Some people say that "Narayama Festival Kao" is a film about the relationship between mother and child. It sounds good at first, but I can't help thinking about it. As a director who is determined to show the true face of Japan, Imamura Shohei's ambition is obviously more than family love. In fact, when the coat of mother-child relationship is lifted, the film reflects the multiple facets of society and human nature, which are intricately intertwined, presenting a strange pre-modern social ethics.
About feminism.
At the beginning of the film, a baby is thrown into the farmland, the reason is a bit ridiculous, because it is a boy. Seeing this, it goes against the feudal society's ideology of valuing patriarchy over women, and I thought it was advocating women's rights. But in the end, I was too superficial. When the plot developed to the point where the new house asked Azhi to have sex with all the men in the village after his death in order to atone for his sin, and Chenping asked his wife to sleep with Risuke for one night in order to solve the problem of Libido who had nowhere to put his brother. It is found that the social status of women is still in the tool attribute. Everyone wants to have a baby girl because the baby girl can be sold for money, and the money can be used to maintain the patriarchal society. After all, a woman is just a rib in a man, a subsidiary existence that can be replaced at any time. Even if one rib is missing, it is unlikely to be life-threatening, and it is not a pity that new ones can grow after a good rest.
About time.
In the "Narayama Festival Exam", the villagers' cognition of the concept of time is almost absurd. While she was worried about the eldest son's continuation of the string and the second son's sexual hunger, she personally sent her grandson-in-law, who was pregnant with her own flesh and blood, to be buried alive. How can this paradoxical behavioral contrast be explained? I think that in their worldview, the timeline may not extend infinitely before and after, but only intercept the section that can be seen at the moment, the upper limit is seventy years old. As for newborn babies, they can be easily discarded in minutes because of the wrong gender, and thrown into the wilderness like garbage. And once they reach their seventies, whether they want to or not, they must accept Narayama as the last stop in their lives to make way for future generations. Therefore, in such an agricultural society, because of the lack of resources (not only food resources, but also reproductive resources), they have no time to think about it. There is no past, no future, only the real living conditions of the present moment.
About filial piety.
Regarding what filial piety is, Imamura Shohei made a clever discussion in the film. Chen Ping's father Liping has never appeared, and has always been a ghostly existence. In the dialogue between mother and son, Liping is a cowardly and unfilial son. He abandoned his wife and children and fled the village because he refused to carry his mother up the mountain. But in the chat between Aling Po and the neighbors, Liping is a reliable man with a pure heart, not like a perfidious bastard. This seemingly split dual personality finally reached a unity when Chenping sent his mother back to the mountain at the end of the film. Liping's image is reconstructed when he sees the mountains of corpses. It is precisely because of his pure heart that he is unwilling to abandon his mother mountains and vultures as companions, and fight against the ignorance of the world with so-called cowardice, even if it is only exchanged for a gunshot from his son. It was because of filial piety that Liping decided to give up sending his mother to pay homage to the god of Narayama, and Chen Ping also carried his mother to the mountains and rivers because of filial piety. The father and son started from the same starting point, but went to different ends. Find the right planet, go to the wrong universe.
About human nature.
Most of the villagers living at the foot of Mt. Nara have vivid and three-dimensional characters. They are the ones who work hard, they are lucky to bet, they are the neighbors who help each other, and they are the gangsters. There is no way for you to separate the villagers from the specific environment and make a simple evaluation. It is like talking about a face of white bones. You must squeeze the characters into detailed scenes in order to see the multiple faces of their flesh and blood. .
about nature.
Imamura Shohei interspersed a lot of animal pictures in the film, and most of them were mating scenes. The director may have a special preference for that kind of slippery, sticky creature, such as snakes, which made me horrified after giving enough shots. Food and sex, these are the two themes that are concentrated in the "Narayama Festival Kao". Obviously, in pre-modern society, human beings and nature are far from being reduced to today's binary opposition. Humans depend on nature to exist and coexist harmoniously. In modern society, the pace of human development requires the sacrifice of natural resources. We first drew the ground as a prison, surrounded ourselves in the city, then created a plot of land on the outskirts of the city, and then detained a group of pitiful animals.
"Narayama Festival Kao" should be the most famous work of Imamura Shohei's works preserved in later generations. I think that Ben devoted himself to studying with Akira Kurosawa, but finally became a student of Yasujiro Ozu by accident, and cooperated with Ozu as an assistant director to shoot many classics in the history of movies. Therefore, in the works of Imamura Shohei, you can still clearly find traces of Ozu, as if they all like to make films with bland narratives. However, under the ordinary, each has its own merits. Yasujiro Ozu hides the warmth of mortals under the setting of a bland narrative, such as "Good Morning", "Tokyo Story", such as "The Taste of Saury". However, Imamura Shohei is used to using the plain wrapping force to penetrate the paper back. Therefore, in "Eel", Yamashita-kun, who has just killed an adulterer and a prostitute, can hum a song while riding a bicycle, calmly and leisurely to the police station to surrender.
Although it is a master-apprentice relationship, with the maturity of the inner film philosophy system, Imamura Shohei later stood on the opposite side of the teacher, criticizing Ozu for only serving the official ideology and overly promoting the social theme. He himself claimed to expose the cold, violent, selfish and greedy side of Japan, thinking that this is the real Japan. In fact, in my opinion, both Ozu Yasujiro and Imamura Shohei only represent one-sided truth. Only when the two coexist can they constitute two sides of one body in Japanese society. As the anthropologist Levi-Strauss said, the moon has two sides, the visible side and the hidden side. Yasujiro Ozu is the sunny side of the moon, full of light and warmth, making people feel hopeful; Imamura Shohei is the shady side of the moon, full of darkness and cold, and teaches people to keep introspection.
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