Shohei Imamura: The 1960s was a richly creative period for Japanese cinema which, at the same time as many other countries, produced its own new wave (nuberu bagu).
Among its leading directors were Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes, 1964), Yoshishige Yoshida (Eros Plus Massacre, 1969), Nagisa Oshima (Death By Hanging, 1968) and Shohei Imamura, who has died of liver cancer aged 79.
They all explored the link between eroticism and violence, and challenged the moral values of post-war Japanese society.
Imamura went deeper and further into these areas than his contemporaries, but took longer to become accepted in the west as the most important director of his generation. He once stated: "I want to make messy, really human, unsettling films," by which he probably meant that his often elaborate, anarchic narratives were intertwined with sociological, sexual and political themes, unlike the more classical films by the holy trinity of Japanese cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu.
Early in his career, Imamura worked as assistant to Ozu ("I was basically just a clapper boy"), but when it came to making his own films he reacted against what he saw as Ozu's conservatism, rigid camerawork and overly formal relationship with his actors.
What separated him most from many other Japanese directors was that his films focus mainly on the lower classes and social outcasts; his characters are often poverty-stricken women, prostitutes, pimps, pornographers and black marketeers.
Born in Tokyo, he was the son of a doctor and attended elite schools where, he said, he despised his fellow pupils.
"I remember thinking that they were the kind of people who would never get close to the fundamental truths of life. Knowing them made me want to identify myself with working-class people who were true to their own human natures." Imamura became interested in the theatre at an early age, and in 1945 enrolled in literature studies at Waseda university, where he wrote plays and acted.
On graduation in 1951 he joined Shochiku Films, where he worked as an assistant before transferring to Nikkatsu studios.
In 1958, Imamura got his chance to direct three films: Stolen Desire, Lights of Night and Endless Desire, all set in the underworld, followed by My Second Brother (1959), which dealt with the plight of four orphans in a poor Japanese mining town.
Although these were studio projects, one could already detect Imamura's preoccupations and his depiction of what he described as "strong women who accept their fates even in an era when women had been believed to have no actual practical role in society, or were simply regarded as inferior to men".
At the centre of Pigs and Battleships (1961) is the quintessential Imamura heroine who retains her decency in the midst of corruption. This pungent allegory, set during the American occupation of Japan, revealed the director as a master of black-and-white images on the wide screen.
The Insect Woman (1963) was an account of 45 years of the hard life of a woman (Sachiko Hidari) who survives working in a factory, as a cleaning woman and as a prostitute.
The original Japanese title of his unsentimental but compassionate examination of fortitude and patience was Entomological Chronicles of Japan, which came from his reading of sociologists, ethnographers and anthropologists, allowing him to observe his characters with a scientist's objectivity.
The Pornographer (1966), the study of a man who devotes his energies to the purveying of sex aids in the committed belief that he is spreading happiness, was photographed and played in a matter-of-fact style, neither prurient nor judgmental in tone.
In The Profound Desire of the Gods, also known as Tales From the Southern Islands (Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubo, 1968), a brother and sister on a small island fall in love and attempt to recreate the myth of Izanagi and Izanami, sibling gods whose union founded the Japanese race. Incest is treated as a natural phenomenon, only becoming taboo under the influence of westernised Japanese who have come to civilise the island.
The film can be seen as a summation of Imamura's themes: civilisation versus primitivism; science versus superstition; humans as animals or insects.
After the commercial failure of The Profound Desire of the Gods and the near collapse of Nikkatsu studios, Imamura spent the following eight years (from 1970 to 1978) concentrating exclusively on making a series of remarkable documentaries, mostly for television, one of which was The History of Postwar Japan As Told By a Bar Hostess (1970), an "unofficial" view of Japanese society.
Other documentaries dealt with Japanese women sent to southeast Asia in the pre-war years to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military, and with the war veterans who did not return home after the war had ended.
In the 1980s, Imamura finally took his rightful place among the internationally renowned Japanese directors, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes for both The Ballad of Narayama (1983) and The Eel (1997), ironically not among his best films.
His wife, their two sons and a daughter survive him.
Shohei Imamura: born September 15th, 1926, died May 30th, 2006.