The Ballad of Narayama

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, The Ballad of Narayama is a visceral portrait of a nineteenth-century rural Japanese village governed by distinctive rituals that garter daily life. Newborn boys are to be killed; only the eldest son can marry and leave his family home; and villagers who reach the age of seventy are expected to journey to the remote mountain of Narayama to die, as we follow Orin, the family matriarch who is fast approaching the end of her 60s. Based on Fukazawa Shichirō’s 1956 novel, first adapted for the screen by Keisuke Kinoshita, Imamura’s version veers away from Kinoshita’s stylised kabuki staging without sacrificing any of its visual richness. Instead, his images oscillate between fecundity and collapse; rich pastoral landscapes nonetheless reveal a world of extreme poverty as the relentless passage of the seasons constantly threatens to tip the village into famine.

Like the rest of Imamura’s work, The Ballad of Narayama leans into a form of troupe cinema, one that maintains a controlled, almost anthropological, distance from its subjects to probe our most primal impulses — sexual desire, hunger, survival — against the human desire to invent ways to regulate these wonts. These colliding instincts repeatedly coalesce into a society organised around rigid and often gratuitously cruel customs that are only sustained through the unquestioning belief and collective enforcement of those who uphold them. Death is merely the final rite of passage in the film: at times brutal, at others banal, and occasionally even beautiful when approached with unwavering faith and singular dignity.

The Ballad of Narayama (楢山節考), dir. Shōhei Imamura, Japan 1983, Japanese with English subtitles, 130 min