As a finely stylized Japanese film of the Jidaigeki genre, a period piece like so many of its samurai brethren, The Ballad of Narayama stands out nonetheless as an early amalgam of the theater and the cinema. It is an artful filming of the eponymous novella by the Japanese writer Shichirô Fukazawa, itself adapted from the Japanese legend of the practice of what is called obasute, the ritual killing of the elderly, whose offspring take them to a mountaintop or a desolate place where they can pine away. Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita and released in 1958, The Ballad of Narayama combines stark colors and the simplicity of the legend with the verve of kabuki theater, apparent in the ubiquitous sound-stage shooting, the music, and the singsong narration delivered in voice-over.
The non-realistic depiction of this legend makes the film authentic, matter-of-fact, and contemplative; enclosing its world with theatrics that put distance between the material and the audience, The Ballad of Narayama also elicits with the tools of the cinema the crackling and vibrant emotions of a more traditional narrative. The result is a hybrid: theatrical cinema, or cinema as theater. The outcome of this early experiment is that it does honor to the Japanese theatrical traditions from which it sprang, while using its cinematic flourishes and its scripted staginess—stark changes of color, matte shots, throwaway curtains used as transitions, and wide-angle shooting—to excellent effect.
Even though the film’s strange uniqueness to a western audience impresses on it the quality of a so-called cultural experience, which could distort the usual standards applied to the more cinematic film, The Ballad of Narayama seems to pass critical muster not only on its own terms. It is comparable with any other good film, but wrapped in an unfamiliar cultural packaging. And those that love cinema should find out what’s inside.
The story as set up by The Ballad of Narayama is one of harsh and unmitigated cruelty, privation, and survival: a small mountainside village of the Edo period hews to the unforgiving practice of sending all their septuagenarians to the top of Mount Narayama, where they will pine away and so relieve their fellow villagers of another mouth to be fed. Food is scarce, and the long-standing tradition is one way of fending off an actual famine, which always threatens the slight and teetering welfare of the village.
Contrasts between the attitude of an old and frail man of one family, which is only too happy to get rid of someone they consider a parasitic “coot”, and that of the placid Orin, emphasized as the primary character, bring out the stark and often lurid demands of life in the village; while Orin goes with grace and dignity to fulfill her ancestral obligation on that cold, lonely, and barren mountaintop, going so far as to shatter her front teeth to seem more amenable to it, the old man doggedly resists going to his death—he flees his family, he gobbles up bowls of rice from Orin’s kitchen, he flouts his pack-mule duties foisted on him by his savage and ungrateful son.
The film points up the difference that attitude, temperament, and perception can make to those facing their imminent demise, even if this demise is the same in any case—an inexorable doom.
Counterbalancing the harshness of this story is the sheer aesthetic distance of The Ballad of Narayama, its reliance on the theater and its deemphasizing of the usual narrative effects. (As a contrast to this theater-cinema amalgam, the later 1983 version of the legend, directed by Shôhei Imamura, is far more cinematic and focused on narrative; it is also more disturbing, vicious, and explicit. Both versions are worth watching.) The emotional counterpoise is like that of the animated film, Grave of the Fireflies, in that both create an aesthetic distance without shying away from the gravity of the material, impressing on the audience in place of character arcs the weight of ideas and images, as emotive and searing as the most fervently cinematic narratives.
For its peculiar majesty and its fluid, unflinching depiction of life and death and wallowing survival, The Ballad of Narayama deserves a place as one of the greatest creations of the genre of Jidaigeki. It is not to be missed.
