The Naked Island (1960)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Naked Island (1960) – K. Shindô

Wordless but not silent, Kaneto Shindô’s The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima) feels almost like ethnography as it details the (hard) lives of a family of four who live on a small rocky island in the Seto Inland Sea of Southern Japan.  They carry fresh water in large wooden buckets from another island (paddling across the sea in a wooden boat) just to irrigate their crops, which seem to be dying of heatstroke on the exposed cliff face.  No one speaks, they just work; the husband tends to the field while the wife carries the water and the children help to prepare meals (when they are not being ferried to school by the mother).  They take turns having a bath in an old oil drum. There is an almost tactile sensuality to the widescreen images – and the Foley artists seem to be working overtime!  Indeed, it slowly becomes apparent that the sounds have been consciously selected, along with the jaunty (almost Tati-like) musical theme which changes its pace and mood along with the events portrayed.  When the two sons manage to catch a fish, the family heads to the nearest town (jarringly this is a modern film, taking place in 1960 or thereabouts) for an evening out (restaurant, cable car up a mountain). A late tragedy darkens the film’s tone dramatically, almost turning it to horror (a nod toward this director’s later masterworks in that genre: Onibaba, 1964, and Kuroneko, 1968).  Stoically (except for a brief release of tension and pain), the family continues their daily routine (wordlessly).  The result is hypnotic and beautiful, but perplexing in its intentions. Why the constraint of wordlessness? Is this hard, almost Sisyphean life, a metaphor for another fruitless challenge?  Regardless, it works as a pseudo-documentary of a place and lifestyle you’ve never seen before.