Born in 1926, in Tokyo, Imamura attended the elite elementary and middle schools that normally would have him aimed toward a prestigious university degree and a comfortable career in business or government. His love of theater and loathing of conformist presumptions, however, steered him away from a conventional lifestyle. When he failed the entrance exam at the national university in Hokkaido, he enrolled in a technical school. Later on, he quit the institution and enrolled in Waseda University's literature faculty. While his friends from Waseda entered the world of the theater, Imamura joined Shochiku Ofuna Studio as an assistant director in 1951 and found himself assisting Yasujiro Ozu on Early Summer (1951), then later on The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), and his masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953). Imamura found Ozu's notorious rigidity in both camerawork and coaching of actors to be unacceptable. He directed his first film, Stolen Desire, in 1958, the same year that Ozu released Floating Weeds. Both films are about an itinerant acting troupe, but there the similarities end, as Imamura evidently set out to include everything that Ozu's stylized tale left out. While Ozu's camera remains low to the ground, Imamura's camera jumps from one angle to the next. Imamura's first film also revealed a pair of promising motifs that would run throughout his career. His fascination with the dialects and practices of the fringes of Japanese culture was first seen in his depiction of a down-and-out acting community in Osaka's rough entertainment districts in Stolen Desire; again in his portrayal of oppressive village traditions in Intentions of Murder and The Ballad of Narayama; in the mutually exploitative culture at the edge of the U.S. military base in Yokosuka in Pigs and Battleships and History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess; and in the incestuous, animistic customs of a remote Ryukyu island community in The Profound Desire of the Gods. Imamura also populated his films with antitheses of stereotypical female film characters. Unlike the self-sacrificing feminine ideal as seen in such Mizoguchi films as The Life of Oharu, Imamura's heroines are overtly sexual, instinctive, deceitful survivors. Imamura reached his first creative peak with his 1963 masterpiece Insect Woman, a tragicomedy about one of Imamura's signature amoral survivors, followed by Intentions of Murder, and The Pornographers, a brilliant though disturbing black comedy about a pathetic man who becomes obsessed with his lover's daughter. Through most of the 1970s, he made a number of well-received documentaries; until 1979, when he released Vengeance is Mine, a brilliantly ribald film about a serial killer and his father. Since then, Imamura's international acclaim has soared. His 1983 film The Ballad of Narayama and his 1997 film Unagi both won the Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival. Imamura succumbed to liver cancer in May 2006 at the age of 79, although not before contributing two more features.