Blending Silent Cinema and Documentary
Based on an innovative blend of silent cinema techniques and contemporary documentary, Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island occupies a liminal space between two different artistic eras. The film’s depiction of the life of a 20th-century farming family transcends its specific time period, standing at once as a timeless allegory for human perseverance and a sharp critique of Japan’s sudden fall into the capitalist world order. Indeed, it marked an important point in the evolution of post-war Japanese cinema. The film became a bridge between the waning years of the studio system that characterized the 1950s, always referred to as the last heyday of classic filmmaking, and the emergence of the radical New Wave movement in the late 1960s.
The film avoids spoken dialogue in such a conspicuous way that it gives the four main characters an abstract, almost mythological quality. The stern figures (a husband and wife and their two young sons) continue to be the focus of their attention as they struggle to earn a living on a remote and rocky island with no fresh water and no other inhabitants. Nameless and powerless to speak, the family in The Naked Island at times seems to have emerged from the pages of a tribute to silent-era Soviet filmmakers like Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Vsevolod Pudovkin. However, the disturbing series of music composed by avant-garde musician Hikaru Hayashi acts to illuminate the perspective of diversity and empathy towards the proletariat. Instead of heroic symphonic music, the peasants’ narratives are only decorated with sparse and melancholic themes. The endless repetition assumes a rhythm similar to a work song, echoing the endless cycle of the highly profitable film world. Here, every move is precisely designed to fulfill the absolute goal of the family’s meager but burdensome harvest.
Evoking Empathy and Universality
The Naked Island is a project of comprehensive personal significance for Shindo. At the time, the forty-eight year old filmmaker found himself at a critical crossroads in his career. He was involved in a persistent struggle to maintain his independence as a filmmaker. Shindo’s career in the film industry began in the early 1940s, when he honed his specialty as a screenwriter. His first efforts came with two films produced by Daiei Studios. However, the studio system’s rigid hierarchical structure increasingly frustrated Shindo. In a bold move demonstrating his unspoken enthusiasm, he joined forces with fellow director Kozaburo Yoshimura and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950. Together, they founded the pioneering independent production company known as Kindai Eiga Kyokai. The venture paved the way for Shindo’s third feature film Children of Hiroshima. The film’s giving voice to politically charged humanism would remain a central tenet of Shindo’s long and varied career. Despite the project originating from the Japan Teachers Association commission, Shindo refused to comply with their request to depict the United States critically. In defiance, he created an elegy for the devastating destruction caused by war.
Shindo’s sensitivity to the human cost of war stems from his dual identity as a native son of Hiroshima and an army veteran who personally witnessed the horrors of the conflict. The preoccupation reappears in the next film, Lucky Dragon No. 5. A harrowing dramatization based on the true story of Japanese tuna fishermen suffering from radiation poisoning after being impacted by American hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, the film is a reminder of the consequences nuclear war still has.
Shindo’s Personal and Cinematic Legacy
Although his films have an undeniable social urgency and relevance, Shindo’s artistic vision struggled to achieve the level of commercial success necessary to realize his ambitious projects. Undeterred by financial setbacks, Shindo persevered. He decided to make his last effort to achieve artistic and financial stability, thereby risking the hopes of Kindai Eiga Kyokai. Additionally, he donated most of his personal resources to fund the uncompromising and potentially career-defining project that was The Naked Island.
The production of The Naked Island showed how precarious independent filmmaking was in postwar Japan. The film was characterized by its shoestring budget, limited crew, and cast consisting mostly of close collaborators, including Shindo’s future wife, Nobuko Otowa, and his business partner, Tonoyama. The limitations of the film underscore the enormous challenges faced by independent filmmakers in their struggle to create works of art outside the confines of Japan’s mainstream film industry.
Isolation, Scarcity, and Transformation
Despite its eye-rolling style approach, The Naked Island emerges as a more subdued post-Hiroshima film compared to Shindo’s previous works. It is a more nuanced contemplation of the lasting trauma caused by the atomic bomb and the uncertain future facing Japan in the postwar era. It’s true how the film is set in Hiroshima Prefecture itself. It is a very small island. Interpreted as a geographic metaphor for the island nation of Japan, the island stands as a reminder of the isolation and scarcity of natural resources representing Japan’s fundamental condition. The factors were the main driving force behind the country’s major transformation into an imperialist superpower in the first half of the 20th century.
In addition, the film presents a complex picture of the strong determination to drive Japan’s rapid early industrialization and then drive its economic recovery after World War II. Ambiguously, the unfree spirit manifested in the agricultural work depicted in The Naked Island. It is described very vividly in Sisyphean language. The family keeps running, never walking, because they work tirelessly. They lack time for meaningful interactions or even conversations with each other. Similar to the iconic image of Japanese “salary workers” holding their briefcases and constantly pushing the country’s economy forward in the fifties, the farmers remained trapped in a perpetual cycle of work.
Humanity vs. Modernity
The Naked Island is often compared to Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. Both was hailed as a poetic ode to humanity’s relentless struggle to dominate the forces of the wild. Despite the films having a thematic core of high drama revolving around life dictated by and ultimately threatened by the sea, the films’ stark social commentary distinguishes them relevantly from Flaherty’s folklore and mythmaking approach. Flaherty’s decision to cast non-actors gives his depiction of a remote world with a layer of swaggering authenticity. Instead, Shindo employs professional actors on an uninhabited island. Shindo Island transcends a real-life location with established traditions and is a carefully constructed metaphor.
The film emphasizes the metaphorical construction by contrasting the remoteness of the island with glimpses of the modernized mainland. The “floating interlude” occurs when the family ventures off the island. They were fascinated by the new experiences offered by technology such as televisions showing captivating images in shop windows, and cable car rides offering technologically mediated views of the Inland Sea from the top of steep hillsides. The juxtaposition serves as a reminder of Japan’s emerging consumer culture. The single sequence breaks the charm of a seemingly distant island world, highlighting the cruel absurdity of its geographic proximity to a 20th century wonder, yet its isolation from such a wonder.
Redefining the Eating Ritual
Beyond its political overtones, the depiction of atavistic peasants was also a clear manifestation of the growing interest in Japanese cinema in the 1950s towards “primitive” concepts in the nation’s history and cultural identity. The subtly present exploration later found full expression in the work of leading New Wave directors such as Nagisa Ōshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara, documentary pioneer Shinsuke Ogawa, and most famously, Shōhei Imamura.
A closer examination of certain scenes in exemplifies nascent primitive exploration. The scene presents a strange comedic juxtaposition between a family rushing to eat food and nearby farm animals. The director frequently cuts between farmers quickly stuffing rice into their mouths and goats and ducks hungrily devouring grain and leaves. The deliberately created scene can be interpreted as a direct response to the refined and courtly world depicted in Yasujirō Ozu’s later films. Through the scene, Shindo turns the traditional eating ritual into a humorous and vulgar spectacle.
Shindo’s Unconventional Legacy
Likewise, the scene depicting the farmer’s unusual and almost blank gaze at the television in a shop window alienates and makes the coveted television almost obscene, a major symbol in Ozu’s Good Morning. This deliberate alienation further emphasizes the contrast between Ozu’s established aesthetic and Shindo’s exploration of the “primitive” in Japanese culture.
Despite his prolific and diverse body of work, Shindo unfortunately remains a relatively unknown figure in the cinematic landscape both in his home country and internationally. The lack of recognition especially prevalent at the start of his directing career required re-evaluation. Just as his contemporary Susumu Hani was unconventional, Shindo sparked a strong documentary impulse in the postwar Japanese film industry. The drive manifested as an effort to confront the contradictions that characterized Japan’s postwar period.
Beyond Genre
As a fiercely independent and politically engaged filmmaker, Shindo challenged the nationalist narratives and idealized depictions prevalent during the censorship regime of the US occupation and the fascist era before it. He did so by advancing a very uncomfortable argument: how the fundamental character of Japanese society had remained largely unchanged. Shindo argues how the characters are deeply rooted in the harsh reality of the island nation. The Naked Island ends with a message beyond its specific narrative. It reminds us how life and efforts to work must continue. In doing so, the film transcends genre while simultaneously becoming an existential fable, a chilling ghost story, and a harbinger of the more radical countercinema that would emerge in the years to come.
Bibliography
- Guest, H. (2016). The Naked Island: The Silence of the Sea. Current | The Criterion Collection.
- Jenkins, C. (2016). ‘The Naked Island’ and the Centrality of Work to Existence. PopMatters.
- Kovács, A. B. (2007). Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980. The University of Chicago Press.
- Wang, B. (2004). Trauma and cinema: cross-cultural explorations. Choice Reviews Online.
