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 direc- tor’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

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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

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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

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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. Naked Island, but due to time constraints, the However, what brings it somewhat close to this cinematic mode – besides sequences depicting its durational effect on audiences – are certain shared thematic preoccu- two different seasonal festivals were both pations that gravitate towards depicting marginal rural communities and filmed in July 1960 in employing an approach akin to that of documentary film. The Naked Island the course of only two was certainly successful in tricking its international audience (who unlike days. the domestic ones would not have recognized the well-known actors Otowa Nobuko and Tonoyama Taiji as the film’s leads) into believing that they were watching an ethnographic film that authentically depicts agricultural life at the margins of contemporary Japan. In fact, Shindo¯ points out that the members of the international press, who interviewed him at the Moscow International Film Festival where The Naked Island received the Grand Prize, were all convinced that the actors were amateur performers (Shindo¯ 1994: 137). Karl Schoonover, writing on slow cinema, has reminded us how corpo- reality is very much part of neorealism as understood through a Bazinian lens, for which ‘potency resides in using nonprofessionals in key roles […] neorealism accrues its value through the performance of amateur bodies’

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(2012: 69). For Bazin, it is the bodies of amateur actors in films such as 8. An anecdote has it that in 東京物語 Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948) that lend credibility to the claims of (Tokyo Story) (1953), realism and create a site of identification (and exhaustion) for the audience. Ozu Yasujiro¯ based La terra trema could be seen as yet another point of reference and influ- the language spoken by the grandparents ence for The Naked Island, although it is a very different film in both intent from the small town and execution. Depicting an attempted revolt among the fishing commu- Onomichi on that nity in rural southern Italy, its explicit political content is displayed by way of Shindo¯ , whom he had befriended when of extended debates on the realities of low-paid labour among the workers. both still worked at While being noted for his advocacy of Visconti’s work, Bazin quipped that the Sho¯ chiku studios the director’s ‘disinclination to sacrifice anything to drama has one obvious (Ishizaka 1995: 148). and serious consequence: La Terra Trema bores the public’ (Bazin 2005: 45). 9. See Kitsnik (2014) for how Shindo¯ has Schoonover has suggested that what is at work in both neorealism and slow recycled the famous cinema is a ‘labour of viewing’, in which the bodies of the spectators are put montage sequence through a physical ordeal simply by the experience of watching these images from 原爆の子 () (1952) in (Schoonover 2012: 68). his subsequent work. While extreme labour depicted in The Naked Island is matched by the effort 10. I have not been able taken by the audiences, the parallels do not end here. Shindo¯ has admitted to determine whether to putting the professional actors through considerable hardship during the and when Shindo¯ saw shooting of the film in an attempt to tease an ‘authentic’ performance out of Man of Aran, which premiered in Japan in them. The excessive bucket-carrying even resulted in the female lead, Otowa 1935. Nobuko 乙羽信子, getting her skin peeled off in layers several times (Shindo¯ and Hayashi 2000). The two actors could also be described as somewhat atypical of Japanese stars of the day: Otowa praised by Shindo¯ for looking like as a common Japanese woman, and Tonoyama Taiji 殿山泰司, a self- proclaimed supporting player (三文役者), a character actor with very unusual facial features. If realism is invested in bodies, it should also be noted that Shindo¯ ’s own rugged appearance has often been described as more befit- ting of a common labourer or a fisherman than a filmmaker (Yamagiwa 1961: 51). Looked at in this way, the body of the director, who, while based in Tokyo, never managed to lose his thick local accent from western Japan, itself becomes a site of authenticity.8 Such drive for (or play with) authenticity certainly feeds into a temptation to regard The Naked Island as an ethnographic film or a kind of documentary. Joan Mellen is only one among many scholars who have called it a semi-docu- mentary (1975: 74). This view seems appropriate because in a number of films, Shindo¯ has merged fiction and documentary film styles, often by re-enacting historical events. Subsequently, such scenes have sometimes ended up being used by the director as documentary footage.9 Shindo¯ also directed a docu- mentary, らくがき黒板 (Scribbling Blackboard) (1959), just before embarking on the production of The Naked Island. This film about a primary school in Mihara, a coastal town just miles away from Sukunejima where The Naked Island was shot, actually presented Shindo¯ with an opportunity to make prep- arations for the subsequent project.

Taking poetic licence Any kind of narrative filmmaking, including documentary, necessitates some poetic licence. Robert J. Flaherty, commonly considered the father of docu- mentary film, famously said that ‘[s]ometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit’ (Barsam 1988: 118). In fact, Flaherty’s silent film Man of Aran (1934) has remarkable similarities to The Naked Island, and could be seen as a precursor, if not a direct influence.10 At any rate, both its

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11. Similar criticism has insular setting and approach to material are highly informative in comparison been laid on Man of Aran’s celebrated shark to the choices that Shindo¯ made in his depiction of agrarian life. Man of Aran hunting sequence depicts the seemingly premodern living conditions and daily routines of a for which people fishermen’s community on an island (Inishmore) off the west coast of Ireland. were brought in from Scotland to teach this Importantly, Man of Aran upon its release provoked disputes about the nature ‘forgotten tradition’ to of documentary film and ‘its reputation today rests as much on the debate the local fishermen. and controversies that it raises as it does on Flaherty’s aesthetic achievement’ (McLoone 2005: 51). What accounts for perhaps the most striking resemblance between the two films is their respective agricultural premise: in The Naked Island it is the absence of a clear water source that necessitates retrieving it from another island, while the issue in Man of Aran is the lack of soil for growing pota- toes. Apparently, a farming family has to look for what little they can find in crevices in the rocky ground, and then drag and carry it to the field. By way of another parallel, the Irish are here identified with their staple sustenance much like the poor Japanese in The Naked Island are associated with sweet potato, rather than rice, which is meant for the wealthier classes. At the same time, the existence of the type of potato farming depicted in Man of Aran has been denied by the critics and Flaherty accused of fabrication.11 Shindo¯ , for his part, has readily admitted that The Naked Island is not a film about farming or even an accurate depiction of agrarian life. In a

Figure 3: The potato growing scene from Man of Aran.

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commentary track recorded for the ‘’ DVD of the film, the director relates that

In fact you shouldn’t really water the plants in the full sun like this. The soil will just dry out. […] I know that well because I come from a farming family. That’s why I could do it. It would have been strange if I’d done it this way without knowing that. That’s what I wanted to do [it]. Watering the plants when the sun shines means that you water the spirit. And that’s how I decided to use the dry land to express this. (Shindo¯ and Hayashi 2000)

Underlining his personal knowledge and background, Shindo¯ also playfully engages with the alienation and ignorance of contemporary audiences to create this stylized version of farming. Shindo¯ is exaggerating for dramatic impact and in so doing provides a commentary on how far Japan has developed from being a predominantly agricultural nation to becoming an industrial economy. If the deliberate inaccuracy on Shindo¯ ’s part was having the farmers water plants under intense sunlight, what Flaherty has been accused of by scholars is his refusal to show the scope of social inequality on the island. When the camera pans from the cliffs to show the village, it stops halfway not to reveal the well-cultivated fields of the more affluent inhabitants of Aran. Richard Barsam points out Flaherty’s apparent obliviousness to all matters political, such as the exploitation of Irish tenants by the absentee British and Irish landlords and the effects of the great depression of the 1930s on the islands (Barsam 1988: 67). By omitting the possibility of making a social commentary, Flaherty depoliticizes the content of this film. Barsam adds that ‘Flaherty’s subjective view of reality – his “making it all up” – has a romantic basis, idealizing the simple, natural, and even nonexistent life’ (Barsam 1988: 116). On the other hand, John Goldman, the editor of Man of Aran, is emphatic in saying that the film ‘was not a documentary, it was not intended to be a documentary […] it was a piece of poetry’ (Stoney and Brown 1978). More strongly, the Marxist critic Ralph Bond wrote at the time Man of Aran’s release that ‘we are more concerned with what Flaherty has left out than with what he has put in […] Flaherty would have us believe that there is no class struggle on Aran despite ample evidence to the contrary’ (Bond 1934: 246). In contrast, the leftist Japanese film critic Uriu Tadao notes that

what I saw [in The Naked Island], was a prototype of the labour of work- ing Japanese who, with their backs on the verge of breaking, have since the Meiji era to this day supported Japan’s capitalist development and industry in the sense that the foreigners and the Japanese ruling class praise that ‘Japanese are industrious’; a little more specifically, the working conditions at small- to mid-size businesses that are even now exceedingly bad, as well as the basic conditions that maintain this situation. (1961: 49)

While Shindo¯ , like Flaherty, evoked the notions of ‘spirit’ and ‘poetic effect’ when explaining the inaccuracies in The Naked Island, Uriu has detected the film’s implicit social critique in the socio-politically crucial year of 1960 beyond the (agri)cultural allegory.

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12. Alongside such Contesting the studio system politically charged films as Shindo¯ ’s 原 Something that has puzzled many viewers of The Naked Island, besides its 爆の子 (Children of deceptive simplicity, is that at first glance the film seems to be devoid of Hiroshima) (1952), ど ぶ (The Ditch) (1954) explicit political content. This is very much in contrast to Shindo¯ ’s earlier work, and 第五福竜丸 (Lucky both praised and criticized for its strong leftist agenda when dealing with Dragon No. 5) (1959), 12 The Naked Island might issues such as war, crime, poverty, disease and discrimination. The lack of indeed seem like a political engagement is even more striking if we consider that the film was timeless fable. released in 1960 amidst the calamities surrounding the re-signing of the US– 13. Shindo¯ points out Japan Security Treaty. It might seem as if Shindo¯ was deliberately detaching wryly that it was and distancing himself from what was taking place in the cities teeming with easier to find a seat on the train because political protests. In fact, according to Shindo¯ ’s shooting diary for The Naked very few people were Island, his small film crew left Tokyo on the morning of 22 June, the day of the commuting to work general strike that was following outbursts of dissent and violence that had that day (Shindo¯ 1994: 13 179–80). been ongoing since the previous month. At this juncture, the question that one should probably be asking is whether the intent behind the making of The Naked Island was to depict an archetypal human drama by isolating its setting from the societal complexi- ties of Japan in 1960, one of the most politically charged moments in postwar Japanese history, or rather, by so doing addressing precisely these contempo- rary issues in a more oblique and allegorical manner. After all, Lutz Koepnick in his influential work on slowness has posited that

the wager of aesthetic slowness is not simply to find islands of respite, calm and stillness somewhere outside the cascades of contemporary speed culture […] [but to] investigate what it means to experience a world of speed, acceleration, and contemporality. (2014: 10)

I will leave this interpretation intact and proceed to point out that Shindo¯ , from a personal and professional point of view alike, had bigger fish to fry when leaving Tokyo for the Inland Sea that summer morning. In the introduc- tion to 太陽とカチンコ (The Sun and Clapboard) (1960), a book that shortly accompanied the release of The Naked Island, Shindo¯ makes it clear that his main motivation for making the film was the current state of the Japanese film industry (Shindo¯ 1994: 154–55). It is not the crowded streets but major studios that Shindo¯ ’s critique more readily pertains to and while the notion of strug- gle (闘い) permeates his autobiographical writings, it is mostly targeting the standard practices of the studio system that seemed restrictive in all too many ways for an independent filmmaker like Shindo¯ . An example of how The Naked Island visualizes this critique of the Japanese film industry can be seen in the sequence depicting wheat growing that pains- takingly follows the entire process from sowing the seed to cutting, threshing, collecting and delivering the stock, again in a boat. Shindo¯ contextualizes this within his experiences of directing for major Japanese film studios:

When you are being hired to direct for a film company, although I haven’t actually done much of that, the main thing is not to let a shot drag on. You can’t shoot a slow scene like this of people just walking along carry- ing a sack of wheat. You would have to cut and jump straight from the harvest to the coast. Here, I could faithfully follow the natural sequence. (Shindo¯ and Hayashi 2000)

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Figure 4: The wheat harvesting scene from The Naked Island.

By such simple acts as extending the duration of a scene, The Naked Island 14. Originally devised in 1953 by the five represents a deliberate protest against studio filmmaking on both an aesthetic major film companies and an ideological level. While studio productions of the day involved the (Sho¯ chiku, To¯ ho¯ , Daiei, work of hundreds of people, The Naked Island was shot with a crew of only To¯ ei and Shin-To¯ ho¯ ) to prevent the flow of its thirteen members (including the director and actors), who, during the shoot- staff to the newcomer ing, were living communally under ascetic conditions not unlike the charac- Nikkatsu. However, ters in the film. Displayed here is a particular work ethic but also a critique Nikkatsu itself joined the agreement in of the detailed division of labour on which the studio system relied upon, 1958, making it the Six- while stripped-down independent filmmaking is presented as a more intimate Company Agreement. For more, see Anderson and flexible alternative to such mainstream filmmaking. Moreover, The Naked and Richie (1982: 356). Island was made at the time when corporate consolidation towards the end 14 15. Shindo¯ humorously of the 1950s, exemplified by the Five-Company Agreement (五社協定), had admits to having at led to a situation whereby major film studios controlled virtually all means of one point resolved production, technical and acting staff, venues of exhibition and, by extension, to simply shoot the script – literally the mass audience. the pages of the screenplay – so that he would not have to pay Finding an audience the actors and staff the money that he did not Shindo¯ had completed the script of The Naked Island as early as 1955 while have (Shindo¯ 1994: i). taking a break between writing for Nikkatsu and To¯ ei studios. It was published 16. Shindo¯ was one of in the journal 映画芸術 (Film Art) in December 1957, but initially without the most prolific any intention of being produced (Shindo¯ 1994: 157). While Shindo¯ gradually screenwriters in Japan, with over 200 films to started to entertain the idea of making the film, he was all too aware that the his credit. In the late experimental approach would be too off-putting for any major studios.15 In 1950s, he averaged the 1950s, Shindo¯ ’s films had often been produced and/or distributed by big six to eight produced scripts annually, companies, but towards the end of the decade he found himself increasingly excluding those disillusioned by the mainstream system. Eventually, Shindo¯ decided to make directed by himself. the film without any external funding, using only what he earned writing scripts for other directors,16 after devising a plan to radically cut the production costs by downsizing the staff and arriving at the rough figure of 5 million yen for the entire film (at the time, studio productions would have normally cost between 20 and 50 million yen) (Shindo¯ 1994: 164–66).

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17. The Japanese critics The Naked Island was to be the swansong of the independent production viewed the film favourably, and it company, 近代映画協会 (Modern Film Association), which Shindo¯ had founded placed sixth at the with the director Yoshimura Ko¯ zaburo¯ after both left the Sho¯ chiku studios in 1950. annual Kinema Junpo¯ critics’ poll, becoming Shindo¯ ’s highest- At that time, we had been in independent production for exactly ranking film to that 10 years. Both economically and mentally, we had reached the point date. where we were going to have to wind up the company, If so, we thought, 18. The film shared the before that happens, let’s first make one pure film with no concessions prize with Grigori to commercialism. Chukhrai’s Chistoe nebo (Clear Skies) (Shindo¯ and Hayashi 2000) (1960). 19. It has been pointed out It was not only the film’s production, but also its later exhibition that was how the international highly problematic at the time when Japanese cinema had evolved to the film festival has ‘enabled not only point where the studios were targeting specific audiences with their exclu- [slow cinema’s] sive networks of promotion and distribution, something that an independent global promotion and production could not rely on. Indeed, the only distributor who approached consumption but also its production’ (de Luca Shindo¯ about the film did so because judging from the ‘naked’ in the title, and Barradas Jorge they had thought that it was an erotic feature (Shindo¯ 1994: 128). As a result, 2015: 11). the exhibition of The Naked Island was severely limited to minor, often rural 20. This film followed the venues. However, the film that premiered on 23 November 1960 was soon director’s earlier Las gaining a reputation, and a sympathetic review in the leading film journal tierras blancas (The White Land) (1959), set Kinema Junpo¯ キネマ旬報 called for the film to be more widely distributed to in a poor village in a mainstream urban audiences (Izawa 1961: 83).�17 semi-desert climate that is attacked by With the completion of The Naked Island, Shindo¯ believed his directing drought. career to be over and expected to return to full-time screenwriting. However, the film’s unexpected success changed this course of action. Although his earlier 原爆の子 (Children of Hiroshima) (1952) had received limited exhibition outside Japan, it was The Naked Island, Shindo¯ ’s sixteenth feature as direc- tor, that finally introduced him to an international audience, largely thanks to its winning the Grand Prize at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival.18 Shindo¯ recalls selling the screening rights to 64 different countries in a matter of days during the festival and adds that ‘[w]e made so many prints of this film. I thought we were going to wear the negative out’ (Shindo¯ and Hayashi 2000). The Naked Island, not initially screened in major Japanese cinemas, found a forum at an international film festival, an altogether different venue with an audience that is generally sympathetic to experimental modes of film- making.19 In this capacity, The Naked Island was also showing the way to the next generation of Japanese independent filmmakers. Paradoxically, Shindo¯ ’s bold, perhaps even desperate, decision to make a quasi-silent, quasi-documentary film saved his independent company from impending bankruptcy. But the fact that Shindo¯ ’s work first found international success in Moscow also brings to the fore the geopolitical aspect of film recep- tion networks against the backdrop of the Cold War-era tactics of soft power. The thematic focus of Shindo¯ ’s films certainly struck a chord with audiences and particularly the state-controlled system of film distribution in the Socialist Bloc, where the depiction of labour carried yet another set of meanings in an ideolog- ical sense. In his diary, Shindo¯ recalls how the passage with a wheat field sway- ing in the wind instantly received applause from its Moscow audience (Shindo¯ 1994: 136). It seems that The Naked Island fell on fertile ground awaiting inter- national social realism. The competition that year included other films depicting rural hardships such as Esta tierra es mía (This Earth Is Mine) (Carril, 1961) about the life of cotton workers in the province of Chaco and their struggle for wages.20

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Figure 5: Shindo¯ Kaneto (right) receiving the Grand Prize for The Naked Island at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival.

With this geopolitical background, it is hardly surprising that western critics 21. Joan Mellen (1975: 21 74–76) has summarized were somewhat less generous in their opinions of The Naked Island. Pauline various western Kael notoriously described the film as ‘ponderously, pretentiously simple’ and reactions to the film. quipped that ‘it may have had a special appeal for the Russians – as one of the few foreign films that could be absolutely counted on to make life outside the Soviet Union look more grim than life inside’ (1968: 356–57). Many Japanese critics seem to have sided with this sentiment, with Tada Michitaro¯ admit- ting being embarrassed by such a depiction of Japan (Mellen 1975: 76), and

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- Oshima Nagisa sharply criticized Shindo¯ for presenting the western audience a self-orientalized image of Japan. Maya Turovskaya, a major Soviet film critic, took a more analytical approach and compared The Naked Island to Alexander Dovzhenko’s Земля (Earth) (1930) (Turovskaya 1961: 140–41). This seminal silent film was an influence on Uchida’s film of the same title, which in turn had influenced Shindo¯ in his devising a brand of slow semi-documentary real- ism for The Naked Island.

Conclusion The Naked Island was a turning point for its director Shindo¯ , both for moving from earlier social melodrama to the more experimental approach with film form and receiving critical acclaim, both in Japan and internationally. However, its historical reputation and relevance lie strongly in the way in which it influ- enced the subsequent boom in independent film production in Japan in the 1960s. The film’s critical and commercial success pointed the way for fledg- ling Japanese filmmakers who could no longer find work within the declining studio system. The Naked Island was a seminal film in that it proved the viabil- ity of stripped-down, self-financed small-budget production – a mode of film- making that could find considerable success without relying on the big studio networks of production, promotion and exhibition.

Acknowledgements The author would like to express his gratitude to the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP17F17738) for research funding.

References Anderson, Joseph L. and Richie, Donald (1982), The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barsam, Richard (1988), The Vision of Robert Flaherty, The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bazin, André (2005), What is Cinema? (trans. Hugh Gray), vol. 1, London and Berkeley: University of California Press. Bond, Ralph (1934), ‘Man of Aran reviewed’, Cinema Quarterly, 2:4, Summer, pp. 245–46. Flaherty, Robert J. (1934), Man of Aran, Irish Free State: Gainsborough Pictures. Flanagan, Matthew (2008), ‘Towards an aestheric of slow in contempo- rary cinema’, 16:9, http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm. Accessed 26 January 2018. Ishizaka, Sho¯ zo¯ 石坂昌三 (1995), 小津安二郎と茅ヶ崎館 (Ozu Yasujiro¯ and Chigasakikan), Tokyo: Shincho¯ sha. Izawa, Jun (1961), 裸の島 (‘The Naked Island’), Kinema Junpo¯ , 336, January, p. 83. Kael, Pauline (1968), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, New York: Little, Brown and Company. Kitsnik, Lauri (2014), ‘A record of repeated gestures: Leitmotifs in Shindo¯ Kaneto’s films’, Reflexive Horizons, http://www.reflexivehorizons. com/2014/04/. Accessed 26 January 2018. Koepnick, Lutz (2014), On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Luca, Tiago de and Barradas Jorge, Nuno (eds) (2015), ‘Introduction: From slow cinema to slow cinemas’, in Slow Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–21. McLoone, Martin (2005), ‘Man of Aran’, in B. McFarlane (ed.), The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, London: Wallflower Press, pp. 41–51. Mellen, Joan (1975), Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York: Liveright. Schoonover, Karl (2012), ‘Wastrels of time: Slow cinema’s laboring body, the political spectator, and the queer’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 53:1, Spring, pp. 65–78. Shindo¯ , Kaneto 新藤兼人 (1952), 原爆の子 (Children of Hiroshima), Japan: Kindai Eiga Kyo-kai. —— (1960), 裸の島 (The Naked Island), Japan: Kindai Eiga Kyo-kai. —— (1994), 新藤兼人の足跡 (Shindo¯ Kaneto’s Footprints, vol. 5:) 闘い (The Struggles), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Shindo¯ , Kaneto and Hayashi, Hikaru (2000), ‘Commentary’, The Naked Island, DVD extras, Japan: Kindai Eiga Kyo-kai. Stoney, George C. and Brown, James (1978), How the Myth was Made: A Study of Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, USA: George C. Stoney Associates. Turovskaya, Maya (Т уровская , Майя) (1961), ‘Голы й остров’ ( ‘ The Naked Island’), Iskusstvo Kino, 11, pp. 140–44. Uchida, Tomu 内田吐夢 (1939), 土 (Earth), Japan: Nikkatsu. Uriu, Tadao 瓜生忠夫 (1961), 「裸の島」と芸術的主題 (‘The Naked Island and artistic themes’), Shinario, 17:9, pp. 48–50. Visconti, Luchino (1948), La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), Italy: Universalia Film. Yamagiwa, Eizo¯ 山際永三 (1961), 伝統の荷受人ー新藤兼人 (‘Shindo¯ Kaneto: The consignee of tradition’), Shinario, 17:9, pp. 51–53.

Suggested citation Kitsnik, L. (2018), ‘Real and slow: The poetics and politics of The Naked Island’, Asian Cinema, 29:2, pp. 261–73, doi: 10.1386/ac.29.2.261_1

Contributor DETAILS Lauri Kitsnik (Ph.D. Cantab) is Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Research fellow at Kyoto University. His research interests include Japanese and international film history and theory, adaptation and screenwrit- ing. His work has appeared in Japanese Studies, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Journal of Screenwriting and several edited volumes. Contact: Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Yoshida-nihonmatsu-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan. E-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5162-2315

Lauri Kitsnik has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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