The Island (1960)

Films such as The Man from Arran and Nanook of the North make great pains to show the hard life of Primitive Society; ceaseless toil, brute necessity, life/death. The Island is, in some ways, an exception. Arguably, the director, Kaneto Shindo, did say that the film was intended to show work as an eternal struggle against nature. But in contrast with the two films I mentioned, work, here, is portrayed from what I would call a religious perspective. The film never idealizes hardship. We see the contrast of the life on an island, and the life in the town, but this contrast bears no trace of judgment. The director does not say that work in the old days was honest and uncomplicated – far from it. Work is not a mere “struggle” against some physical obstacle. The perspective on nature in The Island is much richer than that. Nature is not just a passive object; it is a part in a relation.

The two protagonists, a man and a woman, work with the discipline, but also the solemnity of ritual. Together with their two children, they live on an island. They are the island’s only inhabitants. The film silently follows their routines. Summer, winter, spring, summer. They fetch water for their crops with a row-boat. The water, carried in buckets, is laboriously dragged along a dangerous-looking track that leads to the top of the hill. The water is then meticulously distributed. The camera patiently waits for the water to absorb into the soil. One scene in the middle of the film contains a shocking disruption of the calmness; the episode, in tandem with a few other ones in the film, has the effect of a jolt in the viewer’s mind. There is no dialogue in the entire film. 

The slightly mournful score of the film is a perfect match with the quiet unfolding of routines and errands. The music captures the sense of repetition in the protagonists’ life. Yet this is not dull repetition, but the repetitive sequence of two persons going up the hill is transformed into an adventure every time we see the event taking place (and we see it almost in real time…). Some little detail is always different. Sometimes the camera tracks the events of nature; the movement of the sea; a crab’s lazy movements on the beach, the struggle of a fish, the blossoming of a tree, the sound of rain. That the director manages to breathe so much life into the images is simply impressive. It is not surprising that every scene is carefully arranged, so that there is a fluid transition of movement and stasis, of the island and the town, of long shots and close-up of faces (these actors are very good at conveying a wide range of emotions with a very, very restrained facial expressions and overall demeanor). The Island is a breathtakingly beautiful film.