I haven’t had a chance to write up the new Pacific Film Archive schedule, but it includes a series of Japanese films meant to honor the late curator Kashiko Kawakita. It includes a few films I’ve seen, more I want to see, and two I saw for the first time Friday night.
That’s when my wife and I went to two films in the series, Naked Island and Branded to Kill.Technically, it wasn’t a double bill, since the PFA charges separately for each feature (although the second one is discounted if you buy tickets for both). And this would make a very strange double bill, anyway. What do they have in common? They’re both Japanese, of course. They were both made in the 1960s, although at opposite ends of that decade. They’re both in black and white and scope (pretty much the norm in that time and country). That’s about it.
Dialog-free, Naked Island can be classified as a post-talkie silent film–with music and sound effects, of course. It focuses on a nuclear family living on and farming a tiny island in what appears to be a pretty large harbor in present-day (for 1960) Japan. Their life is tough beyond measure. The island doesn’t even have enough water for their needs; several times a day they row to a larger island, fill four large wooden buckets, row back, carry the buckets up a steep incline, and water their crops. Yet they persevere through the seasons and through heartbreak. In fact, they persevere through problems that shouldn’t be so insurmountable if they would buy an outboard motor or build a pulley system. Writer/director Kaneto Shindo brings us into a way of life we can scarce imagine, but a part of me couldn’t help wondering how much of that lifestyle came out of his imagination–or out of a history already gone.
Naked Island is arthouse fare; Branded to Kill is a slick, commercial crime thriller–although a strange one–filled with sex and violence. Written by Hachiro Guryu and directed by Seijun Suzuki, it follows the career ups and downs of a promising professional killer (a chipmunk-faced Jo Shishido). And what a life he has. He shoots lesser killers down by seemingly the hundreds in order to deliver one man safely to a destination. He has wild and violent sex with his wife in all sorts of positions (including at the top of a spiral staircase). And he indulges in his greatest weakness: sniffing boiling rice. Then he botches a job, everyone is out to kill him for a change, and things get really weird. Even if you like this sort of thing (and I do), Branded to Kill works better in individual scenes than as a whole.
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