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Snakes in Movies   The Ballad of Narayama (1983)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This masterpiece by the great Japanese director Shohei Imamura is a tale of a poor primitive Japanese villiage that kills off anyone over the age of 70 because of a scarcity of food. The film is quietly punctuated with many shots of animals, including snakes, without much comment. Each house seems to have a "house snake." The snakes are all shown behaving naturally, fighting, eating, birthing, without any apparent emotion or meaning other than to show the villagers' place in the natural world. In winter we see two coiled snakes which appear to have rats chewing on them. We see the same two snakes at the end of the film. As a young man and woman wrestle on the ground next to a creek in the forest, there is a cutaway to two striped yellow snakes wrestling (probably two males wrestling for dominance but they might be meant to represent a breeding pair.) We also see nesting birds and amplexing frogs. Snakes crawl on and in buildings. One snake eats a rodent. A man is in bed with his new wife, notices a snake moving across the floor. He tells the woman "the chief is moving" - that the snake is greeting her. When a man is talking to pregnant girl there is a cut away to a snake giving live birth. A family is shamed for stealing food. The stored bags of food are all taken away. Their house snake crawls away from the house, abandoning them.