480 The Human Condition

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Re: 480 The Human Condition

#201 Post by FilmSnob » Tue Jun 15, 2021 1:55 am

I watched The Human Condition over three nights this weekend on Criterion Channel. My thoughts:

Part I

This was the strongest part in my opinion. The cinematography was extraordinary, I'm thinking about the scenes of workers hiking up to the mines, the Chinese prostitutes parading on the other side of barbed wire in the fog of night, and the masses of half-dead human zombies disembarking from the train.

The supporting cast: Michiyo Aratama has most of her screen time in this part as Kaji's wife; Chikage Awashima, who played the idealized but suffering wife so beautifully in Ozu's Early Spring, shows some flesh here as the main Chinese prostitute at the camp; Kôji Mitsui plays the weasel villain pitch-perfect (as always); and Sô Yamamura deserves special recognition for his rugged but sympathizing portrayal of Okishima, Kaji's co-worker.

The weakest aspect of Part I was Tatsuya Nakadai's main character, Kaji himself. Like Michael Kerpan and others, I found his story simply unbelievable at times. I am by no means an expert on Imperial Japan, but I simply could not believe his idealistic insubordination would have been tolerated for so long. Surely he would have been arrested by the Kempeitai much earlier in the movie. I also was not a fan of Nakadai's wide eyes in this part, lacking all subtlety, which reminded me of Masayuki Mori's similar portrayal of the Prince Mishkin character in Kurosawa's adaptation of The Idiot.

Nevertheless I did find this to be the strongest part of the trilogy.


Part II

This had to be an inspiration for Full Metal Jacket, with a 20-minute tank battle at the end. The first half, before the intermission, was quite strong, and I found Kaji and Nakadai's portrayal much more likeable and compelling. Not sure whether he would ever have been allowed to stay with his wife for a night at basic training, but the scene was beautiful anyway (too bad it was cut from the theatrical release by Japanese censors in 1959). Ultimately though, the second half devolves into repetitive melodrama and squabbling. I would have preferred to see a half hour romance between Kaji and the cute nurse, and less biting and slapping by the recruits back at the barracks.

This was the only section of the trilogy I found boring, but thankfully Part 2 ended on a high note with the tank battle against the Russians at the end.


Part 3

This started out as my favorite part, Homer's The Odyssey except much more realistic and set in the Manchurian wilderness; instead of Scylla and Charybdis, Kaji and his small groups of Japanese soldiers and civilians have to avoid Soviet troops looking to capture or mop them up, and local Chinese civilians seeking revenge. They also have to trek across hundreds of miles of fields and forests with little or no food or logistical support. You know some of them are going to make it and some of them won't, you're just trying to guess who the entire time. Very compelling cinema, but a very odd spot to insert the intermission instead of a more natural place like the start of the Soviet POW camp sequence.

The other thing to mention about this part is that the other Japanese are often not friendly to each other either, lying, stealing, deserting, betraying each other, doing whatever it takes to survive. There's a great quote from Part I when Kaji arrives at the labor camp-- when he's told he won't need his books or intellectual theories anymore, because men are not poets or philosophers, instead they are nothing more than masses of flesh of excrement. Everything comes full circle by this point in the series, because there are no more agreed upon rules or conduct anyone should live by; any such notions shift and change depending on new enemies or alliances made. Stripped of all agency and confronted with the unbending reality of human suffering during war, Kaji's idealistic nature gradually breaks him down until he finally starts to go insane. His actions become wanton and careless. At last, after enjoying almost the entire series, the very unsatisfying ending causes me to pause and reconsider everything I've seen before...

What was the point? And I don't mean the outcome, I mean the summation of his choices. Some spoilers:
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He saved like what, three or four men of dubious character at the labor camp, maybe even only temporarily. Those guys probably died in the mines later anyway. For all that, he was undoubtedly replaced by someone who made the working and living conditions much more deadly for the other 10,000 captives. He was arrested by the Kempeitai, conscripted into the army, had to kill numerous Russians in battle to save himself and a few members of his company. He never saw his wife again and left her a widow. The people he encountered in the Manchurian wilderness, certainly the civilians, would have been better off never meeting him. He brutally murdered a man in cold blood, pretty much torturing him as an act of revenge. Even the act he avenged, the rape of the woman, happened because of his own idiotic carelessness.

I can't help but remember back to the words spoken by Wang, the Chinese leader of the camp workers in Part I, who expressed what sounded like noble words of solidarity with Kaji for risking his life to save other human beings. Suddenly, the Kaji of Parts I. II, and III, all seemed the same to me-- an idiot who was used by everyone around him until he eventually went insane.

Ultimately I can only see this as a morality tale, and a rather didactic one with an unlikeable character in the lead. In the hands of a more nuanced writer or director, this story might have been a more lifelike and realistic conversation between the two viewpoints posed in Part I -- what is a man, especially in times of war? Is he human ideals, or a mass of flesh and excrement seeking only to avoid pain and survive?

But as presented in The Human Condition, that conversation becomes a one-sided argument, which I find fundamentally untrue to life. Yes, there's a lot of base humanity in the world, even during times of peace. It may become nearly ubiquitous during extreme conditions and times of war. But the good side of humanity, including some positive outcomes, even in the darkest of times, never completely disappears. There is such a shocking lack of any evidence of goodness by the end of The Human Condition that it appears artificial to my eyes.

Don't be a self-righteous idealist who can win a small battle but ultimately lose the war. Lesson learned.

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Re: 480 The Human Condition

#202 Post by ChunkyLover » Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:39 am


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Mr Sausage
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The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#203 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:13 am

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, April 3rd

Members have a two week period in which to discuss the film before it's moved to its dedicated thread in The Criterion Collection subforum. Please read the Rules and Procedures.

This thread is spoiler free. Please see the second post for details.


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

I encourage members to submit questions, either those designed to elicit discussion and point out interesting things to keep an eye on, or just something you want answered. This will be extremely helpful in getting discussion started. Starting is always the hardest part, all the more so if it's unguided. Questions can be submitted to me via PM.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#204 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:18 am

I'm giving this one a month because, all told, it's a ridiculous 579 minutes long. My current plan is to watch each of the six sections individually and write up the experience. It'll probably be spread out, tho', across the weeks.

Because of that, please:

-use spoiler tags. It should look like this:
Part 1Show
Tatsuya Nakadai unzips himself to reveal Lain of the Wired

The bb code is as follows:

Code: Select all

[spoiler="Part 1"]text[/spoiler]

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#205 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Mar 06, 2023 9:42 am

Mr Sausage wrote:
Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:13 am
This thread is not spoiler free. This is a discussion thread; you should expect plot points of the individual films under discussion to be discussed openly. See: spoiler rules.
Mr Sausage wrote:
Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:18 am
Because of that, please:

-use spoiler tags. It should look like this:
Part 1Show
Tatsuya Nakadai unzips himself to reveal Lain of the Wired

The bb code is as follows:

Code: Select all

[spoiler="Part 1"]text[/spoiler]
Well, now I don’t know what to believe

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#206 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Mar 06, 2023 10:26 am

...I've been C&Ping that spiel for so long I forgot what was in it. Changing it now.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#207 Post by Drucker » Mon Mar 06, 2023 11:12 am

Okay if you're giving me a month I suppose I'll finally open up the Arrow disc I have.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#208 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 09, 2023 10:14 am

No Greater Love: Part 1
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An earnest social drama. The movie is so far animated by a horror of imperialism and militarism. The set-up is conventional: an idealistic young man, whose basic humanity is treated as radical, is quickly disillusioned by the brutalities of life and the impossibility of doing good within an evil system. Nakadai's idealism, tho' it has a heavy leftist cast, is less political than fundamental: a need to see humans as more than just their basic biology, or what the camp leader calls a "mass of lust and greed that absorbs and excretes." But Nakadai is quickly co-opted by the realities of a functioning system, becoming, in his own estimate, a brothel runner and an accomplice to murder. He's not wrong. He's a jailer and prostitutor who believes people shouldn't be jailed and prostituted. There's a cynicism behind this: that his reward for advancing an idealistic theory is to be broken in by the nature of praxis. The trouble, too, is that in order to be incorruptible, he also has to be inflexible, and his inflexibility is exactly where his own inhumanity begins to simmer.

The movie is blunt: for instance, the recalcitrant foremen, the one meant to represent the brutality of the mines, forever carries a whip and slaps his thighs with it as he talks. This is representative. The bluntness eventually grates: everything, even the cruelty, as persuasive as it is, always serves to illustrate a point. You can feel the lesson at every turn. The movie is rather stifling--and it often feels self-flagellating as well. And, considering it's about the human condition, the characters are types rather than persuasive humans: the young idealist; the sympathetic but worldly overseer; the venal camp leader; the brutal foreman; the mixed-race kid forced to choose a side; the self-sacrificing young wife; the sly madame; the totemic prisoners.

The movie was enjoyable, but the idea of spending another six-to-seven hours receiving these same lessons in history wearies me. At the moment, I much prefer Ichikawa's war films.


Random observations:

-The movie is handsomely shot. The scenes at the camp are full of an impressive pictorialism: lines of men snaking up and down the hills; masses of workers lining the walls of the mines; windswept plains full of grasses extending to the horizon. And all shot in scope with elegant camera movements, long takes, and deep focus. The movie looks terrific. Perhaps too terrific: there's a level of sweat and grime the movie declines to show. But its visual beauties never feel inappropriate.

-There are many strong scenes, including a train-car full of prisoners whose horror and intensity rivals a zombie film--just the way these stumbling, broken bodies, all crazed and moaning, lurch across the plain in a wave, driven by nothing more than the raw, inarticulate need for food. Strong stuff.

-Interesting to see the movie admit the existence of comfort women, given how controversial that idea has become in modern Japan, and the poltical divisions it's created between Japan and its former vassal states. In the immediate post-war period, self-flagellation was more accepted--the penance for losing the war. Now, I guess not so much.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#209 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Mar 09, 2023 5:53 pm

Mr S -- Your comment summarizes why I can't bring myself to re-watch this "series" -- despite the fact that it features many actors and actresses I admire. In some fashion I can't quite pinpoint, I don't care for the way he directs his casts. Similarly while his films definitely have abstract pictorial beauty. it is not the sort of cinematic beauty that moves me. Kobayashi's heart is certainly in the right place -- in this and in his other work -- but his films just don't resonate with me. My loss.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#210 Post by Sloper » Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:54 am

Having watched the first two parts (of the six-part version), I share some of Mr Sausage’s and Michael’s reservations, but am feeling more positive overall.
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It reminds me of Harakiri, which I haven’t seen for a while but to which I had a very mixed response: on the one hand it felt overlong, awkwardly paced, and melodramatic to the point of being kind of silly; on the other hand, I found myself deeply disturbed by the violence and cruelty it depicted, and was completely swept up in the anger driving the film to its climax.

I’ve had similar reactions to The Human Condition so far. There are a lot of scenes where the emotions feel forced and over-egged, and where the ideas are spelt out too baldly and too often. There’s no need for any of the ‘human/beast’ stuff in the dialogue – I agree this is all ‘shown’ perfectly clearly, and doesn’t need to be ‘told’ as well.

But I also think the film is doing interesting things with these ideas.

For one thing, we spend a lot of time watching the characters’ faces, and for all the obviousness of the dialogue I think the acting can be really complex and subtle at times. Nakadai’s character is frustrating at times, and there is something a bit tiresome about this ‘type’ – the principled young man fighting the system. But the frequent close-ups of Nakadai (reacting to whatever fresh horror he’s been confronted with) go beyond mere righteous outrage. You can see from tiny gestures, like twitching eyelids or shifts in his facial muscles, that he’s struggling to process his feelings, bottling them up, becoming (or trying to become) more hardened in order to deal with the trauma, perhaps reflecting on his own callousness and self-absorption. This gives some weight to the various confrontations where people question his values, motives, or basic humanity – every choice he makes about how to deal with this job, or even about how to process it in his own mind, feels consequential, and there’s never a simple ‘right’ choice.

The same is true for the other characters as well – Michiko, Okashima, Furuya, Okazaki – who can seem like caricatures at first, but who develop more shades of grey as the film goes on, largely (I think) because of what the actors are doing and how the camera pays attention to them. I particularly like the fact that this applies to the villains as much as the heroes. One of my favourite moments so far is during the execution sequence in Part 2, when Furuya asks one of his subordinates whether he’d like to try cutting the next prisoner’s head off. The soldier looks at the bloody sword being wiped off, and says ‘Yes’. It’s a tiny moment, there’s no close-up inserted to tell us what the soldier is feeling, and the actors don’t over-play the emotions, but you still feel them. This simple acting/directing choice means that we understand what is at stake in the following action, when the soldier botches the job, Kao leaps up and delivers a series of damning condemnations, and at last (once the prisoner is dead) Furuya gives the soldier some good advice for his next beheading: ‘Don’t think of it as a human head.’

I also like the use of settings: the ore mine location reminds me very strongly of Sidney Lumet’s The Hill, where a military prison in the desert becomes an allegorical microcosm, a (maybe slightly obvious) crucible in which dark truths about human brutality are revealed. The mine in The Human Condition feels both very expansive and very enclosed, with those huge dune-like hills on all sides making us feel both protected and hidden from the world outside; we are set apart from the world, but also this place becomes the whole world, and mirrors all of the nightmares we’re supposedly escaping from. Kaji has taken this job to avoid military service, so it’s a kind of safe haven for him and Michiko, but it’s also a cage where he is forced to be complicit in a series of atrocities, to the point where maybe he’d have been better off going to war (or maybe not, I’m guessing…). By the end of Part 2, I felt like I’d really lived in this place for some time, and had grown to hate it – it’s simultaneously an wide open desert where anything goes, and a claustrophobic pit whose inhabitants have no choice but to writhe around like eels in a barrel.

There was one really interesting shot (in Part 2) when Kaji gets up in the middle of the night and tries to go and free the prisoners. Michiko frantically holds him back, and their struggle takes them through different spaces in their small house, right up to the front door. Most of this occurs in a single shot, with the camera more or less static, and the two characters getting further away from us. The shot is gradually taken up more and more with the structures (panels, floors, etc.) of the domestic space, until the married couple seem precariously placed on the edge of that space.

Again, it’s a good example of how the film conveys a point in an effective, cinematic way, as well as sometimes yelling it out loud. Kaji is trying to get out of his sedate, middle-class home, to save the starving, exploited, tortured prisoners from having their heads cut off. There’s something trivial and absurd about his home, and his marriage, in the context of that humanitarian crisis. But on the other hand, the home and the marriage do mean something, and Kaji’s impulsive action will destroy them. For Michiko, stopping him from reaching that last ‘layer’ of the domestic space, the threshold between safety and danger, is as much of an existential battle as Kaji experiences in the more violent, frenetic outdoor sequences. And the actors are good enough to sell all of this, and to transcend (to some extent) the clichéd husband/wife ‘But what about us?’ struggle we’ve seen in countless other movies (JFK is the one that springs to mind, for some reason).

And yes, that train scene in Part 1 is absolutely horrifying. It resonates through everything that follows, like a promise of how bad things can get - and perhaps how bad they always are, under the surface.
Anyway, as much as this film makes me roll my eyes sometimes, I’m definitely into it and looking forward to the rest.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#211 Post by knives » Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:31 pm

This is an all time favorite and Sausage’s curiosity has me enthusiastic to return though I’ll be taking it especially slow. The film, made at the precipice of the ‘60s seems to balancing an almost nostalgic criticism of Japan with the question of what that criticism means for today. The first sixth’s wife subplot emphasizes this for me as it’s shot and scripted practically like a Carmen film while having these bizarre and uneasy moments like the end of their first meeting having her call him a coward.

Overall I feel like the series is structured like a Greek tragedy with Nakadai as this Cassandra figure. He sees with the foresight of a decade the problems with the Japanese war effort, but is unable to communicate his ideas to others in an intelligible way. His hubris and base foreign thinking prevents anything but tragedy for him.
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To touch on Sausage’s great comments a second, I don’t think the series is about the human condition broadly, but rather its needs and response systems. Nakadai expresses what the people need while also transforming, sometimes radically, as a way of dealing with the systems that he must exist in. The rather serious question of the series is when does the spirit reach its limits. This works with types rather than people, I believe, is because the particularism works like allegory. It isn’t so much a question of people dealing with bad systems as the good of humanity in people functioning within systems. Nakadai is Kobayashi’s idea of humanity at its most good within this system confronting the worst of the system. The, I’m sure historical, holocaust like imagery of the Chinese really pushes this. How can you be the good of this situation when dealing with living corpses? I’ll admit this is emotionally punishing and not a strategy for addressing these questions for everybody, but for me it causes enough introspection to be worth while.

Also, you’ll get to the sweat and grime later. This is the optimist’s section.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#212 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Mar 13, 2023 1:04 pm

No Greater Love: Part 2
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As expected, Nakadai's humanistic ideals are brought to a crisis when an equivocal escape attempt results in a barbarous scene of execution. But the situation is weird, because while it's set up as "will Nakadai do the right thing?", it's not a situation where he bears any special guilt. He wasn't there and he made none of the decisions. Indeed, he tries his panicked best to avoid the execution. But the film puts him through the moral wringer anyway, with all sorts calling him a murderer or implying the state of his soul as at risk. And all to the least complicit man at the mine. That the moral situation is resolved by Nakadai begging the army to stop, something he had been doing all along...I'm not sure what personal moral step that is, or what that resolves besides convincing the prisoners he is on their side with his willingness to risk his life for them. I guess it just proves how far he's willing to go for his ideals. A weird situation all around, born of the movie's need to keep its main character pure while still forcing him to endure a moral reckoning, complete with physical suffering.

Which brings me to the main weakness of the two sections: the movie is exploring moral simplicities. The movie does a terrific job representing the impossible complexities of the camp as a social and political entity, and yet it's mostly uninterested in those complexities as a moral situation. Unlike, say, Imamura, who would've explored the effect this messy social context had on human behaviour, Kobayashi prefers simple, classical oppositions: human and inhuman; murderer and not; duty and not. The movie so far is about whether Nakadai deserves to be called a "Japanese dog". In the words of the POW's leader: "Your life has been a series of errors, stemming from the conflict between your work and yourself. Such errors can possibly be corrected. But this one cannot. You'll either be revealed as a murderer wearing the mask of humanism or as one worthy of the beautiful name...'man'." Nakadai's right hand man puts it more gently. He says, while drunk, that Nakadai is "straddling a fundamental contradiction and trying to justify it", but in a more sober light declares that Nakadai is "willing to pay the fare [of humanism] no matter how high." The point is plain: this is all or nothing; the labour camp is antithetical to humanism on all fronts; you can either support it or resist it.

The movie's ultimate point is post-colonial, that you cannot be a good Japanese in Manchukuo. So even tho' Nakadai makes the right decision, saves (some) of the condemned, and withstands torture for his choices, at the end the dead prisoner's beloved throws mud at him and chases him off, screaming "Japanese devil, go home!" This is a protest against Japanese imperialism, its hero a stand in for all decent-minded Japanese people who should've stood up and demanded their government cease being butchers.

I...find the moralisms, self-flagellating, and pedagogy unsatisfying. There's a lot here, but the movie is content to make less of it.

Random observations:

-The way Kobayashi directs his actors is often theatrical. They express their emotions with full bodily movements, like turning away to express worry or disappointment. It goes along with the way Kobayashi directs his actors to exteriorize their emotions. Kurosawa is often credited with encouraging his actors to overact so as to capture the spirit of Noh, but I'd say Kobayashi outdoes him here.

-Again, the set pieces are terrific: the escape attempt with the live wires; the execution scene culminating in the peaceful uprising. Kobayashi is superb in these moments. I think his talent is for action. His frame comes alive when people are sparring or tussling with each other.

-There is a terrific moment where Kobayashi uses a canted angle righting itself to suggest the moral turn of the tide that's just terrific. Blunt, as usual, but imaginative and effective. I wish he'd rely more on that than his preaching dialogue or stagey dramatic moments.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#213 Post by knives » Mon Mar 13, 2023 2:54 pm

Great thoughts.
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I think some of your criticisms can be tempered, or at least they are for me, by looking at the situation collectively rather than individually. It’s not that he fails morally or is specifically culpable, rather he is a signal of Japan as a failure because cannot succeed. The film is brutally deterministic which I’m getting a sense is the main thing bugging you in its approach (especially as compared to Imamura’s fluidity). I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the film has a conclusion about the Japanese character of the time and is going to hammer that conclusion home. There’s no real discovery to be had and Kobayashi as a resulting isn’t a researcher nor an observer. I mentioned Cassandra before, but I think Greek theater morality or even fables (though those don’t last for nine hours) is the most instructive precedent for getting positive things out of the series.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#214 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Mar 13, 2023 3:25 pm

You raise interesting points. I’ve been mulling them over, and will keep them in mind as I watch further.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#215 Post by knives » Tue Mar 14, 2023 3:22 pm

No Greater Love: Part 2
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In rewatching this sixth the thing that immediately jumped out is the play on the audience, or at least this audience member, that the film forces. I knew that the Chinese escape was a good thing rooting for it the same way I would in any slave narrative. I also was agreeing with Nakadai on arguing against the violence of his partner, but I was most angry with him as Nakadai undermined his authority and placed himself in danger. Being so stoic would only remove his system of support. His idealism and desire for the perfect work conditions were going to fail him again. This lead to thoughts about the good German problem. If he were realistic in the way I’ve been asking him to be Nakadai would not only have to compromise his humanity, but also would be explicitly helping an inhumane system.

So, what position would be the right one for a good person to take here? The one Nakadai takes which results in him accomplishing nothing but being left a moral person or the realistic one I’ve been promoting wherein he would be able to make small change at the expense of his title as good person assuming that the best for him is being an incrementalist and the worst a collaborator. To speak in a definitive tone I’ve personally developed a moral view that sullying one’s moral standing to make positive change by working within flawed systems is the best. I doubt that is the series’ point of view though this first third can be read that way. Nakadai is an enigmatic character in the sense that what he’s worth as a person is incredibly vague. Is he heroic in his standing up for the oppressed or just a speck of dust? The questions I’m carrying with me will be answered or at least dealt with later.

I will say for sure that it is always surprising even within the moment how engaging and beautiful the film is with the framing offering powerful images. Just look at the subtle use of widescreen when Nakadai is with his tearful wife about 130 minutes in and compare it with the ridiculous epic of the rebel finale.

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The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#216 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Mar 14, 2023 4:58 pm

John Crowley has this terrific post-colonial novella where you come to realize that, much like ancient astronomers trying to calibrate their geocentric models only to produce endless new errors, colonialism is such a fundamental error that any attempt to correct the system will simply produce more and more errors until collapse.
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You can see the contradictions Nakadai traps himself in:

-to be humane, he has to create conditions where prisoners have strength and hope, which makes them more likely to escape, which makes it more likely for the humane system to be abolished.

-to create a humane system, everyone needs to collaborate, including the prisoners. So Nakadai is constantly disappointed or angry that the prisoners won’t collaborate with him on their own imprisonment and enslavement. It’s absurd, and probably a critique on how reformers can get tunnel vision, focussing overmuch on the success of their new system and losing sight of the actual people they’re working for.


Which is all to say, I disagree that the true moral choice is to compromise yourself by working within a gross and ugly system. And I think the movie gives a good account of why that is.

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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#217 Post by knives » Tue Mar 14, 2023 5:41 pm

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Really good points. I will clarify my position to say that I was talking if Nakadai as agent from the inside was to work. The speech when he is first hired that his proposal sounds leftist provides a third option I’m more sympathetic towards and which you sound like you are as well which is, of course, to attempt to end the system in total. That’s not a choice that Nakadai seriously considers though so I didn’t bring it up initially.

That’s what I was aiming for in my good German comparison. Nakadai wants to function in society, but seeing its fatal flaw wants to change it (specifically he doesn’t seem to consider trying to end instantaneously which is why I called him an incrementalist). As someone without resources making him unlike a Schindler developing beuracratic change seems to be within his power, but to do that successfully he seems to need to compromise on his morals.

This is a long way to say that the film does well in showing there are no good options, but that the option which he chooses while making him morally clean doesn’t actually do anything to help the Chinese. I was trying to say if bottom of the barrel options I think he chose the weakest one.

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The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#218 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:38 pm

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In many ways, his choice was also made for him. Having written a paper laying out his ideas for reform, but only because he was asked to write a paper on the situation, he is suddenly told he will be shipped off to put them into practise despite having no experience running a mine. He’s been bootstrapped into demonstrating his ideas, so implement them he must. Then he has to deal with entrenched greed and cruelty, army belligerence, the reality of war-time work quotas, and the sudden task of running a jail as well. Everything he does, no matter the high moral intentions, compounds the original error. But he’s there to show everyone the superiority of being humane—how can he turn that down?

There is another option besides revolution: non-participation. He can wreck the system or he can refuse to participate in it. But I’m not sure any choice he could make within the system would’ve ended any differently: ultimately, those POWs are going to be worked to death, one way or the other, and all his choices only delayed it.

I think ultimately it doesn’t matter so much to me what the correct choice is here. I think what I appreciated most about this first section is how well it showed the impossibility of any effective action, to the point that Nakadai’s moral stand can only be personal (with six more hours of suffering still to go) and not instrumental.

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knives
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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#219 Post by knives » Tue Mar 14, 2023 7:17 pm

I think that phrases it well and gets at what I was stumbling towards.
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In particular passive resistance was the concept I was thinking of without remembering. As some context, I’ve seen a ton of movies recently about the failed left wing militant movements of the’60s and ‘70s (particularly helpful here are Wakamatsu’s films on the United Red Army) and so the (failed) attempts at cultural revolution was on my mind spacing out on the success of passive movements.

I think, big picture, we can agree that our protagonist chose poorly despite the best of intentions. You’re mentioning removing yourself from the problem really gets to something I said in my previous post though as in a way that would be the ultimate individualistic move whereas his choice is to integrate his good into society which as you’ve already said was doomed to failure from the word go.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#220 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Mar 14, 2023 8:31 pm

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Oh, great point. Because Nakadai is also meant to be a symbol of Japan, he cannot make ultimately individual choices like that. The movie wouldn't work within such a flagrantly Western idea. To examine Japanese society at all, the Nakadai character has to be community oriented--not just because this is a well known Japanese social ideal, but in order to critique this idea, or at least lay it out so we can see exactly where the guilt and shame lies (Kobayashi is, as you've said, not Imamura). I never made that connection, so I appreciate you bringing it out like that.

There is a lot in this movie, even if it does make me roll my eyes quite a bit. And I've only see a third of it!

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#221 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 16, 2023 12:09 am

Unlike No Greater Love, I can't seem to find a break or division point in either Road to Eternity or A Soldier's Prayer on a quick scan through. So I'm going to abandon my plan to write up each section and just do the remaining two parts as wholes. Which is kind of annoying, because I don't have the patience to watch 3-hour plus movies anymore.

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knives
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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#222 Post by knives » Thu Mar 16, 2023 12:26 am

They do exist and as you watch them they are as clear as in he first film when they come up. They’re also roughly half way through each film. What source are you using to watch them? Maybe I can’t look for time stamps tomorrow.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#223 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:39 am

Hmm. Maybe I skipped past them? Some time stamps would be nice.

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knives
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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#224 Post by knives » Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:21 am

If you’re using the criterion discs they are chapter 17 for both films.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961)

#225 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:27 am

Do you know the actual time stamp?

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