Kaneto Shindo - International Success

International Success

With Kindai Eiga Kyokai close to bankruptcy, Shindo poured what little financial resources he had left into The Naked Island, a film without dialogue which he described as "a cinematic poem to try and capture the life of human beings struggling like ants against the forces of nature." Nobuko Otowa and Taiji Tonoyama are a couple living on a small island with their two young sons and no water supply. Every day they boat to another island to retrieve fresh water to drink and irrigate their crops. The film saved Shindo's company when it was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival in 1961. Shindo made his first ever trip abroad to attend the Moscow film festival, and he was able to sell the film in sixty-one countries.

After making two more films of social relevance (Ningen in 1962 and Mother in 1963), Shindo shifted his focus as a filmmaker to the individuality of a person, specifically a person's sexual nature. He explained: "Political things such as class consciousness or class struggle or other aspects of social existence really come down to the problem of man alone....I have discovered the powerful, very fundamental force in man which sustains his survival and which can be called sexual energy...My idea of sex is nothing but the expression of the vitality of man, his urge for survival." From these new ideas came Onibaba in 1964.

Onibaba stars Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as 14th century Japanese peasants in a reed-filled marshland who survive by killing and robbing defeated samurai. The film won numerous awards and the Grand Prix at the Panama Film Festival, and Best Supporting Actress (Jitsuko Yoshimura) and Best Cinematography (Kiyomi Kuroda) at the Blue Ribbon Awards in 1964.

Shindo continued his exploration of human sexuality with Akuto in 1965 and Lost Sex in 1966. In Lost Sex, a middle aged man who has become temporarily impotent after the Hiroshima bombing in 1945, once again loses his virility due to nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll. In the end, he is cured by his housekeeper. Impotence was again the theme of Shindo's next film, Libido, released in 1967. Gender politics and strong female characters played a strong role in both of these films. Tadao Sato said "By contrasting the comical weakness of the male with the unbridled strength of the female, Shindo seemed to be saying in the 1960s that women had wrought their revenge. This could have been a reflection of postwar society, since it is commonly said in Japan women have become stronger because men have lost all confidence in their masculinity due to Japan's defeat."

In 1968 Shindo made Kuroneko, a horror film reminiscent of Onibaba and Ugetsu Monogatari. The film centers around a vengeful mother and daughter-in-law pair played by Nobuko Otowa and Kiwako Taichi. After being raped and left to die in their burning hut by a group of soldiers, the pair return to Earth as demons who entice samurai into a bamboo grove, where they are killed. The film won the Mainichi Film Awards for Best Actress (Otowa) and Best Cinematography (Kiyomi Kuroda) in 1968.

Shindo also made the comedy Strong Women, Weak Men in 1968. A mother and her teenage daughter leave their impoverished coal-mining town to become cabaret hostesses in Kyoto. They quickly acquire enough cynical street smarts to get as much money out of their predatory johns as they can. Shindo said of the film "common people never appear in the pages of history. Silently they live, eat and die...I wanted to depict their bright, healthy, open vitality with a sprinkling of comedy."

His next two films were crime dramas. In Heat Wave Island, released in 1969, Otowa is a former Inland Sea island farmer who has moved to the mainland in order to find work, but instead ends up dead. The film begins with the discovery of her corpse, which leads to an investigation that uncovers the narcotics, prostitution, and murder in which many poor farmers had found themselves trapped after World War II. 1971's Live Today, Die Tomorrow! was based on the true story of Norio Nagayama, dramatizing not only his crimes but the poverty and cruelty of his upbringing.

Around this time, at the age of sixty, his wife Miyo divorced him over his continuing relationship with Otowa.

Shindo's 1974 film My Way was a throwback to films of his early career and was an exposure of the Japanese government's mistreatment of the country's migratory workers. Based on a true story, an elderly women resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband's dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way.