The Pornographers

With his seventh film, Imamura continues his exploration of desire but shifts his focus from the women who fall victim to its pervasive and often violent influence, to the men making it their business. Subu is a small-time pornographer, occasional pimp, and sometimes even a bootleg viagra salesman, his work revolves entirely around sex to relative success, that is until his own sexual desires begin to stray from his common-law wife to her teenage daughter.

A film that embodies the inherent voyeurism of its subject in its very form, with almost every scene viewed through a screen of some description, be it the frame of a door, the matrices of a window, or even the murky water of a fish tank. In many ways The Pornographers is the closest Imamura gets to the familial intergenerational dramas of his once boss Yasujirō Ozu, however, in true Imamura fashion he subverts the conventions of that genre in almost every way possible. In Imamura’s work the family unit is a makeshift one, the parents aren’t married, Subu isn’t the children’s father, and the wedge that drives them apart is incontestably born out of desire, whether its Subu’s lecherous lusting for his step-daughter or just the daily amorality of his occupation.

The Pornographers is a family drama but crucially not one centred on the lives of the petit-bourgeois as was the case with Ozu and the Shoshimin-eiga genre, instead Imamura’s drama is built upon that “other Japan” he so regularly cited as his source of inspiration, the lower classes and the lower half of the human body as he once famously put it, the lives and bodily desires that he felt revealed Japanese societies true character.

The Pornographers (“エロ事師たち”より 人類学入門), dir. Shōhei Imamura, Japan 1966, Japanese with English subtitles, 123 min.