Benicio Del Toro presents Kaneto Shindo: A Retrospective
Co-presented by Cinespia. Series coordinated by New York-Tokyo & Bobo Mencho Inc. Support provided by Kindai Eiga Kyokai & the Consulate General of Japan.
“Throughout his remarkably prolific, long and fascinating career, Kaneto Shindo (b. 1912) has remained at the center of major trends and turns in Japanese cinema. A sought-after art director and apprentice in the 1930s, Shindo made a name for himself in the 1940s as a screenwriter before working as assistant director to such iconic filmmakers as Ichikawa and New Wave titans Suzuki and Matsumoro. In 1950 Shindo formed one of Japan’s first independent production companies with actress Nobuko Otowa (who would later star in several of Shindo’s key films), and began to direct politically outspoken features with a distinct class-consciousness — an interest which would culminate in The Naked Island, his extraordinary study of a rural 20th century peasantry, and a film considered by many to be his masterpiece. Shindo’s notable embrace of period ghost stories also resulted in the important and influential films Onibaba and Kuroneko, which maintained the critical Marxist stance of his early work and inspired a new interest in folk-tales and the “primitive” as a major theme. At a spry 98 years old, Shindo remains active to this day with his latest film, the powerful anti-war drama Postcard, marking a return to the subject of Hiroshima’s complex and troubling legacy.” — Harvard Film Archive
Watch Cinefamily’s original trailer for “Kaneto Shindo: A Retrospective”!
Onibaba + Tree Without Leaves
Onibaba – 8:00pm
A masterful dose of animal eroticism and slow-burn psychological horror, Onibaba is a seductive fever dream of a ghost story — once seen, never forgotten. In war-torn feudal Japan, an old woman (Shindo’s regular muse Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law scrape a lonely living by preying on injured samurai in a vast field of tall grass, but when a scraggly, devilish neighbor returns from battle, the explosive sexual tension between the three threatens to unravel everything — until, that is, the appearance of an ominous demon mask. His first foray into the period ghost-story genre, Onibaba marked a radical theatrical departure for Shindo while also simultaneously exploring his recurring themes of poverty, class and womanhood, and the results are shattering. With a thrilling taiko drum score by Hikaru Hayashi and impeccably sharp camerawork by DP Kiyomi Kuroda that works wonders with shadows, rain and waving grass, Onibaba continually escalates its hair-raising tone right up until its final frightful frames.
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1964, 35mm, 103 min.
Tree Without Leaves – 10:00pm
Tree Without Leaves is Shindo’s autobiographical journey through a pre-WWII Hiroshima of his childhood, combined with an affecting self-examination of his twilight years. An aging screenwriter, preparing to write his first novel, looks back on his past, including his family’s declining fortune, his distant father, and his doting mother (Shindo regular/spouse Nobuko Otowa), whose near-incestuous affection is expressed through images that are both provocative and haunting. Rather than revolving around Hiroshima-set historical cataclysm (as in the example of Lucky Dragon No. 5, also appearing in this festival), this ultra-personal later work, which focuses on personal memory and mortality, contains some of the most wistful sequences of Shindo’s career.
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1986, HDCAM, 105 min.
Watch excerpts from “Onibaba”!
Watch an excerpt from “Tree Without Leaves”!
The Naked Island + Lucky Dragon No. 5
The Naked Island – 8:00pm
“Gorgeously shot in wide-screen black-and-white…once seen it is not easily forgotten — the myth of Sisyphus transposed to Tahiti.” — J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Exhilarating, heartwrenching and so tangible you’ll feel the soil under your own fingernails and the sun on your brow, The Naked Island is one of the most emotionally satisfying Japanese films you’ve never seen — from any decade, past or present — and is simply one of Kaneto Shindo’s greatest works. Filmed on a nearly deserted archipelago, and told with almost no dialogue whatsoever, this landmark docudrama tone poem in the tradition of Robert Flaherty charts one year in the life of a poor farming family who must continually reach out to neighboring islands in order to subsist. “Daily chores, captured as a series of cyclical events, result in a hypnotising, moving, and beautiful film harkening back to the silent era.” (Masters of Cinema) Anchored by a stoic, moving lead performance by Nobuko Otowa and a haunting score by regular Shindo collaborator Hikaru Hayashi, The Naked Island is a pure poignant wallop. DO NOT MISS IT.
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1960, 35mm, 96 min.
Lucky Dragon No. 5 – 9:45pm
1959′s Lucky Dragon No. 5 is Shindo’s dramatic recreation of a radioactive disaster five years prior that not only launched the anti-nuclear movement in Japan, but also prompted the premise for Godzilla. In 1954, 23 men aboard fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru (the film’s eponymous trawler) were physically devastated by radiation poisoning from nearby H-bomb testing conducted by the U.S. government, and fallout from the tests blighted an area previously inhabited by humans for over 2000 years. The nerve center around which Shindo masterfully reconstructs the turmoil is one perfectly-rendered character: radio operator Kuboyama Aikichi (Jukichi Uno), the first victim of the blast. In his depiction of the toxic, irreversible impact of the culture of war, Shindo shines a searing light on the human element — the psychological and social fallout of a tragic miscalculation that continues, to this day, to compromise the region’s safety and to silently terrorize the community that remains.
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1959, HDCAM, 115 min.
Watch the trailer for “The Naked Island”!
The Naked Island + Postcard (w/ intermission reception, producer in person!)
Evening co-sponsored by Smart Assist and Cultural News
The Naked Island – 7:00pm
“Gorgeously shot in wide-screen black-and-white…once seen it is not easily forgotten — the myth of Sisyphus transposed to Tahiti.” — J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Exhilarating, heartwrenching and so tangible you’ll feel the soil under your own fingernails and the sun on your brow, The Naked Island is one of the most emotionally satisfying Japanese films you’ve never seen — from any decade, past or present — and is simply one of Kaneto Shindo’s greatest works. Filmed on a nearly deserted archipelago, and told with almost no dialogue whatsoever, this landmark docudrama tone poem in the tradition of Robert Flaherty charts one year in the life of a poor farming family who must continually reach out to neighboring islands in order to subsist. “Daily chores, captured as a series of cyclical events, result in a hypnotising, moving, and beautiful film harkening back to the silent era.” (Masters of Cinema) Anchored by a stoic, moving lead performance by Nobuko Otowa and a haunting score by regular Shindo collaborator Hikaru Hayashi, The Naked Island is a pure poignant wallop. DO NOT MISS IT. Reception to follow on Cinefamily’s backyard Spanish patio during intermission! Sake from Hiroshima provided by Smart Assist.
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1960, 35mm, 96 min.
Postcard – 9:45pm (producer Jiro Shindo in person!)
“Mr. Shindo’s world is sad and inspiring in familiar ways, but what makes it so memorable is that it is also gorgeous and strange.” — A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Shindo sometimes tells ghost stories about the living. For this haunting chamber piece of a film (his 49th, completed when he was 98 years old!), Shindo returns once more to the subject of warfare, and its capacity to fracture personal experiences of love, trust, and purpose. The story follows the path of a postcard sent by a Japanese soldier to his wife as he prepares to depart for World War II; upon returning, he finds that all his loved ones have mourned his loss and moved on with their lives. Mining his own early experience as one of the few surviving soldiers of a hundred-man unit, Shindo pieces passages — in turn meditative, wrenching, hilarious, and lyrical — into a careful and composed whole. The result is an anti-war film like no other: the work of a man who has absorbed the impact of a century of conflict, and reflected it back to us in an unforgettably cathartic form. Our screening of Postcard is preceeded by opening remarks from producer Jiro Shindo (Kaneto Shindo’s son), and Jun Niimi of the Consulate-General of Japan In Los Angeles!
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 2010, 35mm, 114 min.
Watch the trailer for “The Naked Island”!
The Naked Island + Kuroneko
The Naked Island – 8:00pm
“Gorgeously shot in wide-screen black-and-white…once seen it is not easily forgotten — the myth of Sisyphus transposed to Tahiti.” — J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Exhilarating, heartwrenching and so tangible you’ll feel the soil under your own fingernails and the sun on your brow, The Naked Island is one of the most emotionally satisfying Japanese films you’ve never seen — from any decade, past or present — and is simply one of Kaneto Shindo’s greatest works. Filmed on a nearly deserted archipelago, and told with almost no dialogue whatsoever, this landmark docudrama tone poem in the tradition of Robert Flaherty charts one year in the life of a poor farming family who must continually reach out to neighboring islands in order to subsist. “Daily chores, captured as a series of cyclical events, result in a hypnotising, moving, and beautiful film harkening back to the silent era.” (Masters of Cinema) Anchored by a stoic, moving lead performance by Nobuko Otowa and a haunting score by regular Shindo collaborator Hikaru Hayashi, The Naked Island is a pure poignant wallop. DO NOT MISS IT.
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1960, 35mm, 96 min.
Kuroneko – 9:45pm
More overtly supernatural than Onibaba, and more delicately operatic as well, Kuroneko is Kaneto Shindo’s second triumph of superb horror filmmaking set during the feudal reign of the samurai. Stories about nekomata (ghost cats) were among the most popular tales in Japanese horror of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and this creepy, emotionally-charged nekomata tale (loosely based on the time-honored folktale “The Cat’s Return”) centers around two peasant women who, after being raped and killed by a band of samurai, seek revenge as cat-like spirits who lure soldiers in with sex, then pounce and maul them to death. Painting a grimly realistic portrait of a “noble” soldier class using a firmly anti-war brush, mixing it with a harrowing tale of fate and wrapping it all up in an evocative B&W package, Kuroneko is a stark horror classic steeped in its nation’s chilling history.
Dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1968, 35mm, 95 min.
Watch the trailer for “The Naked Island”!
Watch the trailer for “Kuroneko”!
