I waited to write about Keisuke Kinoshita's 1958 film,"The Ballad of Narayama" until I'd seen the more acclaimed 1983 version of the same story, directed by Shohei Imamura. The two films are radically different, and I like Kinoshita's version better. This is entirely a matter of taste, as both films are very strong. Imamura's is more brutal and more crudely naturalistic, almost certainly meant to distinguish itself from the more stylized visuals in the Kinoshita film, released twenty-five years earlier. I, however, have always been a sucker for pretty colors, and love Kinoshita's kabuki-inspired production design, the lyricism of the idealized nature elements, and the elegant cinematography.
Kinoshita's visuals are purposefully designed to look dreamlike and artificial, setting the scene for a story with roots in myth and legend. It's introduced by a black-clad narrator, who draws back a literal curtain to usher us into the film. The environments were almost all constructed on soundstages, including the terrain for the final trek up an imposing mountain. The approach reminds me of the roughly contemporaneous MGM musicals like "Brigadoon," with their hyperreal recreations of the picturesque locales. The village in "The Ballad of Narayama," however, is very remote and poor. Life there is so hard that families have a cruel custom of abandoning their elderly on the mountaintop when they reach the age of seventy. "The Ballad of Narayama" revolves around the mother and son pair of Orin and Tatsuhei, who carry on this tradition out of love, despite neither wanting to part from the other. Orin is still healthy and contributes to her community, but food is scarce, and everyone is on the brink of starvation with winter approaching.
For such a beautiful film, the story is often brutal. A subplot involves a neighbor who is already over seventy, and comes to a truly terrible end because he bitterly resists his fate, until his son resorts to violent measures. In another, a food thief is discovered, leading to awful reprisals against his entire family. The Imamura version is more visceral in portraying these incidents, drawing parallels between the actions of the villagers and wild animals. Kinoshita's more idealized, more stylized approach allows the viewer more narrative distance, creating space to consider the story in more allegorical terms. However, the emotional power of the performances and the mise en scene is not diminished. I especially enjoy the performance of Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin, the self-sacrificing maternal ideal, committed to making the most of her final days. Amazingly, she was only in her late forties at the time the film was made.
Keisuke Kinoshita was a contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and produced a very eclectic variety of titles, but was best known for sentimental romances and stirring melodramas, like the wartime memoir, "Twenty Four Eyes." However, he was also an important innovator in Japanese cinema, directing the first Japanese film in color, "Carmen Comes Home," in 1951. Other Kinoshita films feature fanciful attempts to recreate the aesthetics of classical Japanese artworks. Examples include the masking effects to denote flashbacks in "She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum," and the spot color and woodblock print designs in "The River Fuefuki." These experiments were often not very successful or poorly received, and many have aged badly. However, I still find them admirable, as rough as they are.
"The Ballad of Narayama" stands out from Keisuke Kinoshita's filmography, for being one of the boldest films he ever made, combining theatrical traditions with cinematic forms in a way that's still impressive to this day. You can see its influence all over Japanese cinema, especially in the later period films from Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi. Kinoshita's "Narayama" didn't get the warm international response that Imamura's did upon release, but both are held in equally high regard today, partly thanks to an excellent Criterion release and some overdue reevaluation. And it has become very difficult to talk about one version of "Narayama" without the other.
What I've Seen - Keisuke Kinoshita
Port of Flowers (1943)
The Living Magoroku (1943)
Jubilation Street (1944)
Army (1944)
Morning for the Osone Family (1946)
Carmen Comes Home (1951)
Twenty Four Eyes (1954)
She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955)
The Ballad of Narayama (1958)
The River Fuefuki (1960)
Immortal Love (1961)
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