the carp leaps out of its tank
Shōhei
Imamura (screenplay, based on a novel by Akiyuki Nosaka), Shōhei Imamura
(director) Erogotoshi-tachi yori:
Jinrulgaku nyūmori (The
Pornographers) / 1966

Loving companion to an ailing woman, Haru
Masuda (Sumiko Sakamoto), and a kind of adoptive father to her two children,
Koichi (Masaomil Kondo) and Keiko (Kelko Sagawa), Yoshimoto Ogata (Shōichi
Ozawa) desperately tries to make ends meet by leading a kind of double life:
pretending to be a salesman—to keep both police and the mob off the track—while
shooting two pornographic movies each day, selling them (much like a salesman)
to wealthy businessmen. To justify his occupation, Ogata declares that he is
only serving a social cause, giving men what they need in order to survive—as
important as food and finances. The problem, of course, is that in the
post-World War II Japanese society in which he lives, the blue films he makes
are illegal and the mob is only too ready to demand their share of any meager
profits. Despite some few successes, accordingly, by film’s end we see just how
much of a failure Ogata is at his strange profession.

Despite
the relatively restrained sexuality of Ogata’s earliest films, in his own home life,
things are much more suggestive, as Koichi jumps into bed with his mother,
declaring he is cold, and, later, demands her gentle ministrations (a mix of
hugs and leg-rubbings) for the same reason. Ogata, attracted to the school-girl
Keiko, plays out one of his film scenarios with a retarded girl dressed in
Keiko’s own school uniform, and simultaneously demonstrates a sexual interest
in his “daughter.” Becoming pregnant, Haru becomes ill and is hospitalized,
during which time she suggests that if she were to die, Ogata should marry
Keiko. All of this, moreover, is represented by Imamura in a series of scenes
shot through cracks in the wall, peeking in through windows, peering into crevices,
and, as in the discussion with Ogata and Haru in the hospital, with others
overhearing. If Ogata’s films are rather straight-forward, giving his customers
what they desire, his and his family’s lives are lived out in a much more
prurient way, belonging more to pornography that his blue movies. Keiko even
participates in a large group orgy.
Working throughout with a cinematic partner, a misogynist who eschews all
women, a man who declares they are dangerous and even unclean, Ogata finally
comes to a new perspective: instead of dealing with “real” members of the
opposite sex, he will create a machine to salve his sexual needs. A bit like
Tommaso Landolfi’s character in his story, “Gogol’s Wife,” Ogata, after Haru’s
death and Keiko’s rejection, moving to a small houseboat works to create a
latex doll to fulfill his sexual desires, shifting from a kind of filmmaker to
a kind of sculptor. With his work nearly completed, Ogata, in a sense, is freed
from the restrictions of his previous world—is released from the confining
sexual mores, the financial demands, and the greedy and selfish ploys of other
beings. The boat breaks loose from its moorings and is quickly taken out to
sea. Film-critic Donald Richie describes it as, “a scene of mysterious beauty,
he sails, all unknowing, through the canals of Osaka and out into the Pacific
Ocean—presumably never to be heard of again.” Perhaps one might rather say,
however, Ogata sails into a world where he will never again have to hear from
the closed and truly pornographic society in which he has previously lived.
Los
Angeles, March 21, 2013E
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