Shohei Imamura, 79; Japanese Filmmaker Focused on Outcasts

Shohei Imamura, one of Japan’s leading filmmakers whose dark and poignant tales of society’s outcasts brought a gritty realism to the movies of post-World War II Japan, has died. He was 79.

Imamura died Tuesday in Tokyo of liver cancer, which he had been treated for since last year, said his son Hirosuke.

Twice Imamura won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for films that reveled in or skirted the surreal.

“The Ballad of Narayama,” about a mythical village’s tradition of abandoning the elderly to die on a sacred mountaintop, won the Palme d’Or in 1983. The award in 1997 went to “The Eel,” the story of an ex-convict whose closest friend and confidante is a fish.

Although the Oscar eluded him, Imamura was surprised by his work’s reception in the West because outsiders couldn’t “possibly understand” what he was talking about, he told the London Guardian in 2002.

“I’ve always wanted to ask questions about the Japanese, because it’s the only people I’m qualified to describe,” Imamura said.

He wanted nothing less than to “change society completely” with his films, he said, and was unafraid to explore subjects usually considered taboo, such as incest and superstition.

His obsession with the lower classes altered Japan’s traditional movie landscape, which was filled with idealized, self-sacrificing heroines. Films by Imamura and other new wave directors in the late 1950s began showing people on the fringes of society.

“The themes in his films weren’t for Americans, but rather for Europeans,” Tadao Sato, a Japanese movie critic, told the Associated Press. “It would be difficult for Americans to grasp the convoluted state of mind depicted in his work in times after Japan’s defeat of the past war.”

In 2003, The Times called Imamura “an artist who’s made a brilliant career of rolling in the muck of the human condition.”

Realism counted, and strong-willed women were central to his vision. He cast a middle-aged former prostitute as the star of “The Insect Woman” (1963), the story of a villager who trades her life for factory work and prostitution.

Sometimes called the “cultural anthropologist” of Japanese cinema, Imamura was known for exhaustive research, including familiarizing himself with regional vocabularies and accents since his films often were set in remote areas of Japan.

His roots were far more privileged than his artistic vision reflected.

The third son of a doctor, Imamura was born Sept. 15, 1926, in Tokyo and grew up attending elite schools. To avoid the draft during World War II, he attended technical school before enrolling in Waseda University in Tokyo. He studied Western history and literature and was drawn to avant-garde theater.

Selling cigarettes and liquor on the postwar black market, Imamura became acquainted with the people at the bottom of society who would populate his movies.

He considered “Pigs and Battleships” (1961) his first personal film. A satire about pigs fed on waste left by American soldiers in a port town, it reflected his black-market experience.

For much of the 1970s, Imamura made documentaries but returned to fiction filmmaking in 1979 with “Vengeance Is Mine,” one of the first films to depict a serial killer as a hero.

“Black Rain” (1989), which depicted the devastation of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, brought him the Kinema Junpo Award, Japan’s equivalent of the Oscar.

His final film was one of 11 short subjects in “September 11” (2002). The untitled piece indirectly referred to the terrorist attack by presenting a sorrowful parable of a soldier who behaved like a snake.

Imamura is survived by his wife, Akiko; a daughter; and two sons, one of whom, using the name Daisuke Tengan, collaborated on the screenplays for his father’s last three features.