Word: narayama
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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...
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...
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...
...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...