“This winter… I'm going to the mountain. My mother went to the mountain, as did the mother-in-law of our home. So I have to go too.”楢山節考 [Narayama-bushi kō / The Ballad of Narayama] (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)
Dec
11
International Mountain Day
Tatsuhei (Teiji Takahashi) with his mother Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka) in a bamboo carrier on his back. She's combing his hair. Around them the mountain range. DP: Hiroshi Kusuda.
A starving community has come to the agreement that the elders approaching the age of seventy are to be carried up Narayama mountain to die. The day prior to the mountain's festival, sixty-nine year old Orin prepares to leave, carried by her son Tatsuhei.
– Orin
In Keisuke Kinoshita's highly stylised 楢山節考, the arguably cruel (and most likely fictional) practice – of 姥捨て [ubasute, abandoning an old woman] – is superbly abstracted. Narration, dramatic lighting, colour filters and very obviously a soundstage underline that what we're watching is not a film, but a kabuki play.