Word: imamura
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...Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama and Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence are both expected to earn their distributors about $4 million. So is The Makioka Sisters, directed by Kon Ichikawa from Junichiro Tanizaki's novel about an upper-class family just before World War II. Masaki Kobayashi's Tokyo Saiban, a grueling, 41/2-hour documentary of the Tokyo war-crimes trials, is a surprise success that should earn rental fees of $ 1.6 million...
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...
...Development held last February in Paris. The award reflected a retreat to the ordinary concerns of cinema. Last year's Palme d'Or winners, Missing from the U.S. and Yol from Turkey, played like news bulletins from Third World battlegrounds. This year's winner, Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, is a harshly elemental lyric about Japanese mountain folk that could have been made any time in the past three decades. Two survivors of the international film wars won special consolations, Grand Prize for Cinema Creation: France's Robert Bresson for L 'Argent...
...send the famed message: SEND US MORE JAPS. The message was idly tapped out by an unknown signalman. Nor did the U.S.S. Houston sink four Japanese transports off Java's Bantam Bay. They were actually torpedoed in error by the Japanese cruiser Mikuma, Toland reveals. General Imamura assumed that the Houston was responsible, and his chief of staff was too embarrassed to contradict...