The Naked Island

A family of four struggles to survive on a rocky little island off the coast of Japan in this poetic 1960 drama. The island has no fresh water, so father (Taiji Tonoyama) and mother (Nobuko Otowa) must row across the bay to fetch pails of water and haul them up the steep path to irrigate crops in the terraced gardens below their home. This scenario could be taking place centuries ago—until the mother ferries their sons (Shinji Tanaka, Masanori Horimoto) to school and it becomes clear that the modern world is very close to the family's primitive existence. Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo and shot in lyrical black-and-white, The Naked Island plays like a beautifully-observed neorealist film, capturing a hardscrabble existence carved out of a gorgeous but hostile environment. Eschewing spoken dialogue, the film presents the sounds of the family's world—from the lapping of water stirred by an oar to the scuffs of footsteps up the dirt path, backed by a lyrical score from Hikaru Hayashi. Chronicling a year or more in the struggling life of the family—a cycle of demanding toil broken up by brief respites and a third act tragedy—the film embraces the humanism and social commentary of Japan's postwar movies while also looking ahead to the experimentation of the New Wave of the 1960s. Making its American home video debut on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion with a new digital restoration, extras include an introduction by Shindo, audio commentary (subtitled in English) with the director and Hayashi, an appreciation of the film by Benicio Del Toro, an interview with film scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit, and an essay by film scholar Haden Guest. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)