Peep Show From the underbelly of Japan to the streets of New York. by CHRIS HERRINGTON The Pornographers directed by Shohei Imamura (Home Vision) Before Boogie Nights there was The Pornographers. Shohei Imamura's 1966 black comedy about the large risks and small rewards at the low-budget end of the skin trade is a key document of the Japanese New Wave, a loose film movement that arose in the '60s in stark contrast to the work of a previous generation of Japanese film giants. Seen now on a beautifully restored letter-boxed video from Home Vision, The Pornographers illustrates a vein of post-war Japanese cinema influenced as much by Europe as by earlier Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Imamura's sardonic take on taboo-busting content is similar to the work of Spanish director Luis Bunuel at the time, and Imamura's playful camera, particularly his use of freeze-frames and his penchant for rotating his images 90 degrees, definitely has more to do with the formal experimentation of the then-prevalent French New Wave than with the more controlled visions of earlier Japanese cinema. Shot on location in Osaka, the film centers on Subu Ogata, a middle-aged man who makes his living shooting and selling 8mm blue movies. He lives with his widowed lover Haru and her two teenaged children: a daughter Keiko, whom he secretly lusts after, and son Kolchi, who extorts money from him. Imamura's focus on the underbelly of Japanese society stands in contrast to the decorum found in most Japanese films, and the scenes of Ogata's porn films being created and watched, while never explicit, are hilariously ribald. One scene, both unbearably brutal and extremely funny, has Ogata borrowing Keiko's school uniform for an actress in one of his "virgin" films. The actress turns out to be mentally handicapped and has trouble following directions, prompting Ogata to deadpan, "We'll use a simple story." Imamura's view of these characters is both mordantly ironic and deeply compassionate, but is marked most of all by a kind of formal detachment, a strategy clearly indicated by the film's original subtitle, "An Introduction to Anthropology." Imamura makes frequent use of framing devices that remind viewers that they're peeking into these lives, filming scenes through windows, doors, and, most memorably, through a fish tank that houses a carp Ogata's lover believes is her late husband reincarnated. The Cruise directed by Bennett Miller (Artisan) This documentary about a New York City tour-bus guide received a relatively wide release and lots of mainstream ink earlier in the year, so it was somewhat surprising that it never showed in area theatres. Luckily it seems nearly every video store in town has picked up multiple copies of this recent video release, because it's well worth the rent. The Cruise is a breezy, minimally directed, verité-style black-and-white profile of twenty-something tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch. Levitch looks sort of like Tiny Tim and comes across as the lost love child of Bob Dylan and Katherine Hepburn. The title of the film comes from Levitch's name for his job, and also seems to serve as a kind of Zen notion of his life's journey. Levitch loves his job and is great at it. With an exhaustive knowledge of the city's literary and architectural history, he's a remarkable talker, which is good because he begins spieling from the moment the films opens and doesn't let up until it ends. He seeks to give tourists more than just information; he wants to provide them with a "total transformation of their lives" along with "advice on how to feel debonair despite interior feelings of despair." You have to feel for the average tourist whose vision of New York eccentricity comes from Seinfeld reruns and is then confronted by "Speed" Levitch, who expounds at length on Thomas Paine (the "infidel revolutionary") and whose typical monologue goes something like this: "Let's just blow up the grid plan and rewrite the streets to be much more a self-portraiture of our personal struggles rather than some real estate agent's wet dream from 1807." It seems the only thing Levitch loves more than his constant stream of verbiage is the city itself. The Cruise is a portrait of one man's New York, like Woody Allen's Manhattan as reimagined by the Unabomber. In the end, how we feel about Levitch may say as much about us as it does him. Is he a pathetic, lonely figure (the "Travis Bickle of tour guides" as a friend calls him), or is he someone to be admired, a person who's found contentment in work and an outlet for personal expression?