Screen Picks

Sam Adams on film.

by Sam Adams

PRIMAL SCREEN: Shohei Imamura captured man's bestial urges in The Profound Desire of the Gods and other films. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In Memoriam: Shohei Imamura 1926-2006 (Wed.-Sat., Nov. 14-17, $7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, www.ihousephilly.org) "I ask myself what differentiates humans from other animals," Shohei Imamura once said. "I don't think I have found the answer." Imamura, who died last year at the age of 79, proclaimed that he wanted to make "messy films," in deliberate contrast to the stoic melancholy of Yasujiro Ozu, whose working method he observed and despised while working on the set of Tokyo Story. Imamura styled himself in some ways as a revisionist historian of Japanese culture (one movie was titled History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess, undermining the "official" version of a nation silently suffering under a carefully controlled facade. Replacing it was a vision of humanity barely removed from its primal impulses, and frequently giving into them.

In Imamura's movies, five of which will be screened at the International House's retrospective, men and women's bestial urges are always surging to the surface. But Imamura himself stands apart, which makes him in some ways closer to Ozu than, say, Seijun Suzuki. The literal title of The Insect Woman, which is part of the I-House series, is Entomology of Japan, and Imamura deploys a battery of distancing devices — freeze-frames, long lenses, abrupt leaps in time and space — to ensure that the audience never gets too close to his specimens.

Opening with a shot of a beetle scrambling up a mount of dirt, Insect Woman follows its emblematic heroine from the 1920s through the postwar years, as she ascends from small-town peasant to metropolitan madam. Her life is nasty, brutish and ultimately circumscribed by the prejudices of Japanese society (Imamura often films the vertical slats of Japanese houses so they resemble the bars of a cage), but her wildness makes her, at least occasionally, free in a way that Japanese heroines rarely are.

The Profound Desire of the Gods combines history and creation myth, opening with shots of gelatinous sea creatures slithering through the brine. Set on a remote island where primitive religion still holds sway, the movie contrasts the modern aspirations of a Tokyo engineer with the ancient curse of one of the island's families, who have been digging a pit for decades to appease the angry gods. Imamura, naturally, sides with the primitives, not least by filming the movie in wide-screen color whose intense hues overwhelm the city man's pale frame.

The series closes with Black Rain. Shot in 1989 but filmed in 1.33 black and white, the movie uses the fallout of the Hiroshima blast as a symbol of war guilt and self-denial. A small community tries to return to normal despite the obvious effects of radiation poisoning; a young woman's parents desperately present a "certificate of health" to potential suitors as proof she is unaffected by the bomb. But the rot inside cannot be carved out, and ignoring it only hastens the end.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)