It's fairly safe to say that nowadays veteran Japanese director Kaneto Shindo is best known in the west as the director of the vividly atmospheric 1962 erotic horror Onibaba, but nip back 40 years and it was Hadaka no shima/The Naked Island that was grabbing all the attention. Made on approximately one-tenth of the usual feature budget of the time, it was in many ways the result of Shindo throwing all caution to the wind and making the film he wanted rather than one a studio might expect. His production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, looked set to fold, and he decided that before it did he was going to "make a pure film with no concessions to commercialism." The resulting work met with international acclaim and was the joint winner of the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival of 1961. For some years, however, the film has remained virtually unseen in the UK, which is where Eureka's fine Masters of Cinema label steps in.

Hadaka no shima is the very essence of minimalist cinema - there is no real dialogue, precious little in the way of story, and actions that would normally cut short by editing are shown almost in their entirety - and as such is going to present a problem for the impatient viewer. But if you surrender to Shindo's technique, temporarily put aside those early, high octane Yakuza movies that have helped bring about the present revival of interest in classic Japanese cinema, and move down in pace a few gears, then you will experience something really rather wonderful.

The film is centred entirely around a poor farming family, consisting of a mother, a father and two young boys, who are the only inhabitants of a small, sun-baked island in the Setonaikai archipelago in south-western Japan. They make their very basic living growing crops on the steep hillsides, but the island has no fresh water supply and the couple have to make regular trips across the bay to collect it in order to feed both themselves and their crops. The island has no modern machinery, no electricity, and the water has to be laboriously transported and carried up steep and precarious paths in wooden pails balanced on shoulder-mounted poles.

The importance of the water and the work required to transport it is shown in extraordinary detail - journeys are completed almost in real time, as the camera focuses on the couple's facial expressions or their sometimes, nail-bitingly uncertain footing as they slowly struggle with balance and weight up a path that would leave even the unburdened out of breath. Shindo clearly wants us to understand the importance of the water and the controlling nature of the labour required to collect it, and achieves this through an opening sequence whose length would seem to defy all cinematic logic. Try to imagine just how long you could keep such a scene going without losing your audience. Five minutes? Ten at a push? Try thirty minutes, almost a third of the film's ninety-three minute running time. It simply should not work, but by thunder it does. A brief meal and the transportation of one of the children to a nearby school is worked in there too, but essentially the first half-hour of the film is just about the transportation of water and the feeding of crops. But as with contemporary Bresson and later Kiarostami, there is absolute purpose to Shindo's approach, something that resonates sharply when, almost inevitably, some water is accidentally spilled, and in a whole number of ways later in the film, when a tragic turn of events prompts a sobering rethink of that long walk up the hill, the relationship between the father and mother, and even the watering itself. By reducing life to its most basic elements, the film very effectively prompts a degree of introspection in its audience - stripped of the trappings and conveniences of modern life and society, there is a clarity here that is startling, enlightening, and deeply affecting.

If the first third passes almost invisibly, then the economy of storytelling, such as it is, moves the rest of the film at a disarming pace, as an entire season comes and goes in only a few short minutes and the fruit of the couple's year-long labour is represented by four small packages delivered to the local mayor by way of taxes or rent. Much of the film has an extraordinary documentary quality to it (at the 1961 Moscow Festival the press did not realise the two leads were actors), with the turn of events in the final third providing the only real 'story', and even here the purpose is linked specifically to life and location rather than the create of narrative.

Clearly much of the film is meant to be read symbolically or metaphorically. The primitive tools and methods employed by the family ground the film in no specific historical period (Alex Cox observes in his introduction that for the most part it could be set in medieval times), and the portrayal of poor farm workers bypassed by rapid industrialisation is still relevant today - just a few short years ago, as Poland prepared for its European Union application, I observed the stark divide between the commercialisation of the city centres and farmland that was still being worked by horse-drawn machinery, its workers untouched by the arrival of urban capitalism (a situation Sindo also observed in China some years after this film was made). Shindo himself talks about the film as a portrayal of life dependent on labour, and the idea that "human behaviour essentially stems from the task of survival," reflecting his own political concerns with those struggling at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

The film's minimalist approach and political undertones have nonetheless had their detractors, most of whom seem to have completely missed the point and taken the story and characters at face value, seeing the lack of dialogue as an inability to communicate and the presentation of the primitive lifestyle as a rejection of modernity in favour of older, simpler times. The family's brief flirtation with progressive Japanese society midway through the film is definitely a narrative jolt, as they travel on a fuel-driven boat, observe a downright peculiar dance/aerobics display on a shop window TV and eat a café meal using western cutlery instead of chopsticks, but it seems to have escaped the notice of the detractors that the later tragedy is brought about in part precisely because of the family's disconnection with regular society. In truth, Shindo presents their way of life in starkly honest terms, with both its positive and negative aspects plainly on view. For the family here, life is about survival - it's hard work and fraught with possible danger, but still holds a freedom that anyone tied to a company and a mortgage and the trappings of modern western society can only dream of achieving.

In Hadaka no shima Shindo created something unique, a stripped-to-the-bone but richly humanist and profoundly moving study of life and labour and the essentials of survival that is a genuinely audio-visual experience, from Kiyomi Kuroda's beautifully composed scope cinematography and Toshio Enoki's purposeful editing to Hikaru Hayashi's gorgeous score - soulfully reflecting the family's toil and trauma, it is at the same time both universal and somehow specifically rooted in its location, as much part of the storytelling as the movements of the actors. Shindo has said that his intention was to create "a visual poem." I can think of few films more deserving of that description than this one.

Sound and Vision

The print here has been licensed from Toho in Japan and has been restored and remastered for this DVD. The result is a mixture of good and bad news, but it's mostly good. On the down side is the sometimes variable contrast - blacks are almost never black, but on a few shots the contrast is reduced to a narrow range of light grays. This would seem to be an issue with the original film print, as the contrast can be seen changing from shot to shot in places, but this has not been adjusted in any way at the digital stage. The transfer is occassionally a little on the bright side, though some of this may have been an intentional aspect of the original film to emphasise the heat of the sun. Film splices can also be intermittently seen at the top and bottom of frame.

That aside, the anamorphically enhanced 2.35:1 print is otherwise very nice indeed, with an often impressive tonal range and very good detail. There is occasional dust and damage, but this is minimal and never distracting. Contrast issues aside, even Criterion would not be displeased with the print here.

The original mono soundtrack is reproduced in Dolby 1.0 and is a clean and largely clear affair. The usual age-related issues regarding slight distortion of louder musical notes is par for the course, but the music, which is effectively the film's dialogue, comes through well otherwise. On the whole a decent job.

Extras