이마무라 쇼헤이의 <복수는 나의 것> 연구 분석

A study on Vengeance is Mine

This paper analyzes Vengeance is Mine by Imamura Shohei. Besides my first aim, to study the artistic value of the piece, the reason I wanted to analyze Vengeance is Mine in this study is because the film confronts the symptoms of fascism in Japanese society. It could be one of the artistic approaches to apply to most societies, not merely limited to Japanese cinema and society. The first aim of this study is to clarify which world view or artistic view the vague narrative of the film stems from, including the outline of the director Imamura and the film. Its narrative and vague motive of murder deal with the world view that this film tries to speak of, even though it comes from a place of artistic immaturity. That is, this narrative was possible since the director had the sort of popular historical view of an outsider, which jumps over abstract popular history. Hereafter, his subtle motives and activities are interpreted as that his treatment process or symptoms cannot come close to the essence and continuously ‘drive,’ along with an interpretation of his trauma. Finally, the paper focuses more on his activities as they relate to the carnival theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. Contrary to a carnival, which is a collective action, though the protagonist Enokizu’s actions are like those of a carnival, they are his own actions, like those of a lunatic. His actions, therefore, cannot reach the level of achievement of popular voice, the collective liberation. In a society where the collective carnival is impossible, however, Enokizu performs the actions recklessly by himself. The film expresses them through diverse apparatus such as eroticism, grotesque realism, and comprehensive strong women. Although this study is only a small analysis of a film by Imamura Shohei, it is written to be a part of the comparative study of Japanese and Korean film and the strained relations between modern society and film.