Shôhei Imamura once said, “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure,” and this intertwining of poverty and sexuality is profoundly felt in every frame of his 1983 Palme d’Or-winning The Ballad of Narayama. Recurring shots of animals and insects mating speak to the unbridled sexual impulses that run rampant in the small but ferociously determined community that lives perched atop a remote mountain. Sex in Imamura’s film has less to do with love, pleasure, or even procreation than with merely fulfilling a primal need that offers only fleeting relief from a brutally unforgiving existence. Like everything else that the members of this community do, the men fuck like they’re lives literally depend on it, helping themselves to any woman they want, and in the case of the notoriously smelly Risuke (Tonpei Hidari), to the neighbor’s dog as well.
The sexual depravity and violence depicted throughout The Ballad of Narayama isn’t merely for its own sake, as such acts are connected to the village’s own struggles to survive in a verdant but savage landscape that’s severely short on resources. Close-ups of a snake devouring a mouse and a majestic shot of a hawk diving down to grab a wounded animal are mirrored in scenes where a baby is found drowned in icy water or when the virginal Risuke ravages an elderly woman (Nijiko Kiyokawa) who offers herself in order to convince him to stop boycotting his fieldwork. The behavior of man and animal is blurred beyond recognition.
Imamura’s film sticks close to the narrative of both Shichirō Fukazawa’s 1956 source novel and Keinosuke Kinoshita’s 1958 film adaptation, including the specifics of the village’s ancient practices, from first-born sons being the only ones allowed to marry and everyone needing to hike up to the top of the mountain to die alone once they turn 70. But where the earlier film’s style bears the influence of Kabuki theater, this version deconstructs the story’s mythological elements by realistically highlighting the barbarity of the villagers’ existence through an unsettlingly naturalistic, documentary-like visual aesthetic. Kinoshita supposedly didn’t care for Imamura’s version of the film, dismissing it as “pornographic.” And perhaps it is pornographic to some degree, but only in the sense that it seeks to reflect what it sees as fundamentally obscene behavior in a society governed by bizarre, archaic laws. And the result is a powerful portrait of the animalistic impulses that lurk within us all, waiting to be released with a furor in a world where sex, labor, and death are the only absolutes.
If male sexuality in The Ballad of Narayama is regarded as purely instinctual, without any trace of morality, Imamura’s next film, 1987’s Zegen, sees sex as a direct extension of Japanese imperialism. In this loose retelling of the exploits of Iheiji Muraoka, who, in the decades leading up to World War II, opened brothels all across the South Seas, Imamura returns to his pet subject of sex work, using the power and greed of the film’s ruthless pimp protagonist (Ken Ogata) to comically mirror the expansion of the Empire of Japan. Its fierce condemnation of unchecked nationalism, here spreading almost like a contagion, is reminiscent of Nagisa Oshima’s work, but as it pushes the limits of its absurdist premise—as in a hilarious sequence of an elder Iheiji repeatedly fucking one of his sex workers (Shino Ikenami) to produce offspring for the empire, all while he stares reverently at a picture of the emperor—Zegen ultimately morphs into something more akin to pinku farce.
That Imamura’s most unrestrained, ribald film was largely dismissed by critics and audiences alike is no great surprise, but his turn toward more straight-laced, prestigious material with 1989’s Black Rain is one of the more unexpected left turns in his oeuvre. The film, which hews relatively close to Masuji Ibuse’s famed 1965 novel of the same name, recalls the anti-war humanism of such filmmakers as Masaki Kobayashi (The Human Condition) than the irreverent works of the Japanese New Wave that Imamura is typically associated with. But while Imamura expresses a deep reverence and compassion for the atomic bomb survivors depicted in the film, he neither wrings their stories for cheap sentiment nor ignores the hardships they faced afterwards at the hands of their fellow compatriots, who often saw them as pariahs who had to be supported by others who worked themselves to the bone.
The suffering endured by these survivors of war is harrowing (the sequences set during and immediately after the atomic blast are appropriately bleak), and heightened by Toru Takemitsu’s haunting, atonal score. But it’s Imamura’s ability to delicately balance the epic scope of the initial bombing with the intimate family drama—set five years after the blast—revolving around a married couple (Etsuko Ichihara and Kazuo Kitamura) trying to marry off their niece, Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka), that lends an emotional richness to the film’s portrait of a small, rural community still clinging to pre-war norms and mores even as they fight to survive in the shattered remains of a devastated country.
The film’s vision of a poor community splintered by in-fighting and struggling daily with the hardships of an unforgiving environment is quite similar to that of The Ballad of Narayama. Here, though, the hazards are almost entirely manmade, be it the atomic bomb or the often callous and self-serving actions of people toward its surviving victims. Like the other two films in Arrow Video’s Survival Ballads set, Black Rain, while certainly the most sympathetic toward its characters, is an excoriating interrogation of Japanese history, capturing both the resiliency and barbarity of mankind, and seeing the two as inherently inextricable.
Image/Sound
Arrow’s remarkable box set includes 2K restorations of all three films, each of which is making their North American debut on Blu-ray, and these transfers are spectacular. The image definition is consistently sharp and offers a high amount of detail throughout the frame and a healthy, even distribution of grain. The Ballad of Narayama transfer looks especially stunning, blowing the murky image quality and dull colors of the 2009 AnimEigo DVD out of the water. Given the crucial role that nature plays in the film, the greens of the trees and plants feel particularly eye-popping, while the numerous close-ups of insects and animals are as vivid as shots found in nature docs shot decades later. The reds in Zegen are rich and fiery, and as on the transfer for The Ballad of Narayama, skin tones are very naturalistic and the dynamic range of colors is quite impressive. Black Rain, the only of the three films shot in black and white, boasts strong black levels and a high contrast ratio. The lossless audio tracks on these films are also quite good, boasting well-balanced mixes that highlight the strengths of the complex sound designs, from the background chatter and natural sounds in The Ballad of Narayama to the sound effects in the atomic bomb scenes in Black Rain.
Extras
Japanese cinema expert Jasper Sharp hosts the audio commentaries included on each film and does a wonderful job of contextualizing Shôhei Imamura’s work within the Japanese New Wave and tracing his rise to popularity in the West during the 1980s. In his discussion of The Ballad of Narayama, he covers Imamura’s focus on milieu over plot mechanics and his symbolic treatment of nature and animals. Sharp also briefly touches on Keinosuke Kinoshita’s 1958 film adaptation before delving into the similarities and differences between Imamura’s version and the 1956 novel by Shichirō Fukazawa. Sharp’s thoughts on Zegen are a tad less compelling, but he makes welcome room for discussion of Imamura’s little-known documentary works made between Profound Desire of the Gods in 1968 and the director’s return to fiction in 1979 with Vengeance Is Mine, while his discussion of Black Rain does a fantastic job contextualizing the history of Japan in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Each disc also comes with “in-depth appreciations” by film critic and filmmaker Tony Rayns, and given how well versed he is in Asian cinema, the high quality of these conversations is no surprise, especially his breakdown of the aesthetic differences between the two film adaptations of The Ballad of Narayama. Rayns also goes on to offer fascinating insights into Imamura’s long-running interest in the intersection between the lower class and human sexuality, a strand that runs quite clearly from The Ballad of Narayama into Zegen, a film that probably contains more sex than any non-pinku Japanese film ever made.
The Black Rain disc includes two brief archival conversations with Yoshioka Tanaka and Takashi Miike, who describe the challenges of the brutal 100-day film shoot and their thoughts on the original color ending that Imamura cut from the film. The set is rounded out by a beautiful, glossy 60-page booklet that includes numerous stills from each film and a lengthy essay by Japanese film scholar Tom Mes, who writes of the huge importance that director Yûzô Kawashima had on Imamura as his mentor, as well as the resounding influence Imamura had on the next generation of Japanese filmmakers.
Overall
Arrow Video’s handsomely packaged box set offers stunning new HD transfers of three Shôhei Imamura classics and a generous heaping of incisive extras.
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