• It’s not as strong as Pigs and Battleships from 1961 but Imamura is still so stylistically motivated
  • like “Pigs” we have a comparison here to a lower tier animal/insect in the text/title
  • Freeze frame on the credits and for many of the transitions with date captions—he doesn’t do every single one though which is bad form
  • Again for Imamura- the lower depths of society, a promiscuous women, bastard children (from text- not my wc)—sexually is incredibly important to this film— anyone who says Imamura is the opposite of Ozu is talking about content over style. He’s stylistically similar and clearly influenced by Ozu
  • Two sex scenes seen through The Searchers open door by on-looking child
  • The narrative bounds around a bit recklessly—a black comedy of hardships
  • Nursing and the father/daughter relationship is odd to say the least
  • One dazzling mise-en-scene framing set-up 20 minutes in with Tome lying down on ground with the window breaking up the frame—really well done
  • Shoots another great scene through tall grass in the mise-en-scene like von Sternberg would. Yet another one though an angle of a machine at work
  • Wonderful foreground/background frames
  • Another framing device at the hospital using the window
  • Two long still-frame montages—one near the end of the film and one half way through at 1 hour in.
  • A family tale—a saga—they’re poor so they resort to crime and sex
  • Great depth of field work—even in the breastfeeding scene (another one). The open door with the sun coming in is in the background, grandma is in front of the door at a different plane, granddaughter front right at another, Grandpa and Tome in the center
  • Goes freeze-frame crazy at times- I like it though- this is early for freeze frame—Jules and Jim is the year before in 1962
  • HR