"Narayama Festival Test" is a genre novel based on folklore by Shichiro Fukasawa. As early as 1958, the great director Keisuke Kinoshita put "Narayama Festival Test" on the screen. Unfortunately, I never watched Kinoshita Keisuke. Only one black and white picture was seen in the "History of Japanese Cinema" written by Chang Iwasaki in 1960. A master who has been immersed in Japanese movies for many years may not necessarily mention in his article, “One of the differences between Imamura's "Narayama Festival Kao" and Kinoshita's version is that Imamura, known as the The real-time shooting is different from the stage background of the Kinoshita version; the second and biggest difference is that Imamura took the same cruel'natural' perspective in dealing with this cruel story, while Kinoshita added a humanitarian stance of criticism of good and evil, which makes it even more obvious. Human touch.” As for the level of the two editions, the Kinoshita edition was selected as one of the 100 Best 100 Years of "Cinema Xunbao"; the Imamura edition won the Cannes Palme d'Or in 1983.
1. Eat.
The film tells that more than a hundred years ago, in a remote mountain village in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, facing the local customs of abandoning the old (that is, due to lack of food, old people aged 70 years old were carried by their sons to Narayama to die. ), about 70-year-old A Lingpo's physical and psychological activities. One of the most impressive is A Lingpo's calmness, and even makes people feel positive and eager to go to the mountain. She seems to take it for granted that everything is natural. When the grandson Chao Ji compiled a nursery rhyme and said that Lingpo was a hag with 33 teeth, and it was sung by others, Lingpo felt ashamed as if she had done something wrong. She even went to Jingyan to knock off her teeth secretly, and at that time she said, "Bah, only two." Then she faced Xuxian Ayu, who had just opened up for her son Chenping, her mouth full of blood. Ling Po seemed to show off and said, "I'm old, my teeth are dead, and I'm going to the mountain." Good teeth, good appetite, good health, good food and fragrant, but this is sinful to her, and it's useless. For the elderly, we can’t waste food for our children and grandchildren.
Contrary to Alingpo’s calm and resoluteness is the hesitation and incompleteness of her son Tatsuhira. Although she is unwilling to abandon her mother on the mountain, the lack of food in reality determines that one more person may be starved to death. Besides, There is one more useless old man. And abandoning the old, this is the tradition of this village for hundreds of years. The reality is the foundation of the tradition, and the tradition has further safeguarded the reality. Chen Ping, an insignificant individual, does not have the courage to resist reality and tradition, and can only obey this tradition against his own will. Masilo’s level of needs believes that people have five types of needs: 1. Physiological needs, including clothing, food, shelter, transportation, and sex; 2. Safety needs: elderly care, disease treatment, and insurance; 3. Social communication needs: people are To survive in a group, you need to make a circle of friends, etc.; 4. Mental needs: people need to respect, respect and be respected by others; 5. Need for self-realization: the highest level of needs, do what you want to do. And the lack of food smashes all the beautiful superstructures of human society with little self-confidence.
There is also a section in the film where the family in the rain house was buried alive because their parents stole food from the village, including Chao Ji's pregnant wife Asong. What is impressive is that the rain house said that there are too many children in his family, so he steals if there is not enough food. The villagers answered, who gave birth to most of the children. This actually has a subtext, which means that after giving birth, you should kill most of them. At the beginning of the film, villagers dumped the newly born baby boy into the field, and Chenping’s younger brother Risuke quarreled with others and said, “You almost made fertilizer”. This shows that the cruel reality makes childbirth only serve the necessary reproduction. In the case of extremely backward contraceptive conditions, redundant children are even artificially destroyed at birth, and the children are completely reduced to a by-product of courtship. People who have not been completely accustomed to the traditional instinct of unwillingness to abandon their children can only steal in the face of the reality of hunger, and are eventually buried alive by the whole family and cut off the roots. Survival of the fittest is revealed here to the fullest.
2. Sex.
In Imamura's "Narayama Festival Kao", the main activity of human beings is sex, which is also the basic activity for humans to reproduce. And in many cases sex is also for serving, just like Asong and Chaoji, it’s nothing more than Genzi’s. It seems that the women who Chaoji look for in the future are also for this reason, and Ayu doesn’t come to Genzi’s house to say, they told me Good food here. In the film, sex is not as beautiful as most of the time. It is naked, direct, and even ugly. Imamura Shohei, who had been shooting a documentary for a long time, even interspersed with many sex scenes at the same time some scenes of animal intercourse, such as frogs. Snakes, etc., are all implying the animal nature of humans.
The role of Yuriju in the film highlights the repression of sex caused by poverty, that is, lack of food. Here, in most families, only the eldest son has the right to marry for the purpose of reproduction. Even if other children are not "humanely destroyed" after birth, it is difficult for them to have the right to marry. Risuke is such a role, coupled with the inherently stinky incomparableness, and no one cares about it. His loneliness can only be vented by the white dog in the village. And when the mother who was about to go up the mountain begged her neighbor who is about sixty years old to meet Lisuke, Imamura’s unshirkable shots accompanied Lisuke’s naked aging on the cluttered haystacks again and again. On the female body, at that moment, I was not the only one who was shocked by such ugly intercourse and laughed.
3. Go up the mountain.
If it was the foreshadowing of the film, then Chenping carrying Alingpo up the mountain is the natural climax of the film. After preparing for the ceremony, Lingpo, who could not speak, was secretly carried on the road by the same silent Chenping in the early hours of the morning. Silence contains more emotions, unbearable but very helpless. After Chenping scratched her foot, Lingpo hurriedly tore the cloth from the corner of her clothes and wrapped it up. Maternal love, what a great and ordinary maternal love, isn't Lingpo going up the mountain to live better for her children and grandchildren. The reality is cruel, Chenping finally became more cruel and calm, "For hundreds of years, our ancestors were like this, now I am carrying you up the mountain, and in 25 years, Chao Ji will carry me up the mountain. In another 25 years, it will be Chao Ji is going to be carried up the mountain." So we can only continue on the road, and the bones everywhere at the destination confirm the great tradition of these hundreds of years. We don't need to be shocked anymore. We are all used to being calm. But when Chenping wanted to leave the lunch to A Ling Po, A Ling Po silently pushed away, handed it, and pushed it away; when Chen Ping finally hugged A Ling Po in tears and whimpered, the long-term depression became more turbulent. The gushing out, in fact, we don't want to be like this. After that, Lingpo sat peacefully in the heavy snow, waiting quietly for death, I had already sobbed.
When Chenping went down the mountain, he saw a neighbor coming with his father on his back. He only went to the mountainside and his father cried and refused to go up the mountain. During the push, the son pushed his father down the cliff. The shot of the old man rolling down quickly even challenged the audience again. Numb nerves. But Chen Ping just watched quietly from the side, without blocking or accusing, he also used a slightly decent form to do things that didn't make much difference. And is this also the director telling the audience, don’t blame Chenping, how much better can you be?
4. Conclusion.
The miserable truth of Imamura's "Narayama Festival Kao" can't help but make people wonder-is this Japanese history or folklore? The Japanese director Terayama Shuji once explained: “No one knows exactly what is real and what is fantasy. For Japanese film critics, Imamura’s sin is that he blends the two seamlessly and is indistinguishable.” Those who have watched some of Imamura’s documentaries. I have learned about Imamura’s truth-seeking spirit of breaking the casserole. But whether this is legend or history, what was Imamura's purpose for making this film? Is it just to tell a tragic story? The master of French existentialism asked Paul Sartre to talk about in "What is Literature" that literature is for exposing and exposing is for change. In fact, movies often do the same, but in Japan in the 1980s, Imamura’s "Narayama Festival Kao" obviously no longer has the significance of revealing reality, so what is its significance. Or the ordinary state of interpersonal living makes us unable to pay more attention to the eased human nature and the ethical relationship of the upper strata, just like the worry-free Western Jin Hui Emperor who did not understand the victims of hunger and change of children, "Why not? Minced meat?". So Imamura pushed the state of human existence directly to the edge, with only one bite of rice, who would you give it to? All moral preaching is pale and weak here. Or those scenes of animal predation and mating inserted from time to time show that the director originally equated people with animals. At the beginning of the film, a group of people barked and chased the hare like hunting dogs, but after Chenping shot and killed the hare, The sudden appearance of an eagle snatching the hare directly puts man in the food chain of nature.
Or, in this story that is ultimately caused by food, what Imamura wants to say is that poverty is the root of all evil. To be a human being, and to eat a full meal, will there be social ethics to be discussed later.
Monday, January 8, 2007 Baise Sunny
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