An art will always have two periods: its golden age and its silver age. The golden age is the period of the gods; the silver age is the period of the humans. In jazz, the gods are Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie; the humans are Davis, Coltrane, and Coleman. In Japanese cinema, the gods are Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and Ozu; the humans are Oshima, Shindo, and, of course, Imamura.
To understand what distinguishes the art of the gods from the art of the humans, one can examine the transition in Japanese cinema from Yasujiro Ozu to Shohei Imamura. The span of time that defines Ozu's cinema is between 1949 and 1960; for Imamura, who began his career as an assistant director to Ozu, it is between 1963 and 1979. Both directors had the same preoccupation, the Japanese family, but their similarities ended there. Because Ozu was a god, his films are made from the stuff of clouds, the essences of the sky, the light of the sun. They are refined and pure works. Each moment on the screen is an exquisite distillation of an entire culture and history. Side by side, the man and his wife watch the sun set on Ozu's world. That kind of peace and perfection is nowhere to be found in the movies of Imamura. From his first masterpiece, Insect Woman (1963), to his last, Vengeance Is Mine (1979), his subject is the messy, violent, sexual, maddening realm of the human.
But it's always like that with the silver age. The job of this period is to subvert and shatter the work and kingdoms of the golden age. Louis Armstrong's joyful beam of sound was cracked forever by Miles Davis's inward and lonely anger. The silver age is not only a period of humans, but also a period of rebels. And the first appearance of the rebels always marks the twilight of the gods.
The films of Ozu tried to restore the Japanese family, to renew its strength and meaning—"Of all Japanese directors," writes Joan Mellen in her book The Waves at Genji's Door, "no one [lamented] the disintegration of the old family system more than Yasujiro Ozu." (Mellen also contributed an essay to the commemorative book for A Man Vanishes: The Legacy of Shohei Imamura, the touring program that opens this week at Northwest Film Forum.) Ozu's project was to uphold the traditional Japanese family; Imamura's was to explode it. The rebel's dynamite? The will and sexuality of the poor Japanese female.
The program starts with a rare screening of Stolen Desire (1958). Chronologically, this makes sense, as it is Imamura's first film. But the real point of entry to his turbulent world is Insect Woman. It is here that the director's rebellion is out in the open. The family and its direct ties to state power are reduced to rubble. Nothing can control female energy. In Intentions of Murder (1964), even a rapist is ultimately destroyed by it.
The theme of female power reaches beyond Imamura's most fertile period. In The Ballad of Narayama (1983), it takes the form of an old woman who does not age; in The Eel (1997), it is the return of a murdered wife; and in Imamura's final feature film, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001), it is a woman's immense and watery orgasm. Though these powers are ancient, they are not safe; they do not reinforce household codes and time-honored values. These powers are disruptive and feared. Indeed, the woman in The Ballad of Narayama is so disturbed by her body's resistance to aging that she knocks out her own front teeth. She wants to be what society wants her to be: a sick old woman. A healthy (and therefore still sexual) old woman is a natural enemy to the patriarchal order of the Japanese family.
Rebellion is the center and meaning of Imamura's cinema, the main body of which can be seen in this excellent retrospective. This rebellion, however, has its problems. Though Imamura exposed the explosive force of women, a force that the state and family repressed, it was never more than that: a force. The women in Imamura's films have a blind energy, a drive that has no direction. They can destroy male values but they can't make new ones. In the end, his women are not truly liberated because they are not creative. 
