness – that’s where my approach differs from Ozu. He wanted to make a film more aesthetic. I want to make it more real.” There are few rules on an Imamura film where actors are encouraged to do their own thing and compositions are haphazard, shots sometimes short, sometimes long with no attention paid to structural perfections. Imamura liked his films “messy” because he felt that was actually closer to how real life is as experienced by most people – I have a preference for shooting true things. If my films are messy, it is probably due to the fact that I don’t like too perfect a cinema. The audience must not admire the technical aspects of my filmmaking, like they would a computer or the law of physics.”This splendid “messiness” is announced in part in Pigs and Battleships and wholly in the wonderfully earthy The Insect Woman. Messiest of all is A Man Vanishes where the boundaries between reality and film are hopelessly blurred in a way which anticipates the world of Abbas Kiarostami. Just keeping to the films in this box, Stolen Desire and Nishi-Ginza Station (both 1958) are Imamura’s first two films, studio hackwork for Nikkatsu which embarrassed him for years after. The Profound Desires of the Gods and The Ballad of Narayama make an anthropological pair which compare Japan’s ancient past with the present day. The dark Vengeance is Mine is a serial killer film which looks at the effects of Christianity on Japan as well as being one of cinema’s most intelligent probes into the nature of human evil – The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en it certainly is not. I would describe The Insect Woman, Vengeance is Mine and The Ballad of Narayama as masterpieces pure and simple. Profound Desires is excellent but falls fractionally short of these three. A Man Vanishes is an intriguing exercise in a certain self-reflexive style of cinema which is profound and irritating in equally measure (some might find it just profoundly irritating!) while Pigs and Battleships is an entertaining tale of small time gangsters during the American occupation which has dated somewhat, but is (along with Stolen Desires) still well worth watching for depicting Imamura’s origins. They are certainly his most autobiographic films. The best thing about the feeble laughless comedy Nishi-Ginza Station is that it only lasts 58 minutes. On balance then this is an excellent not to be missed box for anyone interested in what happened to Japanese cinema after Kurosawa. Imamura isn’t the whole story of course – I hope one day we will also have box sets devoted to Ichikawa Kon, Suzuki Seijun, Shindō Makoto, Kobayashi Masaki and Ōshima Nagisa.I will review each film individually on their relevant page. For now I leave the basic details of each box within the set.Box 1:STOLEN DESIRE (Nusumareta Yokujō) ***(1958, Japan, 107 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 2.35:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)PIGS & BATTLESHIPS (Buta to Gunkan) ****(1961, Japan, 108 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 2.35:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)Box 2:NISHI-GINZA STATION (Nishi-Ginza Ekimae) **(1958, Japan, 58 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 2.35:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)THE INSECT WOMAN (Nippon-Konchūki) *****(1963, Japan, 123 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 2.35:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)EXTRA: Video conversation between Imamura and Satō TadaoBox 3:A MAN VANISHES (Ningen Jōhatsu) ****(1967, Japan, 130 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 1.37:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)EXTRA: Introduction by Tony Rayns (18 min), Interview with Imamura by his son Daisuke Tengan (9 min)CD-rom containing original MoC booklets for all films:File # 1 Pigs and Battleships/Stolen Desire (articles on both films by Tony Rayns)File # 2 Nishi-Ginza Station/The Insect Woman (articles on both films by Tony Rayns)File # 3 A Man Vanishes (Imamura Shōhei on Ningen Jōhatsu / My Part in the Editing Process by Urayama Kirirō / Reportage on Jōhatsu / On Ningen Jōhatsu by Ōshima Nagisa)File # 4 Profound Desires of the Gods (Gods, Humans, and Profound Desires by Tony Rayns / Traditions and Influences by Imamura Shōhei / My Approach to Filmmaking by Imamura Shōhei / Imamura Shōhei at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1994)File # 5 Vengeance is Mine (To and From Fiction: An interview with Imamura Shōhei by Nakata Tōichi)File # 6 The Ballad of Narayama (Director’s statement by Imamura Shōhei / Interview with Imamura Shōhei by Max Tessier / “It’s Hard Making the Pilgrimage to the Mountain”: Production Diary by Tomoda Jirō / The Legend of Obasuteyama by anon.)Box 4:PROFOUND DESIRES OF THE GODS (Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubō) *****(1968, Japan, 173 min, color, aspect ratio: 2.35:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)EXTRAS: Video introduction by Tony Rayns / Japanese theatrical trailerBox 5:VENGEANCE IS MINE (Fukushū suru wa ware ni ari) *****(1979, Japan, 140 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.85:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)EXTRAS: Video introduction by Alex Cox / Commentary by Tony Rayns / Japanese theatrical trailerBox 6:THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (Narayama Bushikō) *****(1983, Japan, 130 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.85:1, Japanese language, optional English subtitles)EXTRAS: Video introduction by Tony Rayns / 4 Japanese trailers incl. behind the scenes material

If you are looking for a high quality set of Imamura's films, then this is by far the best one out there.Each film comes in it's on case [around the width of an american Blu-Ray case] and contains the Blu-Ray and the DVD. It comes in a thick box, which is very sturdy unlike many cheap flimsy cases. Also, the booklets with the original releases are still in the set, however they are contained as PDF files on a CD within the set.It's been stated that it will go out of print soon so get it while you can.

This is a great opportunity to get all the masterpieces of Shohei Imamura in one box. I immediately bought it after release even though I already owned one of the movies, "The Insect Woman".I expected that the box would just bundle the separate releases, but it turned out that there are differences. The blu-ray cases are much thinner, the high quality 30-page booklets are missing (you get them as pdf files on one of the discs) and the discs are not printed in the same way. If the these features are important to you, you should consider buying the single releases.

Excellent box-set offering some great films from one of Japan's most overlooked directors, Shohei Imamura.The box-set ranges from his first two films through too his later classics and is an excellent starting point for anybody looking to get into his work.

Outstanding collection!