hadaka no shima / the naked island — kaneto shindō (1960)

the eye can express as much as the mouth can.

a family of four, parents and their two children, live on an inhospitable island in the inland sea of japan. as there is no fresh water on the island and the family is living by means of their potato crops alone, the parents travel every day by boat to the mainland to collect precious water. the film narrates the story of their daily chores, of their joys and sorrows, over the course of one year.
produced independently in a short period of time on a minimal budget, the naked island was shot by kaneto shindō on the uninhabited island of sukune, in his native hiroshima prefecture. after working in several productions as assistant director and script writer, upon returning from the war shindō resolved, like many filmmakers of his generation, to make socially conscious works that would reevaluate what he saw as man's ancestral energy and identity. the naked island is therefore a humanist tale in which fiction meets documentary ambitions, and is intended as an ode to the dignity of work in the face of adversity. but adversity played a role also in the making of the film, and some of the creative choices made, such as the lack of dialogue, were originally dictated by actual impediments during production. yet, they proved to be among the film’s most distinctive and memorable features.

el sol del membrillo / the dream of light — victor erice (1992)

do you know how long i’ve been here?

at the beginning of the 1990s spanish filmmaker victor erice endeavors to follow artist antonio lópez as he attempts to paint a quince tree in the garden of his studio. what lópez wishes to portray is the ephemeral effect of the light of the dying season falling on the tree’s leaves and ripe fruits. for months the punctilious lópez and the tree stand face-to-face under the discreet eye of erice’s camera, which all along keeps rolling. other characters—friends and relatives of the painter, casual visitors—enter and exit the frame, questioning lópez, reminiscing, or simply observing him work. but time is not on the painter’s side and nature eventually runs its course: as the tree sheds its leaves and fruit, lópez has to recognize the impossibility of his task.
erice’s documentary, written in collaboration with lópez, is a deceptively transparent reflection in cinematic form on the act of seeing: by looking the artist gets closer to the essence of things, while the camera mirrors his eye, deciphering and filtering reality, joining fragments of time together in an ideally seamless image. but el sol del membrillo is also a document on the unsung routines of the artistic process. erice stands back from the glamorous depiction of the artist and its tired quirks, showing the painter as a lucid and methodical worker, and as such as a master of his trade, even in defeat.

cavalo dinheiro / horse money — pedro costa (2014)

the house is gone, not a stone left standing.

the old ventura wanders the recesses of an asylum that seems to go on and on; slivers of faces, disembodied echoes, the dead and the living, all emerge from dark tunnels and empty rooms to meet him, reminding him of his former self. in all his wanderings, over ventura's ailing body looms large the ghost of the revolution and of its long-lost ideals.
serving as a sequel of sorts in a thread of films set in the neglected outskirts of lisbon—the so-called fontainhas series—and revolving around the moody figure of ventura sustained by a cast of other non-professionals, costa’s film is constructed as a progression of allegorical tableaux whose strained density is shrinking and expanding time and time again. unable both to break free from his previous life and to find meaning in what’s to come, the ventura of cavalo dinheiro is in a static position, moving about but going nowhere, lost as he is in the intricate maze of his psyche, an uncomfortable place where coexisting past and present don’t make any sense but just press on him unforgivingly from all sides.