Japanese filmmaker Imamura is focus of new Cornell Cinema series

Pigs and Battleships will screen Jan. 26 at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre.

As part of its Monday Night Classic Cinema Series, which begins Jan. 26, Cornell Cinema will present five works of Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura. And, in addition to the Monday night features, four other works will be screened for free Thursday afternoons in February.

The Imamura retrospective tour, organized by the Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto and the Japan Foundation in Tokyo, will travel to major cities in North America. The series, cosponsored with the East Asia Program, will be introduced by Brett de Bary, professor of Asian studies, Jan. 26, at 7 p.m. All screenings take place in Willard Straight Theatre. Admission to the Monday shows is $4.50; $4 for students and seniors.

Imamura is still making powerful, award-winning films four decades after he helped reinvent Japanese postwar cinema. He won his second Palme d'Or award at last year's Cannes Film Festival for his most recent film.

Ribald, realistic and conscious of class, Imamura's films break down artistic and social conventions and offer instead an unsentimental view of Japanese life in the late 20th century. Imamura's films are radically different from those of the more traditional Japanese masters, most of which deal with issues facing Japan's middle class. Often focusing on the unsavory members of Japan's lower classes -- the pimps, the prostitutes, the criminals, the killers, the psychopaths -- or the clash of two vastly different cultures within the nation, Imamura crafted some of cinema's most intense melodramas, while at the same time examining politics, religion, commercialism, Western influence and human relations.

The first film in the Monday night series, Pigs and Battleships (Jan. 26), shows the East-West culture clash at a Yokosuka naval base during the span of the first 16 years of American occupation. The Insect Woman (Feb. 2) covers 45 years in the life of a woman, from innocent girlhood to life as a prostitute in postwar Tokyo. Intentions of Murder (Feb. 9) is about an "inarticulate, plain country girl who survives by pure instinct." Masumi Harukawa plays a neglected wife who overcomes her family, a brutal rape and the cultural demands that insist that a 'violated' woman has no alternative but suicide. This film is considered by many to be Imamura's masterpiece. The Pornographers (Feb. 16) takes a wry look at the sex industry. The Profound Desire of the Gods: Tales From a Southern Island (Feb. 23), Imamura's first color film, is a fish-out-of-water tale about an engineer who travels to a remote, primitive island to build a sugar factory, where, due to his gadgets and Coca-Cola, he is viewed as a god.

Thursday's free offerings include A Man Vanishes (Feb. 5, 4:30 p.m.), Vengeance is Mine (Feb. 12, 4:30 p.m.) and Eijanaika (Feb. 19, 4:15 p.m.). Zegen (Feb. 26, 4:15 p.m.), a razor-sharp satire about Japanese expansionism that centers around a hairdresser who builds an empire of brothels and an army of prostitutes, concludes the series.

For more information on Cornell Cinema offerings, call 255-3522.