Blu-ray, DVD Release: The Ballad of Narayama

By
Laurence
– November 19, 2012Find Others: Blu-ray, DVD, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: , ,

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Feb. 5, 2013
Price: DVD $19.95, Blu-ray $29.95
Studio: Criterion

The Ballad of Narayama

Kinuyo Tanaka wishes happiness for her son in The Ballad of Narayama.

The 1958 film drama The Ballad of Narayama is a haunting, kabuki-inflected version of a Japanese folk legend directed by Keisuke Kinoshita (Twenty-four Eyes).

The tale is set in a remote mountain village, where food is scarce and tradition dictates that citizens who have reached their seventieth year must be carried to the summit of Mount Narayama and left there to die. The sacrificial elder at the center of the tale is Orin (Ugetsu’s Kinuyo Tanaka), a dignified and dutiful woman who spends her dwindling days securing the happiness of her loyal widowed son with a respectable new wife.

Filmed almost entirely on cunningly designed studio sets, in vivid color and widescreen, The Ballad of Narayama is a stylish and vividly formal work by the dynamic Knoshita, one of the filmmaking giants of Japan’s cinematic golden age.

Presented in Japanese with English subtitles, the DVD and Blu-ray editions contain the following features:

· New 4K digital master from the 2011 restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
· Trailer and teaser
· New English subtitle translation
· A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Kemp

Buy or Rent The Ballad of Narayama
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.