Author: Haden Guest
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Standard Collection (May 17, 2016)
Shinto's skillful Naked Island, a novel and ingenious blend of silent film and modern documentary, seems to float between two worlds, depicting twentieth-century peasant life as both an eternal allegory of human perseverance and a sharp critique of Japan's sudden leap into a new world order of capitalism.
Naked Island
In fact, the 1960 film marked a pivotal transition in the history of postwar Japanese cinema, somewhere between the late boom of the big studios and the radical New Wave of the late '60s, often considered the last golden period of classical filmmaking in the '50s.
Naked Island's heartfelt concern for Japan's lower classes clearly coincides with its determined and often resentful humanism, embodied in the postwar work of Akira Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, and Kenji Mizoguchi, the first mentor of Nito; it focuses on life and work in contemporary Rural Japan, anticipating the keen interest of a new generation of filmmakers in local and folk traditions.
The film's significant avoidance of dialogue injects an abstract, almost mythical character into the four characters, who remain the firm focus of the film: a couple and their two young sons struggle to live on an isolated rocky island with no fresh water and no other inhabitants. The people in the family in Naked Island have neither a name nor a voice, and sometimes seem to resemble characters in hymns about land and labor directed by Soviet film directors of the silent era, such as Alexander Dudurenko and Vrushevrod Pudovkin.
However, the avant-garde composer Lin Guang's memorable series of soundtracks clearly shows another sympathetic perspective of the proletariat offered here. Without a heroic symphony, this peasant's story has only a minimal, melancholy theme, constantly repeating a rhythm almost like a labor trumpet, echoing the endless cycle of the apparent utilitarian world of the film, where every action is a meager and onerous harvest for the sake of the family.
For the 48-year-old director, Naked Island is a very personal work, and he himself is at a critical moment in his career, as an independent filmmaker, he strives to survive, finding creative and financial freedom outside the dominant system of big studios.
Niito has been active in his screenwriting career since the early 1940s, directing his first two films for Daiei Pictures Co., Ltd., but he found himself increasingly frustrated with the studio's rigid hierarchical structure, and in 1950 he bravely teamed up with fellow director Konzaburo Yoshimura and actor Taiji Teresan to form the groundbreaking independent production company, the Modern Film Association.
The company's early projects included Shinto's third film, Children of the Atomic Bomb (1952), a documentary-style drama that provided a moving voice to politically charged humanism, the highest goal of his long and varied career. Although the project was commissioned by the Japanese teachers' union, Shindo flatly rejected the outspoken anti-American statements they demanded, instead issuing a sad lament for the tragic devastation caused by the war, refusing to easily blame either side.
Children of The Atomic Bomb
A native of Hiroshima and an Army veteran, Shindo was sensitive to the death toll of war, and he later returned to this point in The Fifth Fukuryu Maru (1959), a film about the tragic story of Japanese fishermen affected by the hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Despite such a pressing current nature, Shinto's films failed to achieve commercial success and therefore could not realize his ambitions, but he decided to try again, pinning the hopes of the Modern Film Association and a lot of private investment on the film that was unwilling to compromise and probably the last project, namely "Naked Island".
《The Fifth Fukuryu Maru》
The film's budget was minimal, and the production crew and cast were of low specs, including Shinto's future wife, Nobuko Oto, and business partner Taiji Teresan. The film's fragile production reflects the precarious state of independent filmmaking in postwar Japan.
Compared to Shinto's earlier works, Naked Island, while more daring in style, is a more nuanced post-Hiroshima film that ponders the trauma left by the atomic bomb and the ambiguous future of postwar Japan.
In fact, the location of the filming site that bears his name is located in Hiroshima Prefecture, a very small island that shows its miniature whole through dramatic aerial footage at the beginning and end of the film. The film uses this difficult island as a metaphor for the island nation of Japan, visually reminding people that isolation and lack of natural resources are the original conditions of Japan, which is the fundamental revelation of the catastrophic reconstruction of a country that was still an imperialist superpower in the first half of the 20th century.
However, the intense diligence that drove Japan's first rapid industrialization and later fueled its post-World War II economic recovery is also vaguely reflected in the agricultural labor force that Naked Island portrays as Sisyphus. Families are all running, never walking slowly, they work tirelessly and have no time to meaningfully touch each other, let alone talk. Like the iconic "wage earners" who propelled Japan's economy forward in the 1950s, farmers remain locked in an eternal cycle of work, excluding them from the world they work tirelessly upheld.
Naked Island is often compared to Robert Flahadi's The Aaron Man (1934) and hailed as a poem about man's eternal struggle to dominate the restless nature. However, while both works are wonderful plays about life dependent on and destroyed by the sea, Naked Island's sharp critique of the time makes it distinctly different from Flahadi's folklore and mythological perspective.
The Aaron Man
Flahadi uses amateur actors in the background of the Arun Islands, providing a rich dimension for the distant worlds he bravely explores, while Shinto works with professional actors on an uninhabited island. Unlike traditionally entrenched real-life locations, The Island of The New Vine is a constructed metaphor, and in addition, it stands in stark contrast to the modern continent glimpsed in some fragments.
In those scenes, the family leaves home briefly, drawn to the shiny world of material goods, and indulges in novel, concise images provided by televisions in shop windows, and cable cars overlooking the steep mountainside of the inland sea. This unique sequence is a stark reminder of Japan's emerging consumer culture, breaking the magic of the island's seemingly distant world, making its geographically close but ridiculous distance from the miraculous products of the 20th century.
The returning peasants in Naked Island are politically charged characters who also articulate a fascination with the "primitive" of the new Japanese history and culture, which gradually appeared in the films of the 1950s and later blossomed in the works of New Wave directors such as Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Kawahara, pioneer documentary filmmaker Shinsuke Ogawa, and most importantly, Masahira Imamura.
Imagine an early scene where a strangely comical contrast is staged between a family rushing to eat and the farm animals around them, with farmers stuffing rice into their mouths and goats and ducks greedily eating grain and leaves. Like Masahira Imamura's voracious characters and unconventional thrilling comedies, "Infinite Desire" (1958) and "The Pig and the Warship" (1961), for example, the witty moments in Naked Island can serve as a refutation of the polite and glamorous world of Ozu Yasujiro's films, turning the ritual of a meal into a comical and vulgar scene.
Pigs and Warships
Similarly, the strange staring of peasants at the television set in front of the store made the most important, mouth-watered television set in Ozu's Good Morning (1959) strange and almost obscene.
In subsequent films, however, Nido clearly departed from the contemporary cultural anthropology and entomological studies accepted by Nagisa Oshima and Masahira Imamura in favor of tracing history and mythology, rediscovering the dark ghost stories that inspired his later masterpieces, Ghost Woman (1964) and Black Cat (1968).
"Ghost Mother"
Despite the prolific and diverse nature of his work, Shinto remains a largely neglected figure in Japan and overseas, and his early career as a director in particular needs to be re-evaluated. Like the rugged Hahihito of the contemporary era, Shindo ignited the documentary impulse of postwar cinema, a fervent and determined quest to confront Japan's postwar contradictions, which was fully expressed in Naked Island.
A staunch independent filmmaker involved in politics, Shindo challenged nationalist sermons and hymns built up under censorship by the American occupation and previous fascist regimes, making a disturbing argument that Japan's national character is essentially unchanging, rooted in the soil of rocky islands, plagued by ghosts, shipwrecks, and famine.
The final message of Naked Island is that life and work must continue—no matter what the cost—and it simultaneously serves as a harbinger of an existential fable, a ghost story, and an upcoming radical confrontational film.