is a 1963 Japanese

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...

directed by

Shōhei Imamura was a Japanese film director. His main interest as a filmmaker lay in the depiction of the lower strata of Japanese society. A key figure in the Japanese New Wave, who continued working into the 21st century, Imamura is the only director from J ...

. It was entered into the 14th Berlin International Film Festival, where Sachiko Hidari won the

Silver Bear for Best Actress The Silver Bear for Best Actress () was an award presented at the Berlin International Film Festival from 1956 to 2020. It was given to an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance and was chosen by the International Jury from the fil ...

award. It was also awarded numerous national film prizes.

Plot

The film follows Tome, a young woman born to a rural lower-class family in the

Tōhoku region The , Northeast region, , or consists of the northeastern portion of Honshu, the largest island of Japan. This traditional region consists of six prefectures (): Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi, and Yamagata. Tōhoku retains ...

in 1918, who, after a long series of mishaps, rises to the status of a

madam Madam (), or madame ( or ), is a polite and formal form of address for Woman, women in the English language, often contracted to ma'am (pronounced in American English and this way but also in British English). The term derives from the French la ...

in the post-war era. When she is sentenced to jail, her daughter Nobuko becomes her patron's lover, but later steals his money to use it for building up a farming commune.

Cast

* Sachiko Hidari as Tome Matsuki * Jitsuko Yoshimura as Nobuko * Emiko Aizawa as Rui * Masumi Harukawa as Midori * Emiko Higashi as Kane * Daizaburo Hirata as Kamibayashi * Seizaburo Kawazu as Karasawa * Teruko Kishi as Rin *

Tanie Kitabayashi was a Japanese actress and voice actress. Born Reiko Ando in Tokyo, she began as a stage actress. Kitabayashi was a founding member of the famed Mingei Theatre Company, founded in 1950. Early in her career, she became well known for portrayin ...

as Madam * Kazuo Kitamura as Chuji * Asao Koike as Sawakichi * Masakazu Kuwayama as Owagawa En's Lover * Hiroyuki Nagato as Matsunami * Shoichi Ozawa as Ken * Sumie Sasaki as En *

Taiji Tonoyama was a Japanese character actor who made many appearances in films and on television from 1939 to 1989. He was a close friend of Kaneto Shindo and one of his regular cast members. He was also an essayist. In 1950 he helped form the film company ...

as Foreman * Shigeru Tsuyuguchi as Honda

Production

In a 1977 interview, director Imamura explained that he had chosen Hidari for the role due to her vitality and energy, which had impressed him in the film '' The Maid's Kid'' (''Jochukko'', 1955). Yet according to Hidari, she and Imamura disagreed profoundly on the way she should play her character, calling him a "chauvinist" in retrospect for his bullying the then-pregnant actress by e.g. insisting on multiple retakes in delicate scenes.

Release

''The Insect Woman'' was released in Japan on 16 November 1963, earning $500,000 in four weeks. It was re-released with ''Getsuyōbi no Yuka'' in February 1964, earning a similar amount. The film was released as a region 1 NTSC

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

in 2009 as part of

The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home video, home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of art film, arth ...

's Shohei Imamura DVD box and as a region B

Blu-ray Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-defin ...

in 2011 by

Masters of Cinema Masters of Cinema is a line of DVD and Blu-ray releases published through Eureka Entertainment. Because of the uniformly branded and spine-numbered packaging and the standard inclusion of booklets and analysis by recurring film historians, the li ...

Reception

''Variety'' magazine declared the film being "potent adult film fare by any nation's standards" and praised the camera work by Masahisa Himeda and performances by Sachiko Hidari, Kazuo Kitamura and Jitsuko Yoshimura. The review noted that the film takes place over a period of 45 years in an episodic technique "consciously causing viewer alienation". The film won 14 awards in Japan, including the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Film and Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.

References

External links

* *
''The Insect Woman: Learning to Crawl''
an essay by Dennis Lim at The Criterion Collection 1963 drama films Japanese drama films Japanese black-and-white films Best Film Kinema Junpo Award winners Films directed by Shohei Imamura Nikkatsu films 1960s Japanese films Films scored by Toshiro Mayuzumi {{1960s-Japan-film-stub