January 17: Buta to gunkan

Thursday, January 17 2019 @ 8PM Buta to gunkan aka Pigs and Battleships Japan 1961 d. Shohei Imamura with Hiroyuki Nagato, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Masao Mishima, Tetsurō Tamba and Shirō Ōsaka. In Japanese with English subtitles. Black and white. 108 m

“With this, his breakthrough film and fifth feature, Imamura, a leader of what would retroactively be called the Japanese New Wave, sets out to debunk the myth of the self-effacing, culturally refined, and socially ultrapolite Japanese, as characterized in the films of his former boss and mentor, Yasujiro Ozu…Imamura’s interest lay in the contradictions of the Japanese character, and he came to take a near anthropological approach to the subject, one that couldn’t be further from Ozu’s decorum.”  Audie Bock

Links:  IMDB  Wikipedia

See Also: Nippon Konchūki aka The Insect Woman (Imamura, 1963), Kohayagawa-ke no aki aka The End Of Summer (Ozu, 1961)