The Ballad of Narayama (1958 & 1983)
The
Ballad of Narayama (1958)
-and-
The
Ballad of Narayama (1983)
Introduction
These
two films, based on the same series of short stories by Shichiro Fukazawa, are
unique in that they dare to demonstrate the triumph of the human spirit through
the actions of people who are often selfish and murderous. The closest
comparisons I can think of in commercial cinema are hyper-violent,
post-apocalyptic, libertarian fantasies, but they are not really comparable as
these the two films I talk about here aren’t an action-adventure SF, they are
historical dramas, and masculine-indulgence is extremely far from the concerns of either of these filmmaker. Also, these two films aren’t about rebels -- everyone
submits to the community’s profoundly unjust moral code because the most
fundamental fact of their lives is the constant threat of starvation and all
the injustices, they engage in are a response to that. The films explore the
cost of extreme deprivation on the moral conscience of a community. Though these
characters display astoundingly casual cruelties, these films are ultimately,
powerfully, life-affirming.
This almost
unique take makes both films fiercely political even though they have no
apparent ideological leanings because at their hearts is a conflict between a
truism and a truth:
Truism:
When ordinary folks are put under extreme conditions, they are just a small
step above animals.
Truth:
They remain human.
Today,
we are immersed in a clash of civilizations with people from alien nations who
have suffered deprivations we comfortable Westerners can’t easily conceptualize;
at least some of these aliens-on-earth often seem to casually accept, even
honor, terrorist scum. How can we remember that these people are not sheep-like
beasts but men and women? Intentionally or not, that’s what these two films are
about.
1. The 1958 version:
I'm
sure censorship issues dictated how hyper-stylized this movie is, as cruelty
dominates the whole story, the attractive aesthetic contrivances are clearly
intended to soften it, making it more palatable. But there’s more, as Director Keisuke
Kinoshita distinguishes himself by making incredibly bold choices in that
stylization. The entire film is shot on exceptionally elaborate sets which are huge,
feature an uneven ground- plain, and a babbling brook washes through the center
of many settings. On the other hand, these sets still deliberately reveal their
artificiality, and most of the narrative devices are borrowed from kabuki
theater: There are scenes that change because set pieces slide away, revealing
new locations behind; stylized lighting that drop all into darkness except one
high-lighted aspect, colors suddenly switching to demonstrate emotion; and an
ever-present narrator intoning the tale to traditional clacking of wood-percussions
and twanging of samisen-strings.
One
would expect these contrivances to distance the audience from the characters,
but it didn’t because the story was so strong and the lead actors so fine. It
is also worth noting that these devices, which I’ve never seen exploited so
fully in any of the Japanese cinema I’m familiar with, would’ve been far more
familiar and comfortable to a Japanese audience than a Western one.
The
story is set in an impoverished, rural, village faced with generations-long Malthusian
dilemmas. Because of the constant threat of starvation, if not this year, then
the next, infanticide is casually accepted and there’s an old tradition of
carrying those who have reached the age of 70 up the side of mount Narayama and
abandoning them there to die of exposure; this is called, “ubasute,” and it did exist in pre-industrial
Japan, though most historians argue it was less common in reality than the
nation’s folklore suggests.
At
the center of the story is Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka, who gives the film’s finest
performance) who has reached her 70th year but is still spry and
healthy. She is a profoundly good woman whose morality is submissive to cruel traditions,
and is ready to embrace premature death though still full of life. The bulk of
the story her making the preparations for her family’s welfare after she’s
gone, and her struggle to get her loving and resisting son, Tatsuhei (Teiji
Takahashi) to embrace the fact that he is obligated to murder her.
Tatsuhei
is essential to her ritual killing, he must be the one that carries Orin up the
mountain, yet he is one of only two characters in the film who doesn’t blindly
accept this tradition. Most of the rest are either like Orin, who sees that act
as selfless and virtuous, or Orin's vile grandson Kesakichi (Danshi Ichikawa) and
his even more contemptible girlfriend Matsu (Junko Takada), who can't hide
their selfish anticipatory glee at being rid of the old woman. Kesakichi and
other villagers taunt Orin by singing a song that alleges that Orin still has
all of her teeth because she made a deal with demons. Social pressure and the
need to retain her status as a virtuous widow shape much of Orin’s actions, as
demonstrated when she smashes out her two front teeth with a rock and smiles as
she proudly displays the bloody stumps.
The second
character who resists tradition is their neighbor Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi), who is
old enough to be put on the mountain with Orin but refuses. Mata's family are
ashamed of his recalcitrance and punish him by cutting of his food. He wanders
the village as a desperate scavenger, and Orin seems to be the only person
generous enough to feed him, but each time she does, she gently encourages him
to accept death.
Another
central character is Tama (Yuko Mochizuki), a widow from another village that
Orin arranges to marry her son. Tama’s arrival, and Tatsuhei’s acceptance of
her, makes all right in the world, at least in Orin’s eyes, and sets the final
act into motion. Tama and Orin prove to be kindred spirits, as she tells
Tatsuhei, "When we turn 70, we'll go together up Narayama."
The story unfolds from the
beginning of spring to the beginning of the following winter. Capturing the
progress of the seasons is central to the film’s visual language, and likely
shaped the decision to make the film so wholly set-bound (Production Design by Kisaku Itô and Set
Decoration by Mototsugu Komaki). It is lush and
beautiful, this is obvious even in the muddy, degraded, print I saw (it was
originally shot in Fujicolor, a then much-praised process that proved unstable
over time, and in Shochiku's Grandscope wide-screen process, but the version I
saw was rudely cropped for the small screen). If you watch this film today,
you’ll likely be viewing the much-praised 2012 restoration, in other words, you
have the opportunity to see a better film than I did.
Kinoshita
has fashioned his tale in slowly unfolding vignettes in which the actions often
indirectly demonstrated, but there is only one point where I found this
misdirection problematic (I’ll get to that below). Then, after all the
restraint, there comes the climax on the mountaintop where Tatsuhei must dump
Orin amid a morbid expanse littered with the skeletons of those that had come
before. Here Kinoshita brings the film’s underlying cruelty to the surface, and
with that, the story ends.
2. The 1983 version
The
plot of the two films is identical, though this latter one, which is almost a
half hour longer, has more characters and subplots and style is radically
different. Though both were hailed by critics, the older one is held in higher
regard by most (it’s on Roger Ebert’s “Greatest Films” list) but I have to
admit I prefer this latter one. True, in this case I saw a much better-quality
print, but there some other reasons for my preference, Director Shohei Imamura’s
choices are simply more amenable to me.
As the
subject matter of the story is dark, bloody, and fearsome, and this version chooses
to be darker, bloodier, and more fearsome than the original. While the original
mitigated its horrors with hyper-stylization and indirect storytelling, this
one chooses an extreme naturalism and explicitness, its strategy for mitigating
its horror with bawdy humor. It’s not just a matter that thirty years later
censorship has eased, the latter is more influenced by Western cinema, I
suspect Imamura is a big fan of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Imamura
also relied heavily on gorgeous outdoor photography for capturing the change of
seasons as they unfolded. The film frequently indulges in asides of
documentary-style wildlife photography, presenting us with both a snake eating
a rat and, at another juncture, a rat eating a snake. Since the production
schedule couldn’t have stretched a full year for the whole of the large cast (though
it has been reported that the full production time took three years), the lives
of the human characters mostly unfolded on studio sets (Production Design by Gorô Kusakabe, Art Direction
by Hisao Inagaki and Tadataka Yoshino, Set
Decoration by Senki
Nakamura and Mitsuto
Washizawa), but these created a flawless illusion that integrated
perfectly with the more documentary-style footage.
Ken Ogata’s Tatsuhei in more compelling than Teiji
Takahashi’s, this is in large part because in this version it’s a bigger role
(here the son gets top billing over the mother). His relationship with his
second wife Tamayan, here played by Aki Takejō, is more complex and fraught.
There’s a fair amount of explicit, but deliberately un-erotic, sex in this
version. The only coupling that seems to have anything to do with love is between
Tatsuhei’s and Tamayan, and even that seems in part an act of desperation -- as
they fornicate, the camera cuts to two snakes doing the same.
Tatsuhei is still strong and devoted, but as the new
sub-plots unfold, we see the expectations laid upon him are far weirder than
the prior film suggested. A new character in this version is his brother Risuke
(Tonpei Hidari) who is held in disdain by all because of a foul, body odor and stupidity.
Risuke is unable to find any sexual partners while his nephew Kesakichi (here
played by Seiji Kurasaki) brags about his conquests; this becomes an obsession
for him, driving him to both despair and bestiality. In one of the wildest bits
of dialogue you’re likely to ever hear, Tatsuhei suggests his new wife have sex
with Risuke to protect the welfare of the family’s all-important horse. It is a
credit to Imamura’s command of this extreme material that even after making
that suggestion, Tatsuhei still comes off a pretty nice and reliable guy.
Ultimately, Tamayan doesn’t have to sleep with Risuke. As
in the first film, Orin spends the bulk of the film straightening out the lives
of her descendants, and she finds a better solution.
Sumiko Sakamoto, as Orin, is just as compelling as Kinuyo
Tanaka in the first film, and in this version somehow manages to keep her as a
paragon of virtue while at the same time allowing her to be just as
bloodthirsty as her neighbors (the other Orin was nicer than her neighbors).
This underlines not only that this world made these people cruel but successfully
convinced them to believe they were moral even when they were cruel. With the
larger cast, the community identity was better developed, and we better see how
people can be both depraved in one gesture and compassionate in the next.
The
darkest sequence in this film involves Kesakichi’s (Seiji Kurasaki) girlfriend Matsuyan (Junko Takada). She’s pregnant with his child, as selfish as she
was in the other version, and even more of a burden on Orin’s family’s limited
resources. Matsuyan’s father is caught stealing rice from a neighbor and this
unforgivable sin requires punishment to be brought down on the entire family.
This plot-line was in the original version, but the indirectness of the
story-telling was too opaque, obscuring both the cruelty of the retaliation and
Orin’s role in it. In this film, Orin is central to arranging the punishment,
and it is appropriately horrific.
In
the first film, the cards were shown on the cruelties only in the film final sequence,
but here that is reversed, the last sequence is not at all morbid or violent,
but stunningly beautiful, and deeply compassionate. Tatsuhei carries Orin piggy-back up the side of the
mountain, chatting pleasantly even though this will the last conversation they
will ever share. This death is well timed because Orin has planned everything
so well throughout the film (there's a song
sung over and over, “If it snows, she’ll be released from pain”), and when the
snow starts to fall it is seen as a blessing from the mountain God rewarding
her virtue. Their goodbye is as emotionally intense a scene as you’ll see in
any film. After the often-gruesome portrayal of a life of want, the Malthusian
tyranny is suddenly treated as if it might be right and natural.
3. Both films
I
said earlier these an intensely political films without apparent ideologies,
what where they really supposed to say about their times?
Well,
the 1958 version was released when Japan’s economic situation was rapidly
improving, but the wartime and post-war malnutrition crisis were very recent
memories. The country was also trying to psychically retool to face a new
future where modernity would continue was required to be embraced without the autocratic
tyrannies and militarism that modernity brought with it with the rise of the Meiji
in 1865 and then the Fascists in 1932, had to be purged from their souls
forever. When this film was made, Japan had undergone a centuries worth of dizzying transformations that on the outside
is only understood by through their acts of aggression, but inside was
expressed by improved standard of living and life-expectancy, the creation of a
system of public medicine, and the country could reliably feed itself. Though
we are not informed of the dates of the films’ events, they were clearly ser shortly
after 1865, and Tatsuhei would
likely live long enough to see a world where ubasute became unnecessary, making
this period piece
forward-looking, saying, look how far we’ve come, it used to be even worse than
the war years, and we’re still on the right track.
By
1983, Japan was wealthier still, but was beginning to recognize a problem that
is also a part of USA cultural and political discourse, a problem far worse in
Japan today than it was when this film was released four decades ago, namely the
consequences of an aging population. Here in the USA, immigration has kept that
problem somewhat at bay, racially homogeneous Japan never much embraced that,
and their medium age is now, forty years after the second version was released,
among the highest in the world. The old in Japan are becoming a burden that
could unleash a history-redirecting economic collapse. That would make this period piece also forward-looking,
but with the opposite sentiment of the original, this film about the past maybe
meant to evoke those same post-apocalyptic futures I referred to in the first
paragraph.
Here in the USA, there are currently there are more
people over seventy-years-old in the USA than any other time in our nation’s
history, and even with new births and immigration that segment is expanding
faster than the population as a whole (15.1% vs 9.7%). The old represent a
burden on the total population that we are not living up to now, in a time of
reasonable plenty. When I first wrote this essay in 2015, there was a proposed healthcare
reform bill that would’ve likely increase insurance premiums for the elderly,
who are fixed incomes, to the tune of 759%. Though the bill died, the threat of
some similar travesty passing through Congress remains unabated. In 2014 the
nursing home population of the USA was between 1.4 and 1.7 million people, and
as the baby boomers move through their 70s that population would only increase.
A shocking 85% of people in nursing homes didn’t receive any visitors, so
essentially these institutions, many of which are badly run, are essentially prisons
for those whose only crime was to have been forgotten. I don’t have the
corresponding numbers for Japan, but I assume it’s pretty dire there, too.
Both these films make it very clear why the
pre-industrial villagers were so cruel. What’s our excuse? Is it possible that
we are, in some ways, worse than those living in the shadow of Narayma?
Short scene from the 1958 version:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1xrzrw
Trailer for the 1983 version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOE9g10c_6c
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