Shohei Imamura’s Dirty Work
After a long winter snooze we’re back to regular updates here. Just to get things started, here’s a recent look at the new Criterion box set focusing on the early 1960s work of Japanese director Shohei Imamura – with a jump to GreenCine.com’s venerable daily blog, whose Powers That Be were generous enough to commission the piece.
Although he bowed out in 2006, at age 79, as a globally revered grand master of cinema—his nation’s greatest living filmmaker—Shohei Imamura may have simply refined his touch over a 45-year career so that his gritty vision of Japanese society played more elegantly on the screen. He didn’t stake his reputation on arthouse propriety. Not that you’d necessarily infer that from the somber, poetic tone of latter-day productions such as The Ballad of Narayama (1983). Over time, the director became so smoothly transgressive that his final feature, 2001’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, could employ female ejaculation as a metaphor and not raise any eyebrows. … Read more at GreenCine.
Steve Dollar has been thinking about film since his childhood visits to the drive-in theaters of the Florida Panhandle in the early 1960s, where exposure to Mondo Cane and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly irradiated his tender brain, causing permanent after-effects. Later on, he started writing about the stuff for daily newspapers in large American cities. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he collects Steve Buscemi's junk mail. He also has contributed to such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the New York Sun, GQ, Paste, Playboy.com, and Time Out New York. 24XPS is a topology of cinematic enthusiasms: interviews with filmmakers, screenwriters, actors and designers; reviews of indie, cult, genre, art, forsaken, forgotten, and forbidden movies; conversations with artists and fans about the films they love and hate; news about upcoming releases; festival coverage; and personal essays about anything and everything celluloid and pixel. Please visit often and tell your friends.
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