| Summary: | 博士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所比較文學博士班 === 99 === For many film critics, Imamura Shohei is one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers emerging from the Japanese New Wave Cinema around the 1960s. Unlike Oshima Nagisa and other political filmmakers from the same generation, rather than dedicating himself to more theoretical issues, he assumes an unpretentious tone to embrace a vital and vigorous world. As for Western critics, his significance can be seen as one of the only four directors in the world to win the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival twice, with his Ballad of Narayama (1983) and The Eel (1997) respectively.
Imamura seeks to recover the essence of “Japaneseness” through his works and believes Japanese mind is rooted in lower classes. Nevertheless, his discoveries have exposed the underside of Japan, the antithesis of official conventions and Confucianist families in traditional Japanese cinema. He says he wants to make “messy, really human, Japanese, unsettling films.” Accordingly, his body of work reveals a unique interest in ribald, greedy, lustful, deceitful, vicious, vulgar, indomitable yet always strong, vivacious and touching characters. He celebrates everything excluded from refined official world: the irrational, the vulgar, the primitive, the intuitional, the instinctual, the spontaneous, the carnal, and the superstitious life of Japan’s underclass; and he adores people who are not given due social status, such as peasants, prostitutes, pimps, shamans, pornographers, burglars, gangsters, black marketers, criminals, and whatever outcasts or proletarians or loners or misfits.
Imamura is devoted to the concern of “the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure,” a metaphor that can serve as a paradigmatic guide through his films. Therefore, sex and low life can be claimed to be the most important concepts in all his works. The way Imamura looks at his characters is with stringent insights, but never without a certain admiration for them. He worships tenacious working classes of Japan because they retain the wholeness, undefiled by modernization, civilization and hypocrisy. And he takes an anthropological or entomological point of view to delve into daily life of Japanese underworld, where animals, nature and humans are closely interconnected, and this reflects the same essence of primitive human nature.
In this dissertation, Imamura’s eight early films (1958-1966) and Ballad of Narayama are opted for textual analysis. The reason for this selection is that there have been limited scholarship in Chinese language on Imamura’s early works, but in fact those films have elaborated the themes, aesthetics and styles which persist in all his following works. For that matter, a study of Imamura’s early films can contribute greatly to academic results regarding this filmmaker and possibly draw out generic features of his auteurism. Except for these eight films, this research also analyzes Imamura’s milestone work in his film career, Ballad of Narayama. This masterpiece can be specified as his most informative work on the theme of primitive human nature, consequently reinforcing the elements of instinctive desires and lower classes.
Japanese cinema has been distinct in film history with its nativism and nonconformity since its early development. This dissertation also investigates a variety of critical issues which Japanese cinema encounters in diverse aspects such as history, society, tradition, culture, esthetics, ideology and national identity. Moreover, referring to both Eastern and Western methodologies, and citing from different critics’ dissimilar critiques, along with the classification and comparison of Eastern and Western theses on Japanese cinema in Chapter 2, this study can be affirmed as an interdisciplinary research on the basis of the comparative literature perspective with the goal to enlighten more appropriate reading of Japanese cinema without bias or dichotomy based on Orientalism.
Finally, through the textual analysis of Imamura’s works, this dissertation has established the filmmaker’s authorship, and argues that Imamura can be suggested “the very Japanese of Japanese directors,” for he has found his locus in a closeness to a life deep-rooted in the “real” Japan.
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