The Naked Island

Director: Kaneto Shindô

1960 / 96min / 35mm

A trailblazing (and enormously influential) hybrid of documentary and fiction, Shindô’s independently financed work of lyrical ethnography records the daily travails of a family—non-professional actors all, performing staged recreations of scenes from their own lives—scraping out a subsistence living through backbreaking toil on a remote, windswept island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Almost entirely eschewing spoken dialogue and featuring an eloquent modernist score by Hikaru Hayashi, The Naked Island is cinema stripped down to the barest of essentials, the widescreen black-and-white cinematography of Kiyomi Kuroda magnificent in its stark beauty, lending Shindô’s film something of the quality of a fable.

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of The Year Begins in Silence