The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 2-8
The Naked Island (1960)
Directed by Kaneto Shindo
Shindo made Naked Island in black and white because he thought color would unnecessarily aestheticize the poverty he wanted to depict. In 1960, the director wasn’t far from poverty himself: Kindai Eiga Kyokai, the film company he had co-founded a decade earlier, was failing. Reasoning that commercial success was anyway unlikely, he sank all the remaining money into a passion project: a dialogue-free, documentary-ish feature (scored by Hikaru Hayashi) about a family of four who live on a very small island in Japan’s Inland Sea, and must sail to a neighboring island every day to get fresh water. The water is brought across the sea in heavy buckets, which must be carried uphill, then emptied over the endlessly thirsty earth where the mother and father plant crops. This repeated journey takes up much of the 96-minute running time. But Naked Island is less monotonous than lulling, and its lack of color does nothing to diminish cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda’s compositions, or the scenery. The movie, as it turned out, brought Shindo international renown and sales; its minimalist sentiment appealed to Soviets and Neorealists, although all that water-bearing was mostly metaphorical. It will continue to appeal to anyone who thinks that truth is not exactly a matter of the facts. Elina Mishuris (March 2, 7pm at Anthology Film Archives as part of a series of films selected and introduced by the dancer Eiko)