DIRECTOR: Imamura Shōhei
PRODUCER: Ōtsuka Kano
PRODUCTION CO: Nikkatsu
​SCREENPLAY: Yamanouchi Hisashi
PHOTOGRAPHY: Himeda Shinsaku
EDITOR: Tanji Mutsuo
MUSIC: Mayuzumi Toshirō
WITH: Nagato Hiroyuki (Kinta), Yoshimura Jitsuko (Haruko), Mishima Masao (Himori), Tamba Tetsurō (Slasher Tetsuji), Ōsaka Shirō (Hoshino), Katō Takeshi (Ohachi), Ozawa Shōichi (Gunji), Minamida Yōko (Katsuyo) 

FESTIVALS: Edinburgh

REVIEWS

“A dazzling, unruly portrait of postwar Japan, Pigs and Battleships details, with escalating absurdity, the desperate power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka. Shot in gorgeously composed, bustling CinemaScope, the film follows a young couple as they try to navigate Yokosuka’s corrupt businessmen, chimpira, and their own unsure future together. With its breakneck pacing and constantly inventive cinematography, this film marked Shohei Imamura as a major voice in Japanese cinema.”

 — Janus Films

“Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the US Navy on R&R to the former fishing village of Yokosuka, the film holds true to the stereotype of Americans as big, dumb, pleasure-seeking oafs. But it thoroughly capsizes the idea of Japanese people relishing only the quiet dignity of Zen gardens, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, haiku poetry, and filial piety. With this, his breakthrough film and fifth feature, Imamura, a leader of what would retroactively be called the Japanese New Wave, sets out to debunk the myth of the self-effacing, culturally refined, and socially ultrapolite Japanese, as characterized in the films of his former boss and mentor, Yasujiro Ozu.

Pigs and Battleships takes place a decade after the end of the post–World War II Allied occupation of Japan. But the US-Japan Security Treaty is still supplying thousands of non-Japanese military and adjunct civilian entrepreneurs, who feed on the thriving US military bases scattered all over the archipelago for the protection of Japan and the rest of the Far East from the threat of communism. A key factor in Japan’s economic recovery from the devastation of the Pacific War, the US military proves in Pigs and Battleships also to be a fabulous target for exploitation by the low-level Japanese gangsters known as chimpira — a cut below the yakuza gangsters of movie fame — who prey upon the ordinary people of Yokosuka as well. 

While the chimpira swagger and brawl, another element of postwar underworld control appears quietly in Pigs and Battleships: the opportunists, now with privileged status, from countries Japan conquered and lost again on its way to defeat in 1945 — the Koreans and the Chinese… Imamura portrays the white Americans and the hungry Japanese as equally gullible in the gambits run by these slightly more sophisticated con artists, with their other-Asian flair.

With its raucous visual and auditory effects and its strong, down-to-earth women, Pigs and Battleships was a turning point for Imamura, as it showcased his full-blown distinctive style…The outrageousness of the image, the music, and the dialogue creates an unforgettable picture of a Japan that hates its subservience but will use it to get ahead: a rich, rushed culture pushing forward on adrenaline and a logic all its own.” – Audie Bock, Criterion

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

​Whanganui   
Monday, 17 April, 7.00pm

Wellington   
Monday, 08 May, 6.15pm​

Auckland  
Monday, 22 May, 6.15pm

Nelson  
Tuesday, 30 May, 6.00pm​

New Plymouth   
Wednesday, 21 June, 6.00pm​

Dunedin
Wednesday, 19 July, 7.30pm

​Hamilton   
Monday, 31 July, 6.30pm​

Tauranga
Tuesday, 12 September, 6.00pm

Canterbury
Monday, 02 October, 7.00pm

Timaru
​Tuesday, 24 October, 6.00pm

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 01 November, 6.00pm
JAPANESE CLASSICS  selection >> ​