Word: narayama
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...Japan's new wave, who told haunting, often surreal tales of prostitutes, pimps and working-class heroes; in Tokyo. Rejecting the idealized, selfless protagonists of classical Japanese film, he depicted resilient men and women who guard their dignity even amid brutal conditions. In 1983's The Ballad of Narayama, one of two Imamura films to win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, residents of a mythic 19th century village struggle with an edict requiring them to abandon their elders to die on a mountain. "I want to make messy, really human, unsettling films," he said...
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...
Considered one of Japan's best filmmakers, Imamura is chiefly known for "The Ballad of Narayama," which won the Palme d'Or award in 1983 and has since become a classic of contemporary cinema. The visit is intended to give scholars and film buffs a chance to become acquainted with both the films and their maker, said Petric...
...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...
...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...