Profound Desires of the Gods (Kamigami no fukaki yokubô). Shôhei Imamura, 1968.
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Edition screened: Eureka! Masters of Cinema Blu-ray #10, released 2010. Japanese language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 173 minutes.
Summary: Pervasive presence of animals in an exotic context.
Details:
1) A fisherman climbs into his small boat at 2:10, slits open a raw fish with his fingers and begins to eat it. This would be distasteful to some, and is over at 2:27.
2) A rat is grabbed at 3:15 and held in a stranglehold through 3:33, but there is no attempt to actually kill him.
3) A girl torments, but doesn’t necessarily hurt, a lizard while a village elder sings a creation myth song. This lasts from 7:10 through 11:00, with most of the time spent on the song and occasional focus on the girl in the background with the lizard.
4) A pig falls from a small boat into the ocean at 12:15, and is attacked by a shark for five seconds beginning at 12:40. This scene is conceptually alarming and we see thrashing and blood in the water, but not actual mutilation of the pig.
5) A lizard is run over by construction equipment at 2:06:00, and his bodiless tail twitches reflexively until 2:06:14.
This highly symbolic film explores universal themes with atypical depth and resolution. The setting is a contemporary Japanese village that lives and governs as though it were the 17th century although they are affected by 20th-century culture. Animals appear throughout the film, often reptiles and usually underscoring themes of sexuality or impending danger. At times the perspective of the narrative seems to be through the eyes of animals we encounter, making them a composite omniscient character/narrator. The girl who harasses the rat and lizard is slow witted, overly sexualized, and essentially an animal herself. Her actions and fate are intertwined with those of her village and the whole of Japanese culture.