Chronicle of Shame:Imamura's Mizoguchi

Abstract

Mizoguchi Kenji's 1956 film Street of Shame, and Imamura Shohei's The Insect Woman, released seven years later, are important representations of the role of women in Japanese society, particularly in their depictions of prostitution. With their films often characterised as traditional, beautifully crafted melodramas, and as "messy" modernist quasi-documentaries, respectively, Miizoguchi's and lmamura's work seems to be stylistically poles apart, but their cinematic portrayals of prostitutes and their lives have much in common beyond their shared, topical subject-matter. After a brief review of the ways in which both films, despite their differing cinematic approaches, function as social documents, followed by a survey of the careers of both directors, and their relations to the world of prostitution, this paper presents a reading of The Insect Woman that explores its many parallels with, and apparent reworkings of elements of Street of Shame- at the level both of individual scenes and characters, and of larger structure― and speculates that lmamura may well have seen Mizoguchi's final masterpiece before or during the making of his own film.