Looking Beyond Documentary to Face Truths Shohei Imamura’s Documentaries at Anthology Film Archives

Left and right, subjects in Shohei Imamura’s “In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand”; center, Mr. Imamura, right, with an interviewee in “In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia.” The films concern servicemen who left Japan in World War II.

THE films of Shohei Imamura — rowdier than the certified classics of Ozu and Mizoguchi, but more formally elegant and genuinely perverse than the works of his fellow Japanese New Wave directors like Nagisa Oshima and Seijun Suzuki — have never exactly caught fire in America. Fame came more readily in Europe, where he was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival five times and won twice (for “The Ballad of Narayama” in 1983 and “The Eel” in 1997).

But the relative inattention that his beautifully constructed, darkly comic dramas like “Pigs and Battleships,” “The Pornographers” and “Vengeance Is Mine” have faced here is nothing compared with the neglect of Imamura’s pathbreaking documentaries, all made in a midcareer detour from 1967 to 1975. The documentaries have been so obscure that Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan will be giving six of them their American theatrical premieres in a retrospective beginning Thursday and continuing through Nov. 21.

Imamura, a protégé of Ozu, began directing his own films in the late 1950s, turning out intricate comedies (“Stolen Desire”) and caper films (“Endless Desire”) with hardscrabble contemporary settings and a sardonic critique of postwar Japanese values. In “Endless Desire,” for instance, would-be crooks digging a tunnel to where a barrel of morphine was hidden during the war run afoul of a corrupt municipal program to demolish a teeming neighborhood of small shops.

His engagement with the realities of money, sex and social class continued in more ambitious and bitingly cynical pictures like “Pigs and Battleships,” about small-time gangsters near an American naval base, and “The Pornographers,” about a maker of low-rent erotica who lusts after his girlfriend’s daughter. Then, in 1967, Imamura took the step into nonfiction with his first and best-known documentary, “A Man Vanishes,” which will play throughout the retrospective.

Except that “A Man Vanishes” is not exactly, or entirely, a documentary. Made in a style similar to that of his previous fictional work — shot in rich black and white, with frequent use of freeze frames and nonsynchronous dialogue — and showing the influence of the film essays of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, it takes as its starting point a real-world event: the disappearance of a salesman named Tadashi Oshima, who left for a business trip and never returned.

Beginning with a policeman’s dry recitation of the facts the film is ostensibly an attempt to determine Oshima’s fate and shed light on the phenomenon of young Japanese men dropping out of society. In the first half-hour a large cast, including relatives, co-workers, friends, former girlfriends and even a medium, is briskly questioned about Oshima’s movements and personality.

Even in the early going it seems that the more details we accrue, the less we really know about the man and why he went missing. And then the film takes a decisive turn, as Oshima’s mousy fiancée, Yoshie, who has been a mostly silent presence, suddenly moves to the center of the story. The previously unseen film crew, including Imamura, now comes on screen to discuss her shortcomings, and several long, crucial sequences involve arguments between Yoshie and her sister, who emerges as a possible key figure in Oshima’s disappearance.

Well before Imamura’s third-act coup de théâtre — a literal deconstruction of his own narrative and picture frame — it’s obvious that what we are watching is too good to be true, too carefully staged and too sophisticated in its confusions to be authentically documentary. Imamura, on screen, alternately calls the film nonfiction and fiction. The only thing that’s clear is that the man, Oshima, has not only vanished from sight but has also vanished, for the most part, from his own story.

Anticipating by four decades today’s fondness for blurring the lines between documentary and drama — from the puzzle pieces of Abbas Kiarostami to the dodgy theatrics of “Catfish” — “A Man Vanishes” is startlingly modern and, at 130 minutes, in some measure more fun to talk about than to watch. Having gotten it out of his system, Imamura proceeded to make a series of short, rough, vital, purely documentary films, primarily for Japanese television.

“In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia,” “In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand,” “Outlaw-Matsu Returns Home” and “Karayuki-San, the Making of a Prostitute” make up an informal tetralogy on a theme similar to that of “A Man Vanishes”: how and why people would slip away from the rigid embrace of Japanese society.

Like “A Man Vanishes,” “Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia” plays out like a detective story. Acting as narrator, interviewer and investigator, Imamura flies to Singapore and makes contact with several former Japanese soldiers who have stayed on there. They don’t qualify as “unreturned,” having kept their contacts with the local Japanese people, but they help him as he searches for soldiers who have truly gone native and as he digs into questions of culpability for wartime atrocities and the ability of both the Japanese and the ethnic Chinese to forget about massacres and burned villages.

Eventually his search leads to a man now called A-Kim. Each step of Imamura’s hopscotch journey to and from Singapore and Malaysia offers new insights into Southeast Asia’s violent history. Given directions to a Chinese village where A-Kim is said to live, Imamura discovers that it’s no longer there: burned down by the British after the war because it was thought to harbor Communists, it’s now an Indian village. A-Kim, once found, turns out to be a convert to Islam, a suitable choice, Imamura decides, for a man “whose entire youth was stolen by war.”

In “Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand” Imamura quickly locates three former Japanese servicemen who have accommodated themselves to Thai life, and devotes the bulk of the film to a long, combative and increasingly drunken conversation among them: Fujita, a former spy who admits to burning Chinese captives alive and still worships the emperor; Toshida, a disillusioned individualist; and Nakayama, who stares into the distance and refuses to talk. The next day Fujita says of Toshida: “If we were still soldiers, I’d kill him. That’s just how we are.”

“Outlaw-Matsu” recounts the loyal Fujita’s return to Japan, arranged by Imamura, and “Karayuki-San” profiles a Japanese woman who was sent to Malaysia to be a prostitute for Japanese soldiers and chose to stay. All four films are part of Imamura’s project to recapture the reality of the war “because we have forgotten such things in our peaceful present lives.”

After 1975 Imamura returned to fiction, winning his Palme d’Ors and gaining a late measure of recognition in America with the release of “The Eel” and “Dr. Akagi” before his death in 2006. The Anthology series is an opportunity, not to be missed, to sample the work of a filmmaker who crossed and recrossed the documentary boundary long before established figures like Werner Herzog, Jonathan Demme and Spike Lee could do so without a second thought.