Film Screening: Punishment Island (Shokei no shima)

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The multilevel, slow-burning plot concerns a young man (Nitta Akira) who returns to the island where, as a teenaged reform-school inmate, he was used as slave labor and abused by a sadistic farmer (Mikuni Rentaro at his most brutal). Shooting in color, Shinoda uses a restrained palette in which greens and grays predominate, refusing to luxuriate in the beauty of the natural settings. The compositions are forceful, keeping us off-balance. Dropping flashbacks into the action without preliminaries, Shinoda evokes the compulsiveness of memory and shows that the fascism of the past remains present. Shinoda sees the world of the film as one of complete depravity, over which the two sympathetic characters (Nitta and Mikuni’s daughter, played by Iwashita Shima) triumph only through their isolated and hopeless stubbornness. – Chris Fujiwara

Screening on Film

Directed by Shinoda Masahiro.
With Nitta Akira, Iwashita Shima, Mikuni Rentaro.
Japan, 1966, 35mm, color, 87 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: National Film Archive of Japan

From the Shochiku Collection at the Harvard Film Archive: Sixties Shinoda film series co-presented by the Japan Foundation and co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute