On a Rock in the Sea

The Island. Over the water in the darkness before dawn a little boat comes gliding. Without a word a man and a woman step ashore and, shouldering their yokes and pails, trudge across the fields to a spring that lies perhaps a mile inland. When the pails are full they trudge back to the boat, push off without a word and row across the heaving water to an island several miles from shore, a cold rock whelmed in the cold waters of Japan's Inland Sea. There they take up their pails again and, sweating fiercely as the bleak dawn breaks, struggle up an almost perpendicular path to a small plateau near the summit of the island.

Without a word the man begins to water a patch of sweet-potato plants. Without a word the woman climbs down to the boat again, rows across to the mainland, trudges off to the spring, fills her pails with water, trudges back to the boat, rows across to the island, struggles up the path, climbs down to the boat . . .

Without a word the man and woman labor from dark to dark, from month to month in the long hot season to keep their fields alive. From sun to sun they sleep on a bed of rushes in a hut of reeds. In the autumn they harvest a few sacks of sweet potatoes. In the winter they rout stumps out of the hard land to increase their pitiful sum of soil. In the spring they reap the winter wheat and thresh it with a flail as old as agriculture. In the summer they climb down to the boat, row across to the mainland, trudge off to the spring . . .

All without a word. All, furthermore, with the unmistakable intention to produce a pastoral masterpiece, a Japanese Man of Aran, a hymn to those simple and long-suffering sons of the soil who for thousands of years have dumbly borne the burden of civilization on their backs.

Unhappily, the intention somewhat miscarries. The farmers are obviously not working farmers: their hands are soft, their faces are citified, their bodies are city-fed. And the farm is obviously not a working farm: the Japanese peasant is notoriously clean, but this island is so clean that even a fly would starve. Esthetically, too, the film is not natural. It strains for greatness in every frame--the strain shows but the greatness doesn't. Even so, The Island is an impressive work of artifice, surely one of the best movies ever made for less than $20,000. Purists will praise Director Kaneto Shindo (Children of Hiroshima) for his skill at telling a story without words, and everybody will be grateful to Cameraman Kiyoshi Kuroda. As he sees them, the gorgeous shore-scapes of the Inland Sea, like all worlds in the Oriental sense of things, dissolve and reel away into visionary vastness, into the pure space of pure spirit.

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