The Pornographers

The Pornographers (1966) is available to watch online on iFILM — a Japanese comedy-drama directed by Shohei Imamura, adapted from Akiyuki Nosaka's novel.

Subu runs a one-man pornography operation in postwar Osaka: amateur performers, secondhand cameras, yakuza and police to dodge. He sees no shame in it — his trade serves a sexually repressed society. He lives with his landlady Haru, who is convinced that her late husband reincarnated as the carp in the living-room tank. The fish seems to disapprove.

Imamura uses Subu's world not for shock value but as a dissection of postwar Japan — its buried desires, its layered hypocrisies, its peculiar domestic arrangements. Stream The Pornographers online on iFILM.