The Insect Woman (1963) + Nishi Ginza Station (1958) [Masters of Cinema #22] [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: April 17, 2015

The Insect Woman (1963) + Nishi Ginza Station (1958)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | Cover | 02:02:38 + 00:52:19 | 7,42 Gb
Audio: Japanese AC3 2.0 @ 320 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama | Masters of Cinema #22

Director: Shôhei Imamura

“My heroines are true to life – just look around you at Japanese women. They are strong, and they outlive men,” director Shôhei Imamura once observed. And so an audacious, anthropological approach to filmmaking came into full maturity with the director’s vast 1963 chronicle of pre- and post-war Japan, The Insect Woman [Nippon-konchûki, or An Account of Japanese Insects].

Comparing his heroine, Tome Matsuki (played by Sachiko Hidari, who won the “Best Actress” award at the 1964 Berlin Film Festival for the role) to the restlessness and survival instincts of worker insects, the film is an unsparing study of working-class female life. Beginning with Tome’s birth in 1918, it follows her through five decades of social change, several improvised careers, and male-inflicted cruelty.

Elliptically plotted, brimming over with black humour and taboo material, and immaculately staged in crystalline NikkatsuScope, The Insect Woman is arguably Imamura’s most radical and emphatic testament to female resilience.

The Insect Woman - IMDB | Wikipedia | Rotten Tomatoes
Nishi Ginza Station - IMDB | Wikipedia
Eureka - Masters of Cinema

After previously pairing Imamura's breakthrough Pigs and Battleships with his debut feature Stolen Desire, MoC now join the director's second big leap forward The Insect Woman with his sophomore work Nishi-Ginza Station. The Dual Format release marks the debut of The Insect Woman on Blu-ray and the first time Nishi-Ginza Station, which is perhaps the rarest of Imamura's fictional features, has been made available for English audiences. Previously, the Criterion Collection released The Insect Woman on R1 DVD as part of its Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes set. For this review, I've used parts of my earlier coverage of the Criterion edition and added some thoughts on Nishi-Ginza Station.


Stung by home studio Nikkatsu's unhappiness that Pigs and Battleships went over budget, director Shohei Imamura was given an involuntary hiatus before being allowed to return to work with 1963's The Insect Woman (Nippon konchuki). The film's native title literally translates as "Japan Entomology," and finds Imamura studying humans as one might do with insects. Specifically, the life of a single unexceptional female is explored from her birth in a small village in 1918 through the early 1960s, with numerous points in the time line marked both by what happens to Tomé, the woman, and the nation of Japan. In an interview on the Criterion Collection release, critic Tony Rayns cites Imamura's connecting of his protagonist to events in the country as pretentious, but I actually found this slight, almost subliminal link to be a refreshingly suggestive steadying of the story instead of an attempt by the director to reach beyond his bounds. Imamura is cagey enough to let you know what he's doing without explicitly harping on it.


Regardless, that's not the theme of the film, and The Insect Woman clearly refuses to build on the overt politicization of Pigs and Battleships. Imamura instead makes his intention obvious from the start as a beetle struggles to climb a hill of dirt against the opening titles. Tomé (played with devastating authenticity by Sachiko Hidari) is eventually revealed to be the equivalent of the beetle in the film's last shot, which mimics the opening but replaces the bug with our heroine. This much is not a spoiler or any form of deep analysis of Imamura's intentions. He's quite obviously establishing a parallel. The light bulb moment is allowed to happen inside the viewer's own mind after considering that the beetle is only one of countless identical creatures struggling to survive and adapt to its surroundings. Tomé is likewise a dot in the human spectrum. Imamura uses insects, and that may be a most apt comparison considering how focused and numerous those creatures are, but the analogy of humans to other communities of mobile creatures is also allowed. To reduce the dreams and hopes and accomplishments of human beings to that of mere insects is, for many, a pessimism of the highest order. In Imamura's film he essentially does just that, quite persuasively and still with some degree of delicacy but actually without the negativity one might expect.


The Insect Woman is greatly concerned with its lead character's ability to adapt to her surroundings. It's far less interested in judging her actions or asking the audience to view her as a victim. Imamura's films amaze me in how shrewdly the protagonists' paths are delineated without either offering or eliciting sympathy. We never fully relate to or feel sorry for or even pity Tomé. By the very same token, Imamura also resists any judging of his characters. Even in Vengeance Is Mine, a film that greatly resembles this one, there's never a point where the director is genuinely registering his disgust at the serial killer lead. It can be frustrating knowing that these actions are clearly repulsive and wrong, or, as in The Insect Woman, simply contrary to the established codes of society, and that Imamura is coolly offering no opinion. What a novel approach to telling stories, though. You can enter any film directed by Shohei Imamura and know, with almost extreme certainty, that he will neither justify nor condemn the actions displayed by his characters. Such a lack of hypocrisy can be comforting.


Tomé gets sidled with an abundance of problems and dysfunctions and such. She's not terribly likable, but who is really. The character immediately, through no control of her own, enters the world at a disadvantage by being born a bastard child of a promiscuous mother and irresponsible father. The man she comes to recognize as her father figure is a slow-witted local who develops what is basically an innocently incestuous relationship with her. Tomé's daughter Nobuko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) will also follow on the same path. Imamura clearly emphasizes this somewhat disturbing trend, including a horrifically conflicted death bed encounter where Tomé offers up the milk from her breast one last time to the expiring simpleton, but it mostly comes across as a quasi-accepted part of growing up in the village. There's certainly no shame involved. Tomé lacks regret or disgust, and she, like her daughter later, even insists on giving a particular lover a paternal nickname. It's a cycle that, as in the insect world, perpetuates itself without objection. When Tomé realizes that Nobuko has followed in some of the same footsteps of her mother she's initially angry but soon enough develops a pride in her daughter's ability to also adapt as necessary.


For Tomé, these adaptations are decidedly practical and increasingly opportunistic. The woman raised in a humble village eventually finds herself establishing a union and later ratting out her boss to attain the same position. Her journey also includes working as a maid and negligently letting the child of her employers scald herself to death, as well as serving some time as an initially reluctant prostitute. One has to be careful when relaying the events of Imamura's film to avoid making it seem like a skipping narrative of Hollywood proportions. It's unequivocally not. I've never read any legitimate criticism against The Insect Woman, but I can imagine such dissents would focus on the main character's itchy insistence on spinning greed out of complacency. Tomé is not necessarily blessed with exceptional ambition but she nonetheless makes do with seizing opportunity when it's offered. The most disarming instance of this is when the character, after earlier decrying prostitution as evil, cooperates with law enforcement to get her madame imprisoned and then takes that very position for herself. Remarkable. The wily resolve brings to mind Fassbinder's Maria Braun from his 1979 film.


Where Tomé differs from Maria Braun is that she shows little in the way of forethought or obvious cunning. As with an insect like Imamura's beetle, Tomé doesn't act with the intention or master plan of rising to the top. She simply makes the best possible use of opportunities and manages to adapt to any given situation. Her goal or fate isn't success so much as survival. It's what any successful human, insect or other organism does to thrive. Really, it's even what a virus does. The important thing for Imamura is exposing our natural human instincts as being incredibly primal and consistent with other organisms. The cyclical nature, with Tomé resembling both her mother and daughter in action, is another key to Imamura's point of a continuing, powerful, and repetitive fate that's largely beholden to circumstance. There's something clearly at work here that the director found fascinating enough to largely build a career on and explore repeatedly. Imamura would tackle these sorts of female protagonists again, though not with the same exact focus, and he'd also dedicate his career to people on the very same fringe of society. If Pigs and Battleships was his creative breakthrough, The Insect Woman can be seen as Imamura's first wholly signature film.


One need flash back only five years, or press down on the remote control a couple of times, to find probably his least characteristic movie. Though written as well as directed by Imamura, Nishi-Ginza Station hardly resembles the filmmaker's other pictures in tone or atmosphere. This is a brisk, farcical diversion somewhat reminiscent of Wilder's The Seven Year Itch, only minus Marilyn Monroe. It concerns the husband of a pharmacy manageress who is feeling emasculated. With the wife and kids out of town for a few days and encouraged by his veterinarian friend (Ko Nishimura), the man tries to have a good time. His good time happens to involve a young woman who works in the shop across from the pharmacy. Things do not quite go as planned, though Imamura manages to wring an unexpected amount of fun out of the whole set-up, particularly with the ending he devises.


The silent comedy-style slapstick antics used once or twice should be new to Imamura admirers but there are actually a couple of aspects of Nishi-Ginza Station which feel familiar. One is the general playfulness present. No matter how serious an Imamura film is, there's almost always the inclusion of something which can cause a chuckle here or a giggle there, even if it's often a very uneasy one resulting from the darkness of the humor on display. So while maybe we're not accustomed to seeing an Imamura movie this light, it's not as though he made a career of being self-satisfied and overly serious. It's worth noting, too, that Nishi-Ginza Station is generally pretty good at feeling airy and disposable, like a Jack Lemmon comedy made for Columbia. Of course, the fact that it's just under fifty-two minutes perhaps helps.


Also interesting is how the lead character, played by Shin'ichi Yanagisawa, keeps having some sort of combination of flashback and daydream about being on an island in the South Pacific near the end of the war. These sequences always present the character as a bit wistful and show him with a dark-skinned native woman (Kyoko Hori, who also plays the potential object of his affair in the present day). This is either the happiest instance of post-traumatic stress disorder imaginable or Imamura is, a decade prior to Profound Desires of the Gods, displaying some real interest in showing a romantic pair situated in a kind of island paradise, however briefly. For purposes of the Nishi-Ginza Station plot, these thoughts the man has are a clear means of escape from his very boring, very frustrating life at home. Frank Nagai, a featured singer in the film who also serves as occasional guide, is allowed to speak directly to the camera to explain things to us. He ends the picture by leaving the viewer to decide whether it's "happily ever after" or something less rosy. The cynicism implied here, however big the wink is, feels exactly like the Imamura many of us know and love. And, despite something that initially shares very little in common either with the films that followed or the one that preceded it, a fingerprint or two of Imamura's seems to linger on Nishi-Ginza Station.
The Digital Fix

Special Features:
- Newly restored high-definition master of The Insect Woman
- New progressive transfer of Nishi-Ginza Station [Nishi-Ginza eki-mae, or In Front of West-Ginza Station], a 1958 feature by Imamura
- Newly translated optional English subtitles for both films
- A video conversation about The Insect Woman between Imamura and critic Tadao Satô

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