A dazzling, unruly portrait of American–occupied postwar Japan, Pigs and Battleships details, with escalating absurdity, the desperate power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka. Shot in gorgeously composed, bustling cinemascope, Pigs follows a young couple as they try to navigate Yokosuka’s corrupt businessmen, yakuza, and their own unsure future together. With its breakneck pacing and constantly inventive cinematography, this film marked Shohei Imamura as a major voice in Japanese cinema. —The Criterion Collection
Shohei Imamura’s ribald, darkly comic films about messy human relationships and coarse, indomitable women repelled early European critics who had grown to cherish the graceful, exotic image of Japan typified by Kenji Mizoguchi films. Yet Imamura remains a critically important director, both as one of the seminal Japanese New Wave directors (along with Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda) and as a chronicler of a side of Japan rarely seen in Mizoguchi movies or tourist brochures.
Born in 1926, in Tokyo, Imamura attended the elite elementary and middle schools that normally would have aimed him toward a prestigious university degree and a comfortable career in business or government. His love of theater and loathing of bourgeois presumptions, however, steered him away from a conventional lifestyle. When he failed the entrance exam for the agriculture program at the national university in Hokkaido, he enrolled in a technical school to evade the draft. The day the Pacific War ended… read more
Did anybody else think for a second about the opening of *Touch of Evil* while watching the start of this? Imamura's camera pulling back through the streets, past the open doorways of one shop after another, each shop's particular soundtrack spilling out onto the street as the camera passed? ... And I'd second the comments below: utterly fantastic. (Also: the MoC Blu-ray is tops.)
it is sort of a definitive masterpiece. imamura is immensely gifted in the manner in which he manages to parody the japanese nation under the americans as well as as presenting an insight into the lowest and most realistic of japanese classes. the visuals are beautiful, the script is snappy, funny and in the end philosophical. i just love how real everything becomes in an imamura film. there is only one.
Probably the most pessimistic film every to come out of Japan, but that doesn't mean it isn't any good. In fact, it's excellent. But it's so far opposite Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu that it's practically nauseating.
well excuse me! the most pessimistic Japanese film I've seen! But I feel that pessimism in this film seems to drive the entire story... all the characters try and have hopes and they all fail miserably. Funeral Parade of Roses and such are other very dark and pessimistic, but this one I feel is most vibrant with it's downhill look at life. I will watch a lot more though, I promise.
Criterion releases Kiss Me Deadly on DVD and Blu-ray today and, for the occasion, they're running an essay by J Hoberman adapted from his book
This is a major Japanese classic. It made Imamura into an established name. It is a ravishing film shot in B+W CinemaScope(and you ain’t seen ‘Scope if you ain’t seen Imamura) but the theme and subject… read review
A Japanese ‘Touch of Evil’ played out in the port of Yokosuka. Shohei Imamura had a panoramic eye for the absurd and the dirty deeds done the world over in the post WW II americanization wherever soldiers… read review