This is an exemplary film of Imamura’s ferocious vision, featuring his obsession with sex as either a prison or subversion and his attention to the psychological and social outcast. An amateur pornographic filmmaker (and occasional procurer of girls for wealthy men) lives in the home of a woman who is his lover, and his relationship with her teenage daughter grows increasingly complicated. A universe of striking immorality, perversion and pettiness is observed with exemplary compassion, and while the impassive and sardonic point of view may call to mind the contemporaneous cinema of Marco Ferreri, the style is nonetheless sumptuous, disorienting and baroque. “Erogotoshitachi” yori: jinruigaku nyumon rigorously inscribes its theme of voyeurism with three visual devices: Imamura often shoots scenes through windows, screens and doors, deploying obstructions within the Scope frame to force the spectator into the position of ‘peeping
Tom’; he punctuates the film with looming shots of the ever-watchful carp and bizarre point-of-view shots from its tank (as weird in their way as Raúl Ruiz’s celebrated POV shots); and, in the final image, he reduces the image to the size of one of Subu’s porn movies” (James Quandt). The film is an adaptation of a novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, whose autobiographical novel would later be adapted in 1988 into the animated film Grave of the Fireflies.

Emiliano Morreale