A Research On The Films Of Shohei Imamura In The Dimension Of Body Theory

Shohei Imamura, one of the representatives of Japanese New Wave Cinema, is a world-wide celebrated film director in Japan. As a legend in Japanese film industry, Imamura is famous for his subjects covered a wild range, his plots obscure and ambiguous, also his bold style involved a lot of sex and human bodies. His films, mostly based on the lives of the lower depths, are full of necessary humanistic concern of the history and the future of Japanese people. He prefers to use animal images as metaphor in his films, and sex is always an important tool to prove his theme.Therefore, this paper regards the "body theory" as the breakthrough point to research on the films of Shohei Imamura. The theoretical systems of French writer and thinker Georges Bataille as well as former Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin are my main theoretical support. The first chapter,"Body and nature-the primitive Japanese" explores the reason Imamura prefers to show the wild bodies of barbarians. At the very beginning of human society, there were no obvious differences (such as sexual taboos) between animals and human beings. With the sprout of self-consciousness, human developed a feeling of disgust to "animal sex". But it seems to Imamura that people also lose their creativity and happiness at the same time. In his opinion, the savage beauty in the primitive society belongs to the pure Utopia.The second chapter, entitled "Body and industrial civilization-the imprisoned Japanese", expounds the physical and mental discipline exerted by human civilization. From the wild villages to rapidly developed modern enterprises in capitalist society, the anti-nature human beings have been imprisoned by all kinds of power systems for a long time. Under the manipulation, man’s flesh has become a docile and useful body.Shohei Imamura has all along been thinking over how to get the way to save contemporary Japanese, and to let them restore the original pure joy. In the third chapter,"Body and freedom-the Japanese seeking salvation", it interprets the ultimate way of salvation Imamura finally found out in his latest movies. Firstly, in the field of sex, the animal sex drive belonged to human being should be correctly guided. By doing that, mankind will transgress it saintly and finally unchained himself on the divine level. Secondly, as for imprisoned body, Imamura managed to "downgrade" and decompose the power system to wake up the self-consciousness under the tame body. After the liberation in both physical and mental aspects, the human nature is about to gain the ultimate freedom.