The Poetics and Politics of the Naked Island

AC 29 (2) pp. 261–273 Intellect Limited 2018 Asian Cinema Volume 29 Number 2 © 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ac.29.2.261_1 Lauri KitsniK Kyoto University real and slow: the poetics and politics of The Naked Island abstract Keywords A seminal film that presaged the 1960s boom of independent cinema in Japan, film festivals Shindo¯ Kaneto’s The Naked Island (1960) also marked its director’s breakthrough independent film to the international market. This article examines how the film’s depiction of primi- Japanese cinema tive agrarian life, particularly the ‘authentic’ labouring bodies, relates to the notions neorealism of neorealism and ‘slow cinema’. Tracing its international influences, a comparison Shindo¯ Kaneto to Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) reveals how ‘poetical licence’ is an integral part slow cinema of documentary film with ethnographical aspirations. Working outside the restrictive nature of the Japanese studio system, The Naked Island consolidated the director’s stripped-down and self-sufficient methods of independent filmmaking. After winning the Grand Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival, it also brought him a considerable following amidst the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War. 裸の島 (The Naked Island) (1960) written and directed by Shindo¯ Kaneto 新藤兼人 (1912–2012), an experimental independent film without dialogue, has the reputation of having saved its director’s career from abruptly ending. It is also one of those films perhaps better known outside of Japan, after having initially succeeded in the international festival circuit. The present 261 07_AC_29.2_Kitsnik_261-273.indd 261 11/6/18 2:16 PM Lauri Kitsnik 1. While the names of article examines the film’s production and reception contexts and traces its the couple and their children are given in parallels in world cinema. The film’s repetitive images, overlong sequences the script as Senta, and a focus on labouring bodies bear some similarities to what is called ‘slow Toyo, Taro¯ and Jiro-, cinema’ and I draw from this notion to extrapolate the film’s intentions, influ- respectively, one might wonder why Shindo¯ ences and effects on the spectator. Placing The Naked Island against Robert bothered with the J. Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran (1934), I also speculate on the func- names at all as there is tion of ‘poetic licence’ in ethnographic film. The aim of this article is to exam- no reference to them (save for Taro¯ ’s grave ine how and why Shindo¯ ’s stylistic choices in The Naked Island are linked to marker) within the film the politics of independent filmmaking, which has implications for both film text. production in Japan and its worldwide reception. 2. The Naked Island was Shindo¯ ’s first collaboration with the sLowing down classical composer Hayashi Hikaru The first half hour of The Naked Island, the writer-director Shindo¯ Kaneto’s (1931–2012), noted international breakthrough, consists almost entirely of an extended sequence for his advocacy of depicting the everyday reality of a poor peasant family living on a tiny islet in Japanese-language opera, who was to the Seto Inland Sea that separates the Japanese main island from Shikoku. provide soundtracks for Devoid of a clear water source of their own, a man and a woman1 are collect- most of the director’s subsequent films. ing water from a neighbouring island and carrying it in wooden buckets on yokes first to their rowing boat, and then, after reaching the island, up 3. Matthew Flanagan (2008) has identified a steep slope all the way to the field to water sweet potato plants. There is a trend towards a no dialogue, only natural sounds and extradiegetic music2 and shots of the ‘cinema of walking’ perspiring bodies of the couple and the same gestures of walking, rowing and but this relates more readily to leisurely watering the plants repeated over and over again. Apart from a visit to the rather than labourious nearby town of Onomichi and the death of their eldest son, which introduces acts of covering drama into the film, there is little by way of plot and character development. distances by foot. As if to underline the cyclical logic of this miniature world, the film closes with another lengthy sequence of the couple going through the exact same motions as in the beginning. The film’s most infamous and salient feature is its lack of dialogue, a choice that the director felt compelled to explain on numerous occasions. Shindo¯ emphasized that his intention was neither to display nostalgia for silent cinema nor downplay the dramatic content, but quite to the contrary, to make the human struggle that is at the core of the film all the more visi- ble by focusing entirely on visual storytelling without the help (or hindrance) of words, save for a few titles that appear to denote the story’s setting and the changing of the seasons (Shindo¯ 1994: 154). While the decision to eschew dialogue is what makes The Naked Island stand out and alone in Shindo¯ ’s oeuvre, the director used the images of toiling and sweating bodies to similar effect in a number of films. I have argued elsewhere (Kitsnik 2014) that employing repeated gestures of labour in duration that clearly exceeds such devices as establishing shots can in fact be identified as a major motif in Shindo¯ ’s directing career. There is an undeniably dynamic choreography and sheer visual beauty in these images shot in crisp black and white and edited to include a variety of frames and angles, but the slow and steady pace of the depicted manual labour is certainly devised to have an excruciating effect upon the viewer.3 Looked at today, The Naked Island also seems to feed readily into the popular perception of Asian cinema (with the obvious exception of action genres) as being somehow inherently slow-paced and/or uneventful. At the same time, the notion of ‘slow cinema’, characterized by ‘the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of 262 Asian Cinema 07_AC_29.2_Kitsnik_261-273.indd 262 11/6/18 2:16 PM Real and slow Figure 1: The bucket carrying scene from The Naked Island. storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday’ 4. The uncovered print was missing its first and (Flanagan 2008), has gained ‘unprecedented critical valence in the last last reel, amounting to decade’ (de Luca and Barradas Jorge 2015: 1) within film studies, and has only 93 of the original proved effective when examining the works of such contemporary auteurs 142 minutes. Another, 119-minute version of world cinema as Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr and Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮. of the film, similarly Within this critical framework, several attempts have also been made to missing the last reel, trace cinematic slowness back to a string of European modernist and exper- was discovered in Russia around the turn imental films of the postwar era, starting with Italian neorealism, while we of the millennium. have been warned that such an evolutionary approach ‘legitimizes a history 5. There is a link between of film style that is decidedly teleological and also Eurocentric’ (de Luca and the two directors, as Barradas Jorge 2015: 9). Shindo¯ , a fledgling screenwriter, was While the neorealist intentions and influences of The Naked Island cannot assigned to work be denied, there is indeed an alternative lineage that includes both Japanese with Uchida Tomu and international precedents stretching back to the prewar years. In the film 土 (1898–1970) on a film in Manchuria in the early Earth (内田吐夢 Uchida, 1939), there is a sequence, strikingly similar to scenes 1940s. The project was in The Naked Island, where a peasant couple is carrying buckets of water on cancelled after several yokes for a lengthy distance to water their plants. While Earth, long thought to rewrites, and Tomu, who had stayed, was have been entirely lost until a partial print was discovered in a German archive taken prisoner at the in 1968,4 was not available at the time of the making of The Naked Island, it end of war, returning to Japan only in 1954, is tempting to speculate whether Shindo¯ might have alluded to and in fact where he commenced recreated the image of dry soil being watered from this earlier film.5 On the directing and reached other hand, Earth was made amidst the general political climate that sought a late career peak with films such as the highly to emphasize the agricultural substratum of the nation, which certainly helped acclaimed 飢餓海峡 A to bring it instant critical acclaim, demonstrated by the fact of being chosen (Fugitive from the Past) as the best Japanese film of 1939 by the annual Kinema Junpo¯ critics’ poll.6 (1965). Shot on location in northern Japan over the course of a year, partly to capture 6. Incidentally, the the changing of the seasons, Earth was truly exceptional at a time when the late 1930s in Japan witnessed a sudden Japanese film industry used to churn out features on an almost weekly basis. proliferation of films This much-delayed production could only have been accomplished in a safe that featured the word tsuchi (earth, soil) in environment of studio production, something that, as we shall see later, was their titles. not at all available for Shindo¯ .7 www.intellectbooks.com 263 07_AC_29.2_Kitsnik_261-273.indd 263 11/6/18 4:16 PM Lauri Kitsnik Figure 2: The bucket carrying scene from Earth. 7. Similarly to Uchida, Labouring bodies Shindo¯ wanted to capture the changing From both a stylistic and a structural point of view, The Naked Island is still of the seasons in The too fast and dramatic to be considered as a typical example of slow cinema.

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