By giving shape to Imamura Shohei's career, this collection positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.
Author(s): Lindsay Coleman, David Desser
Series: Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 256
City: Edinburgh
Figures
Notes on the Contributors
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Making of an Auteur: The Early Films (1958–1959)
PART I KILLERS
Chapter 3 Confronting America: Pigs and Battleships and the Politics of US Bases in Postwar Japan
Chapter 4 Insect Men and Women: Gender, Conflict, and Problematic Modernity in Intentions of Murder
Chapter 5 Hidden in Plain Sight: The False Leads and True Mysteries of Vengeance Is Mine
Chapter 6 The Eel: Trauma Cinema
PART II CLIENTS
Chapter 7 The Insect Woman, or: The Female Art of Failure
Chapter 8 The Obscene in the Everyday: The Pornographers
Chapter 9 Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desire for Japan’s Cultural Roots: Critical Approaches to Profound Desires of the Gods
Chapter 10 “Products of Japan”: Karayuki-san, The Making of a Prostitute
Chapter 11 The Female Body as Transgressor of National Boundaries: The History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess
PART III KINDRED SPIRITS
Chapter 12 Better Off Being Bacteria: Adaptation and Allegory in Dr. Akagi
Chapter 13 Time Out of Joint: Shohei Imamura and the Search for an “Other” Japan
Chapter 14 Promotional Discourses and the Meanings of The Ballad of Narayama
Chapter 15 Boundary Play: Truth, Fiction, and Performance in A Man Vanishes
Chapter 16 Why Not? Imamura, Nietzsche, and the Untimely
Chapter 17 Kuroi Ame: An Anthropology of Suffering
Chapter 18 The Symbolic Function of Water
Index
