Word: imamura
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Shohei Imamura, director of "The Ballad of Narayama" and other award-winning films, arrived at Harvard on Tuesday for a 15-day visit under the auspices of the film institute, in cooperation with the Japan Foundation of New York and Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese studies...
...Imamura screened his 1987 film, "Zegen" last night, and it will be shown again tonight and Saturday. The film depicts the life of a Japanese man who sells prostitutes to brothels in Southeast Asia. It stars Ken Ogata, the key actor in several Imamura films. "Zegen" deals with the issues of patriotism, imperialism and particularly feminism, said Vladimir K. Petric, director of the Harvard Film Archives...
Things may be changing. The Japanese cinema has not been so lucky as Chrysler in 1983, but there are small stirrings of renaissance. In May, for only the second time since 1954, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto...
...Imamura and Oshima films are neither flukes nor mutants," says Tadao Sato, a respected Japanese film critic, of their success. "They are part of a new tendency among Japanese directors to visualize the 'irrational' elements of the Eastern world through Western-style intelligence. Once, when a Westerner looked at Japanese movies-at Kurosawa's kamikaze-type warriors in The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, or Ozu's gentle heroines in Tokyo Story and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, or Mizoguchi's evocations of Kabuki drama in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff-he, could tell...
...West, Japan is now that more familiar quantity, a friend and competitor. And yet the most ambitious of current Japanese films continue to plumb the nation's unique otherness: the traditions of rigorous personal discipline, honor and revenge. As Imamura, the international prizewinner, notes, "I refused to accompany Narayama to Cannes this year, because I thought the film would be misunderstood there. When the people at Toei approached me about submitting it to the festival, I told them to wait 50 years or so. By then we will be understood. And we'll be winning the prize every...