It's always risky to re-watch a film that has made a great impression on you; will it hold up, will it let you down, will you be abhorred about your own bad, bad judgment? Watching Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo) again was not painful at all - the film is as marvelous as it was the first time: repetitive, strange, beautiful. Even though a description may make this film seem like a formalist experiment (a slow study of work and habits), there is nothing studiously experimental about Naked Island, nothing self-important, nothing contrived.
The basic set-up of the film is the daily toil of a family of four who inhabit a small island on which they have crops that need tending to and water needs to be fetched from another island. Without sentimentality or overblown emphasis on scarcity, the movie follows the family members' everyday life, the rowing, the fetching, the carrying of water, preparing food, etc. All this is chronicled in flowing images that place the human being in her environment. We start to look at the environment, the sea, the island, the city, from the perspective of the character's active gaze, from the perspective of their activities. But we also start to focus on the way these human beings lives are formed by and conditioned by the environment. Few films contain this meditative attention to methodical action - the only comparison I come to think of is Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann, but that film is done in a completely different spirit and the latter film gives us a very different image of the role of routines in human life. In Naked Island, routines never seem soul-crushing or monotonous. The camera follows the woman and the man carrying water in buckets. We learn to recognize the paths they laboriously have to climb, and we see them gently pouring the water on the crops (these images do not conjure up the illusion of real time, but they make us feel the duration of what is done). The same chores are repeated over and over again, but through a cinematic technique that all the time shifts angles and perspectives, we sense that their toil is a way in which their life continues, and life is never the same.
Its interesting how work and repetition is rendered so radically different on film, depending on what angle the director chooses and more importantly how work is conceived, or rather, in which connections work is placed.
Shindo pays close attention to survival, not as a primitive mode of merely "living" in a naked sense (the island may be naked, but life is not), but as a form of life, a form of life that is contrasted with the life of the city which is hinted at as the family members sell a fish, dine out on a restaurant, look at a dance performance on TV, and take a trip with a ropeway (the life on the island is hard to pin down in terms of historical periods, but the city life reveals specific models of cars, technology and fashion). Up till now I haven't mentioned one of the peculiar traits of Naked Island: it is a silent film. Not in the sense of music-and-intertitles but in the sense of there being no dialogue. I am surprised that this doesn't appear like an eccentric ploy a desperate director comes up with trying to think of something new to sell his latest flick. The silence is almost always an organic part of the film; instead we hear the rain, the thundering wind, steps, flowing water and so on - or the distant chatter of city-folks. And then there's non-diegetic music, a beautiful score that frames the on-screen drudgery magnificently. We learn to know these people, the family of four, on other terms, and I never experience the lack of speech as a lack, or as something that forces me to guess at what is going on. I don't think the point is to make the islanders' life look 'primitive' or 'changeless' - we see their lives changing, there are sudden breaks in the everyday rhythm of work (one scene in particular is a jolt) and we see subtle strains in their relations, and speech is not needed to convey that.
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