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Festival time is coming to the village, a time of transition.
With food always short it is also traditional for the elderly
to climb to the top of Narayama in order to die...
Ballad
of Narayama (Narayama Bushiko, 1958) was directed
by Keisuke Kinoshita adapted from the original novel by Shichiro
Fukuzawa. The casual viewer may have problems with the film.
The sets are obviously staged, bowing little to the pretence
of realism, as is the painted background, giving the film
a deliberately theatrical, rather than cinematographic, look.
This theatrical motif is further strengthened as the film
is presented and performed as a Kabuki, a form of traditional
Japanese theatre and is even introduced by a narrator before
curtains are pulled back to show a strange and almost surreal
world.
However
this clash of the traditional and modern is what lies at the
heart of the film, something that would have been much to
the fore of Japanese post-war society as they struggled to
reconcile the devastation that blind allegiance to tradition
had wrought upon their country. Of course this problem of
the clash between tradition and modernity was very much on
the minds of many of the Japanese post-war film makers and
was to become the central theme of many of Yasujiro Ozu and
Akira Kurosawa films.
The
film questions blind adherence to tradition which ignores
the ideas of personal choice and private morality. The initial
scene first prompts you to think that this is a traditional
story as Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka) is seen receiving the good news
that there is a widow in the next village, a possible match
for one of her sons. When the new wife moves into the household
Orin starts to hand over her role to the other women in preparation
for her ascent up the mountain and her eventual death.
Age
has not been kind to the print, giving the film an overall
grainy look. That said the colours remain as rich and lively
as ever. Audio is clear, if unspectacular, with an option
for English subtitles. The film has little in the way of extras,
just the original theatrical trailer.
This
is going to be a difficult film for western audiences to watch
as the themes are particularly Japanese in nature, as is the
presentation. That said the film is still an interesting work
after all these years and the final image of Orin, shrouded
in snow remains as powerful today as it did in the fifties.
Charles
Packer
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