Year: 1975
Duration: 01:15:06
Directed by: Shôhei Imamura
Actors: N/A
Language: Japanese(English subtitles)
Country: Japan
Also known as: Karayuki-san, Wojenne prostytutki, Esas damas que marchan lejos
Description:
In 1969 after his favourite film-project Profound Desires of the Gods had become a fatal financial failure at the Japanese box-office, driving Nikkatsu, which coproduced his film almost into bankruptcy, Shohei Imamura withdrew from expensive feature-filmmaking for ten years, during which time he, like many of his colleagues, divided his time between the production of documentaries for TV and other activities; most notably in 1975, the creation of a private film school, “The Film and Radio Institute of Yokohama”. Equally as important, Imamura continued his anthropological and ethnographic research during his many trips to South East Asia (to Malaysia, Thailand, Borneo) and even to Morocco. In these TV documentaries the filmmaker examines two cases symptomatic of the uprooted Japanese: first, the women taken more or less by force to military brothels in China during the Meiji era, some of whom, though very old, remain in Malaysia and never even considered returning to the “homeland” and second, the soldiers of the Imperial Army, who oddly enough, stayed behind in the territory in which they found themselves at the time of the 1945 armistice. Many did not learn that the war was actually over until years later. In typical Imamurian style, the director is filmed alongside his small crew as he interviews the characters involved in his investigation. These films are perfectly conventional in form, yet beneath their standard rhetoric, a touch of modernist malaise lingers on; taken together, they form almost a parallel oeuvre to Imamura’s feature work of the Sixties, in which the subjects and images he had previously treated as fiction are recycled as documentary truth.
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