Tuesday, May 30, 2006

R.I.P. Shohei Imamura

Legendary Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura, who started as an assistant for Yasujiro Ozu before going on to a 40 year career as a director, has died today at 79. He had liver cancer.

Imamura's most famous film is probably 1989's Black Rain, a much-lauded film about the bombing of Hiroshima that I'm ashamed to say I have not seen. (Mainly because I have negative associations with the title Black Rain, stemming from an unrelated American film with Michael Douglas.)

In fact, I'm not actually familiar with much of Imamura's work at all. I've seen 1966's classic The Pornographers, which is available on a terrific Criterion DVD. It's a very dark, troubling comedy about a middle-aged impotent porno director. These kinds of sour portraits of self-centered nihilists were Imamura's stock-in-trade apparently. It's a rare filmmaker who can combine bleak and funny.

The only other Imamura film I've seen is his relatively recent The Eel, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1999. This one starts out a sparse and patient character study about a recently-released convict, and then shifts into screwball comedy in the final half-hour. I didn't find the technique wholly successful, but that might have been due to some disorientation. My review for the film represents Classic Crushed by Inertia, when I would still blather endlessly about my day and the circumstances behind my watching the film for no good reason at the top of the review. Why would anyone care about that crap? What was I thinking?

Anyway, just wanted to acknowledge the passing of a great director. Nothing much else to say here.

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