Shohei Imamura's Japan

Think of Japanese cinema and one of two things probably comes to mind: either the robust, action-filled, western-influenced samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa, or the more refined, restrained and elegant films of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Mikio Naruse.

Shohei Imamura, one of the primary filmmakers of Japan’s New Wave, falls into neither category. His work focuses instead on the dregs of modern Japanese society. Pacific Film Archive is hosting a retrospective of the iconoclastic director’s work through June 30.

The New Wave refers to the generation of filmmakers that rose up through that country’s studio system in the years following World War II. Unlike the directors of the French New Wave—outsiders who began as critics and then set out to re-define their nation’s film culture—the directors of Japan’s New Wave were trained, cultivated and encouraged by the industry they would later challenge.

Imamura began his career as an assistant to Ozu and quickly came to the conclusion that, though Ozu was undoubtedly a great director, his restrained style was not for Imamura. When he finally got his hands on his own crew and camera, he veered in the opposite direction, renouncing the refinement and formal beauty of Ozu’s work and opting instead for a cinema of cruelty, perversion and dark humor.

Imamura thought of himself first as an anthropologist. His goal was to document the world as he saw it, not to shape, explain or judge it. And in fact, after making such classics as Pigs and Battleships (1961) and The Pornographers (1966), the director turned to documentary filmmaking in the 1970s.

As he explains in an interview included in the Criterion Collection’s new DVD edition of Vengeance is Mine, Imamura became somewhat disenchanted with actors while making The Profound Desire of the Gods in 1968 and afterwards sought other means of expression. For the next decade, he made nothing but documentaries, until returning to narrative, commercial filmmaking in 1979 with Vengeance is Mine, in which he fashioned a sort of reality-fiction hybrid.

The film, showing Tuesday, May 29, is based on the exploits of a real-life killer who roamed Japan for a few months in 1963. Ken Ogata plays the role of Iwao Enokizu with a steely impulsiveness, the very personification of id. He seeks only the immediate satisfaction of his desires, regardless of the human cost.

Imamura makes no effort to explain this man’s actions; he presents them as a simple fact of Japanese life in the post-war era. We learn much of Enokizu’s youth, his upbringing and his relationships, and though these details certainly help us get to know the character, there is still no clear motive given for his crimes. As critic Michael Atkinson puts it in the DVD’s liner notes, “Vengeance Is Mine … wastes no breath on compassion, no calories on decorousness, and no time on explanations.” Atkinson places Imamura among what he calls the “Sardonic Objectivists,” directors such as Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel and Douglas Sirk, who tried to shed light on humanity’s dark side. Imamura, Atkinson says, was “a Japanese Samuel Fuller, fascinated with working-class ruin and primal impulse.”

In the opening scenes of Vengeance is Mine, Imamura gives us the impression that the worst is over. The killer has been arrested and is being transported to prison. But soon we are subjected to flashbacks of Enokizu’s first two killings, graphic scenes which contain none of the usual screeching violins or tawdry effects of many a serial killer film, but are instead shot at arm’s length and with no adornment. Imamura sought no attention for his camerawork or framing; he wanted his technique to remain invisible. Thus, in simple documentary terms, we see murder not as a melodramatic plot point but as an almost mundane occurrence: grisly, clumsy and primitive.

There are no pure innocents in Imamura’s films. The killer's wife is somewhat deranged and manipulative herself. This is one of the themes that runs through much of Imamura’s work: women clawing their way through the morass of Japanese society, resorting to the baser instincts in the struggle to survive. These are not the long-suffering women of quiet dignity as found in classical Japanese cinema—“Those women don’t exist,” Imamura once said—they are bold, lusty, self-interested and at times desperate, using whatever means available to survive in a society that is structured to subdue and degrade them.

The result is a body of work unique in Japanese cinema, one that seeks not to organize and understand the world, but to simply document it without explanation or condemnation.

"Shohei Imamura's Japan." Through June 30 at Pacific Film Archive. 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Vengeance is Mine (1979). Starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho, Frankie Sakai, Kazuo Kitamura, Chocho Miyako, Nijiko Kiyokawa, Rentaro Mikuni. Directed by Shohei Imamura. 140 minutes. Playing at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. $29.95. www.criterion.com.

Red Road: A Minimalist Journey Along the Road to Recovery

Red Road, a Scottish film directed by Andrea Arnold, draws the viewer in immediately with its quiet intensity. The film begins with Jackie (Kate Dickie) silently watching a bank of monitors at her job at a security company, each screen presenting a different view of urban Glasgow from cameras positioned around the city.

The glimpses into everyday working-class life in the city are fascinating and Jackie looks upon them with an endearing combination of benevolence, amusement and boredom. It’s her job and nothing more, but she nevertheless seems to go about it with a certain degree of interest if not pleasure.

Thus right away we see that Jackie is an observer of life, not a participant. She lives alone and is apparently alienated from her parents and sister. Her only human contact consists of soul-deadening sex with a co-worker in a parked car. Her comfort at the surveillance desk console and her shy, nervous demeanor when she steps beyond it suggest that she is more at ease in this darkened room full of high-tech spying equipment, watching strangers come and go, than she is out in the world.

She almost appears god-like for a moment as Dickie manages to convey Jackie’s compassion for the strangers who appear on her videoscreens. She smiles as a night-shift housekeeper dances to unheard music while going about her work; she furrows her brow with pity while watching a man walk his aging and sickly dog. And when she finally steps out of that room and into the streets, it is as if she is not one of them at all, but a privileged observer who occasionally slums by walking anonymously among those she oversees, taking a role as just another character in the drama she monitors daily.

Yet once Jackie crosses that line and takes part in that drama, her life becomes a drama all its own. A chance sighting of a familiar face on one of the security cameras sends Jackie on a strange journey. It is apparent that this man is a figure from her past, someone who has somehow hurt her, but Arnold withholds all explanations right up to the end. Instead we watch as Jackie monitors the man for weeks and gains entry to his life, stalking him through a degraded, neglected cityscape, one whose battered streets and grafitti-scarred buildings mirror the heroine’s mental state; years of painful remembrance have taken their toll on her psyche.

The film is part of a larger project called the Advance Party, in which three directors made three different films using the same characters. Arnold has fashioned a compelling tale out of that raw material, and her direction is strong and focused, yet the film is slightly undermined by its evenness of tone. Those early scenes of quiet watchfulness are engaging, but after 90 minutes the minimalist approach causes the pace to flag.

But the most troubling flaws in Red Road come when Arnold yields to the threadbare devices by which indie dramas so often seek to prove their indieness: actors willing to appear naked under less-than-flattering lighting conditions; gratuitously graphic sex scenes; and somehow, somewhere, sometime, someone must vomit. Thus maketh a film of great import and honesty.

But these are minor complaints. Kate Dickie’s portrayal of Jackie is subtle and powerful, and Tony Curran as Clyde inspires just the right blend of allure and recoil. And despite the contrivance that draws these disparate lives together, Arnold has managed to create a memorable and harrowing tale of a woman who must come face to face with her fears before she’s ready to start piecing her life back together.

Red Road (2007). Written and directed by Andrea Arnold. Starring Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Natalie Press. 113 minutes. Not rated. Contains graphic sex. 

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep Finally Gets Its Due

In the prologue to his 1945 novel Cannery Row, John Steinbeck articulated the difficulties inherent in capturing a real time and place in a work of artistic fiction, likening the process to that of a marine biologist attempting to capture the most delicate of specimens. Ultimately, Steinbeck concluded, it is easier to simply open the jar and let the little creatures ooze in of their own accord, and this is the approach he took to his novel—“to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.”

Charles Burnett’s 1977 Killer of Sheep, opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas, has this quality. It is an episodic film that moves at a languorous, summertime-like pace as it charts the life of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a slaughterhouse worker struggling with depression amid the ghettos of South Central Los Angeles. The film captures the dark reality of racism and poverty, of a bleak existence with little hope for the future, and yet it resorts neither to easy cynicism nor simplistic idealism. Images of despair and disillusionment are juxtaposed with the simple, almost transcendent joys of love and family and friendship: the embrace of a loved one; the gaze of a child; a quiet moment of togetherness in the fading light of evening. It is as though Burnett simply opened the lens and allowed the essence of 1970s Watts to flow into the frame, whole and untouched.

One of the film’s most remarkable achievements may be its authentic portrayal of children at play. With the directness of a documentary, Burnett’s unassuming camera records the exploits of kids left to their own devices, staving off boredom and adulthood with improvised games amid tenement complexes and dusty vacant lots. They haven’t much, but they make do with what they have, from dirt clods to battered dolls, from passing trains to accessible rooftops. And Burnett succeeds beautifully in depicting the seemingly innate inclination of boys everywhere to take any opportunity to throw a rock. Put an unfamiliar object in its path and a dog will sniff it; an infant will put it in his mouth; and an 8-year-old boy will invariably throw a rock at it.

The dangerous terrain between youth and old age is one of the film’s central themes. “You’re not a child anymore!” a father tells his son in the opening scene. “You soon will be a goddamned man! Start learning what life is about now, son.” The father’s scolding is punctuated by a mother’s slap across the face, a stark wake-up call delivered with a sad, maternal smile.

Later an iconic shot expands on the theme, showing kids jumping from one roof to another across a two-story drop, symbolizing the perilous gap between childhood and adulthood. The camera then tilts downward to follow Stan as he descends a stairwell into that very chasm, looking up at the children as they hurdle over his head.

Along the way, the adult world is burnished with echoes of a long-lost past in the form of old Southern words and phrases that suggest where these characters have come from and what they’ve left behind, evoking memories almost archetypal in their ability to comfort as well as afflict with nostalgia for days gone by.

Rediscovering classic films can be like a series of “a-ha moments,” with missing links in the progression of cinematic style, technique and vision revealing themselves like long-lost Rosetta Stones. Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, while clearly drawing on preceding films and genres, is a seminal film for many reasons, but primarily for its application of the Italian neo-realist techniques of the ’40s and ’50s to black urban life in America; its low-budget indie aesthetic; and its use of popular music in shaping and defining its imagery.

The film’s obscurity is in large part due to its soundtrack, a wonderful blend of classic jazz, blues, R&B and pop songs for which Burnett was unable to afford the legal rights. Thus Killer of Sheep never enjoyed commercial distribution and was bottled up under threat of litigation for three decades, until Dennis Doros of Milestone Films (with a bit of financial help from director Steven Soderbergh) undertook the daunting and expensive task of securing those rights and presenting a beautifully restored 35-millimeter print, courtesy of UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Since the advent of MTV, the use of popular music in films as the all-consuming soundtrack to a scene has proliferated, most often in youth-centered films. At its worst it is a lazy method of direction, using the song rather than the image to carry the essence of the scene. But at its best, as in Killer of Sheep, lyrics and music deepen and amplify the impact of the imagery. One especially effective scene features Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) in a heartbreaking slow dance to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” played out in silhouette against the harsh glow of sunlight through a tenement window. Another scene, of a weekend outing derailed by a flat tire, is granted both gravity and humor by the strains of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.”

Only one song remained out of reach. Milestone was unable to secure the rights to Washington’s “Unforgettable,” which originally punctuated the final scene, so Burnett instead opted to repeat “This Bitter Earth,” which proves not just an adequate substitute but perhaps an improvement, providing a fitting reprise for the film’s central themes.

Killer of Sheep poses no easy questions, seeks nor finds no easy solutions; it merely presents the African-American experience in a particular time and place. And, through a relentless focus on character—on everyday people and their everyday lives—Burnett manages to find the universal in the specific, depicting the timeless struggle of men and women to—as Washington sings—ensure that the dust does not obscure the glow of the rose.

Killer of Sheep (1977). Directed by Charles Burnett. Starring Henry Gayle Sanders and Kaycee Moore. 80 minutes. Not rated. A Milestone release.