480 The Human Condition

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

#226 Post by knives » Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:29 am

I can check later in the day on my discs.

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

#227 Post by knives » Thu Mar 16, 2023 3:42 pm

The time stamps are 102 minutes for the second and 90 minutes for the third film.

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

#228 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 16, 2023 3:45 pm

Hah! I literally just tried to post that I'd found them, only for your post to come up. Thanks nonetheless!

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

#229 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:14 pm

Road to Eternity: Part 1
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In a grim irony, Nakadai, one-time prison reformer, now finds himself jailed and subject to the cruelties and abuses he had sought to ameliorate. And that's the point the section drives at: that the camp and the barracks are two names for the same thing. One of the benefits of long-term story-telling like this is that you can pattern more widely, create parallels and echoes across a greater expanse of narrative. By itself, this section is a good, if familiar, indictment of military training. As part of the whole, we can see how much the barracks recapitulates what we saw in the work camp. This is where the brilliance starts to show, in the larger structural organization that can create this layered social critique. For instance, it is bad enough to see the men routinely beaten and humiliated for the smallest perceived slight, but worse when we remember every time that same thing happened to the prisoners and camp workers. The impression is that Imperial Japan treated its soldiers, the very men it depended on to secure its aims and for whom it was presumably governing the country, no differently than it treated its lowest and most exploitable social stratum. The movie also makes an implicit critique that functions as short hand: we are given little access to the functioning of the army brass, the decision makers; but because we have spent so much time with the decision makers at the camp, the parallels let us know that the brass works no differently, and with no less greed, selfishness, and pettiness.

The movie continues the strongest element of No Greater Love, the careful attention to the social structure of its chosen microcosm. Like the workers' camp, the barracks feels like a living entity, crammed with people and structured around a tangle of hierarchies, motivations, and duties that aren't easily reduced. The narrative feels less leaden, too: there are fewer scenes of intoned speeches, blunt moralizings, or lame romantic conversations. Almost every scene is fraught in some way or another, with violent or absurd intrusions peppering most interactions, and smaller conversations always shadowed by someone's hostile eyes. It allows Kobayashi to play to his strengths, ie. his gift for action. The opening scene sets the atmosphere perfectly: the men roused from bed without warning and beaten, one-by-one, without reason or recourse. Such will be the rest of the movie. It becomes so absurd that, by the end, Nakadai is being screamed at even for daring even to walk a couple steps out of bed without permission--and this in a hospital! Usually hospitals in war films serve as a kind of reprieve, but even here the prison-feel persists.

One of the darker aspects is the fact that Nakadai's resolve in the face of evil, his willingness to stand up for virtue, is, apparently, exactly what the brass like in a soldier, and they keep trying to promote him despite his utter distaste for everything he sees. Somehow, trying to be a decent man in spite of his training seems to be turning him into precisely what the training intends--an utter absurdity the film thankfully doesn't belabour.

I enjoyed myself here. The film felt less overtly didactic, more willing to make connections and draw parallels to make its points. It's still a guilt-sodden, self-flagellating story, but it's not as caught up in ideas of duty and virtue, or even ideas at all. It's a much smaller, more focused story. I look forward to the second part.

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

#230 Post by ballmouse » Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:25 pm

This is the first Film Club discussion I've decided to participate in (mostly because I happened to have the DVD here the same time the topic came up). I'm still working my way through Part 1 (around 45 minutes in). So far so good. I have two bullet points so far.
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The story, while filmed in 1959 and taking place during WWII, is still completely relevant in 2023. Look at the news regarding backlash of remote work or loss of minimum wage workers from the workforce and the proliferation of the r/antiwork subreddt (don't ask - I just happen to get shared a number of posts there). My own workplaces has similar conundrums regarding treatment of workers from management. Frankly, the system isn't squeaky clean. But it's designed by humans for humans, so how could it be really? I suppose I'm a cynic, but I'm a sucker for films that point out our own contradictions and corruption.

The second point is that as someone who speaks and understands Mandarin, the Mandarin used is quite awful. I want to believe Manchuria had some strange dialect or accent used, but I do find it much more likely the actors were not Mandarin speakers and didn't have time to learn the pronunciation. I didn't even realize they were speaking Mandarin the first few times it happened. I thought it might happen just a few times, but this happens multiple times with multiple different actresses and actors that I can't help but point it out now. Unfortunately, it really breaks the spell of the film, which is so far I've quite enjoyed. So in my head I'm going to try my best to imagine all the actors speaking it are Japanese ex-pats and that Manchuria had a strange regional pronunciation, instead of the analogous English equivalent of something like Nic Cage or Sean Connery trying to speak Spanish, playing a Spaniard without irony.

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

#231 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:53 pm

There are no Chinese actors in the movie, or even Chinese speakers. All the Chinese characters are played by Japanese actors speaking Mandarin phonetically. I don't even speak a Chinese language, and I could tell immediately that something was off.

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

#232 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:20 pm

For a different sort of perspective on the Japanese war in China -- made at the time of the war, in China, not THAT far behind the front lines -- there is Fumio Kamei's 1938 Fighting Soldiers. Kamei was a fundamentally anti-war leftist -- and his depiction of exhausted soldiers (and his generally sympathetic picture of the conquered Chinese) got him into trouble. He was the only Japanese director arrested for being unpatriotic, and his license to direct films was revoked. His right to direct was restored after the war ended -- and he proceeded to make a film that castigated the Japanese government (and especially the Emperor) for fighting the war in the first place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the American Occupation authorities banned THIS film. (It was initially approved, but when MacArthur found out about the finished product he was apparently quite unhappy about it).

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

#233 Post by ballmouse » Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:57 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:53 pm
There are no Chinese actors in the movie, or even Chinese speakers. All the Chinese characters are played by Japanese actors speaking Mandarin phonetically. I don't even speak a Chinese language, and I could tell immediately that something was off.
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I just got to the point where the comfort women try to talk dirty in Mandarin, and it's actually so bad it's funny. But I know it's blasphemous, but I now want a redubbed version of the film for the Mandarin parts because it seems 1/3 (if not more) of the dialogue now is in Mandarin.
Still, the film is still enjoyable, though I wonder how the phonetic translator felt after preparing the actors and actresses or if Kobayashi and the producers had any idea how bad the Mandarin was.

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

#234 Post by ballmouse » Sat Mar 18, 2023 2:15 pm

I finished Part 2 (the 2nd half of the 1st Criterion disc).
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I don't think it matches up to Part 1, which I quite liked. Part 2 was a little melodramatic and there seemed to be scenes that were superfluous. They didn't move the plot and they repeated what we already knew. Maybe they were meant to reinforce our feelings. I guess I'm the wrong audience then.

I do think it would have been nice to see Kaji's improvements in the mining camps. We hear that they've hit their production quota, but we only see Kaji's frustration. It also makes the conversations between him and the POWs about trust and friendship hard to understand since we never see any of Kaji's "victories". I think it raises the question within the audience: why doesn't he give in? Much like a less than stellar job, we stay because of the the small, emotional highs that give us hope things may improve or that "things aren't all so bad" (and the pay of course. Perhaps that could have also been shown as well, although Kaji does not seem like he would have been influenced much by his salary or any potential raises/promotions). I think those little bits of happiness would have been nice to show to some extent. It would tether Kaji's position a little closer to the realities we all face. Instead, it makes Kaji's story seem less relatable and the whole story something we tune out a little given the repetition and the filtered POV. Of course, perhaps it's better to pound that POV in.

With regard to the posts regarding Kaji's decision, I think they all choices are rotten. But that's the game of "middle management", which is the tier Kaji was stuck with. You're told to feed your subordinates, but you're only given rotten bananas (why this came into my head I don't know). You're given a responsibility you can't possibly control given the decisions made by your superiors create a scenario of contradictions. So how does middle management work in the present? Off the top of my head, they quit because they can no longer reconcile the conditions of work with their personal code; they compartmentalize work and self and act as employee at work and live outside work as another person; they aren't bothered by work conditions because they see nothing wrong or that work is supposed to be this way; or they raise a stink, which rarely resolves the issue because the issue is the whole system. I'm sure there are others, but this is what came to mind. And in no case does anything change. We're in a system designed by humans for humans. It will never satisfy everyone in every way. Unfortunately, a system 50% good in ethics (if that makes sense) is "good enough" and that makes folks like Kaji who wants a system that is 100% ethical suffer.

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

#235 Post by ballmouse » Sun Mar 19, 2023 1:44 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:14 pm
Road to Eternity: Part 1
SpoilerShow
In a grim irony, Nakadai, one-time prison reformer, now finds himself jailed and subject to the cruelties and abuses he had sought to ameliorate. And that's the point the section drives at: that the camp and the barracks are two names for the same thing. One of the benefits of long-term story-telling like this is that you can pattern more widely, create parallels and echoes across a greater expanse of narrative. By itself, this section is a good, if familiar, indictment of military training. As part of the whole, we can see how much the barracks recapitulates what we saw in the work camp. This is where the brilliance starts to show, in the larger structural organization that can create this layered social critique. For instance, it is bad enough to see the men routinely beaten and humiliated for the smallest perceived slight, but worse when we remember every time that same thing happened to the prisoners and camp workers. The impression is that Imperial Japan treated its soldiers, the very men it depended on to secure its aims and for whom it was presumably governing the country, no differently than it treated its lowest and most exploitable social stratum. The movie also makes an implicit critique that functions as short hand: we are given little access to the functioning of the army brass, the decision makers; but because we have spent so much time with the decision makers at the camp, the parallels let us know that the brass works no differently, and with no less greed, selfishness, and pettiness.

The movie continues the strongest element of No Greater Love, the careful attention to the social structure of its chosen microcosm. Like the workers' camp, the barracks feels like a living entity, crammed with people and structured around a tangle of hierarchies, motivations, and duties that aren't easily reduced. The narrative feels less leaden, too: there are fewer scenes of intoned speeches, blunt moralizings, or lame romantic conversations. Almost every scene is fraught in some way or another, with violent or absurd intrusions peppering most interactions, and smaller conversations always shadowed by someone's hostile eyes. It allows Kobayashi to play to his strengths, ie. his gift for action. The opening scene sets the atmosphere perfectly: the men roused from bed without warning and beaten, one-by-one, without reason or recourse. Such will be the rest of the movie. It becomes so absurd that, by the end, Nakadai is being screamed at even for daring even to walk a couple steps out of bed without permission--and this in a hospital! Usually hospitals in war films serve as a kind of reprieve, but even here the prison-feel persists.

One of the darker aspects is the fact that Nakadai's resolve in the face of evil, his willingness to stand up for virtue, is, apparently, exactly what the brass like in a soldier, and they keep trying to promote him despite his utter distaste for everything he sees. Somehow, trying to be a decent man in spite of his training seems to be turning him into precisely what the training intends--an utter absurdity the film thankfully doesn't belabour.

I enjoyed myself here. The film felt less overtly didactic, more willing to make connections and draw parallels to make its points. It's still a guilt-sodden, self-flagellating story, but it's not as caught up in ideas of duty and virtue, or even ideas at all. It's a much smaller, more focused story. I look forward to the second part.
I have just finished watching this part (Part 1 of Road to Eternity or Part 3 of the series).
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I echo how eloquently you structured this. It was very thematic to bring Kaji to the lowest level of the hierarchy.

One piece of dialogue which stuck with me was how the officers outright disallow "personal feuds". I have no idea if this was a throwaway line because it was never expanded further. And yet I could not help see the contradiction of the point. Aren't the soldiers individualized and discriminated because of their perceived faults? Isn't the reason that Kaji is in the military due to a personal feud? Aren't the same officers who disallow "personal feuds" having those feuds with supposed "Reds"? The individualized criticism is even escalated to bullying, something highlighted as against regulations. And yet there is no linking of these actions to a personal feud, which is what they are. If promotion is based on individual achievement and accomplishment, how can one not keep in mind personal failure or disagreement? In fact, there are no "agree to disagree" moments at all in the 3 parts. Those in power force those under them to capitulate and fall in line, no matter the argument.

That said, there were 2 scenes which I singled out as...curious...in the study of Kaji's character. The first was his request for his wife to undress under moonlight. I understand his stated reason to burn the image into his head, but it seems out of character from what I've seen. In no instance before has he shown any desire to indulge in his wife physically. Perhaps the army had broken him down? His wife also breaks down after fulfilling the request, seemingly with the realization she has nothing to offer her husband. I'm not sure if this was the realization that she is not physically beautiful or that her husband stooping to physical effects shows that he doesn't see anything else of use from her or just some melodramatic throwaway line that would have been "womanly" for her to say.

The next was just prior to the prairie fire. It seemed he was about to attack his officer. Previously, we saw him attack his assistant in No Greater Love. But that was clearly spur of the moment and emotionally charged. This sequence showed he had clearly played the idea out in his head beforehand and that he was still visualizing it as he was approaching the officer. Why? Again, has his army experience broken him down? Is it because now he's at the bottom tier of the social hierarchy that it seems appropriate? He was always playing the pacifist and taking the beatings. He had never played the role of aggressor before.

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

#236 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Mar 19, 2023 3:32 pm

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Oh yeah, it's only a personal feud when someone of a lower or equal rank does it. If someone of a higher rank does it, it's army training. The hypocrisy is amazing

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

#237 Post by ballmouse » Sun Mar 19, 2023 9:00 pm

I have finished the series.
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I must admit I liked each of the films in the trilogy progressively less, so consequently the 3rd film A Soldier's Prayer tested my endurance the most. In the first few parts of the trilogy, Kaji's ideals of humane treatment and morals are emphasized over and over, a sort of high minded message. By the end, he is effectively crushed and becomes a morally, rationally twisted beast. That end state does not bother me. I suppose what I found tiresome was the fact we got there the way we did. I understood the failure of authority to be responsible. I understood that some individuals are corrupt. But I didn't quite understand why Kaji continually put himself in progressively worse positions by dragging along every straggler he met as his objective become personal at that point and that he had seemingly come to the realization that there was little in common between him and other men. I was cheering for him when he finally decided to let every man go his own way, but that was right before he was captured and taken into a POW camp. I don't know if there was any additional message to convey with Kaji in a POW camp given we had seen a POW camp in No Greater Love and Kaji at the lowest tier of the power hierarchy earlier as well. I suppose the Kafka-esque sequence with the translator was interesting, though that was about it. Even reintroducing Tange doesn't seem to add much. (As a side note for those viewers like me who have poor recollection of actors, Lt. Kageyama in Road to Eternity is his friend introduced at the very beginning of the trilogy. I hope I save someone the time of searching the internet to figure out who that was.)

I have no idea if this was the intent, but by the end I had given up on the trilogy's initial societal premise. Given the surrealism and constant panging for his wife, I had the understanding that dreams are what keep men sane in an insane world. There is a division between the real, physical world and the mental one. Peace in the physical world cannot be achieved physically or in reality. The conflicts within society make that impossible. Dreams and our own mental satisfaction are what we can control. In an unideal physical world, having dreams or mental satisfaction Is what keeps us sane, even if it in reality looks insane.

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

#238 Post by Sloper » Sun Mar 26, 2023 5:02 am

Now that I’ve finished all six parts...
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Mr Sausage wrote: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.
Just a couple of thoughts in addition to knives’ responses: one of the reasons Kaji is given such a hard time by the Chinese prisoners is that he set himself up as someone who would help them. He worsens their misery by giving them false hope, he makes them feel like they’ve been duped by their oppressors (which, via Kaji, they effectively have), and in the process he diverts their energy from other strategies that might actually have helped them escape. I didn’t think he was especially culpable, but I also understood why people were hurling insults (and rocks) at him by the end of Part 2.

I think it’s significant that his begging the army to stop the executions is not sufficient to save the prisoners’ lives; it’s the combination of this and the mass protest that cause Furuya to back down. I also got the sense that the mass protest was, to some extent, precipitated by Kaji’s individual protest. Maybe that’s giving him too much credit, but I felt like the film was implying some glimmer of hope for change – if even one middle-manager (to use ballmouse’s term) has the courage to make a stand, that can be the small wedge that opens up a gap in the larger power structure.

I’d also go back to my earlier point about the complex emotions of the Kenpeitai in this scene. Yes, the acting is theatrical in many ways, but I do think the actors consistently give us a sense of the conflicting forces within these characters. The motif of the flickering eyelid recurs several times in the later episodes, usually in association with the act of killing, and every act of killing feels like it has weight, like it affects the killer in some way. This even applies to Furuya, and somehow (besides the fear of a riot) I got the sense that he had had enough brutality for one day, after the botched execution of Kao.

I’d say the same about all of the seemingly cruel, callous behaviour we see in the rest of the film. The bullying soldiers, sneering and cackling in their bunks as they torture the recruits, or torture Kaji, didn’t come across as ‘evil’ to me – they’re just living in the only way they know how, under these circumstances.

As the film goes on and the characters keep dropping like flies, it seems more and more absurd to think in terms of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, or to agonise over one’s role in a corrupt moral system. Those moments when the characters find themselves at the mercy of the elements, starving to death in the forest or freezing to death on an empty plain, seem (to me) like the most lucid demonstrations of the ‘human condition’. The cruel individuals aren’t the problem, the military is; and then the military isn’t the problem, the mindset that drives it is; and then finally, it isn’t even that mindset that is the problem, but the essential cruelty of the universe.

Although there were some slow patches, by the end I found the cumulative force of the narrative incredibly powerful. There is something about the progression (or rather the descent) from one stage to the next that makes it feel like a series of veils are being torn away, and those last 10 minutes or so were absolutely devastating. Kaji’s final journey into oblivion felt like a perfect summation of everything that had gone before, both surprisingly bleak and completely fitting and inevitable. The score is really wonderful here too. The ending made me want to go back and watch the film again, despite my reservations about it, because I think the whole thing would have an added depth and resonance on a second viewing.
ballmouse wrote:Look at the news regarding backlash of remote work or loss of minimum wage workers from the workforce and the proliferation of the r/antiwork subreddt (don't ask - I just happen to get shared a number of posts there). My own workplaces has similar conundrums regarding treatment of workers from management.
I often found myself thinking of workplace experiences I’ve had, especially times when I thought I was acting on principle but ended up accomplishing nothing, or even making things worse. Not to downplay the specificity of what the film is saying about war, but it is also about ideas and power structures that operate in peacetime, in any context.

The translation scene was one of the best sequences, I thought, and the triangulation of the characters rang very true for me: Kaji earnestly trying to get his point across, the translator anxiously calculating how best to play the role assigned to him, and the Russian officer more confidently (and mindlessly) imposing an interpretation that fits the agenda he’s been tasked with fulfilling. Something about the way Kaji stands in the shadows and seems unable to get out of them, and then how he seems to occupy his own subjective pool of light as he reflects on what has happened, gave me a strong feeling that the film was working up to its conclusion, that its exploration of the various themes was coming to a head.
ballmouse wrote:[Kaji’s] request for his wife to undress under moonlight [...] seems out of character from what I've seen. In no instance before has he shown any desire to indulge in his wife physically. Perhaps the army had broken him down? His wife also breaks down after fulfilling the request, seemingly with the realization she has nothing to offer her husband. I'm not sure if this was the realization that she is not physically beautiful or that her husband stooping to physical effects shows that he doesn't see anything else of use from her or just some melodramatic throwaway line that would have been "womanly" for her to say.
The film is obviously very restrained about this stuff (and Philip Kemp mentions that the undressing scene was censored on the original release) but I did get a sense of physical intimacy between Kaji and Michiko before this, partly from the bathing scenes earlier on, but also from the way they looked forward to spending time together and going on a trip. The undressing scene is a reminder of all that lost person-to-person interaction, those simple activities that meant so much, and it adds a poignancy to many other moments when Kaji has some kind of connection (physical or otherwise) with another person – even when he’s trying to save his hated comrade from drowning in the swamp, or near the end when he reaches out pitifully for a scrap of food. Seeing Michiko’s naked humanity is, I think, meant to help him maintain contact with humanity, to remember to see other people as vulnerable individuals rather than as hollow uniforms.
ballmouse wrote:Given the surrealism and constant panging for his wife, I had the understanding that dreams are what keep men sane in an insane world. There is a division between the real, physical world and the mental one. Peace in the physical world cannot be achieved physically or in reality. The conflicts within society make that impossible. Dreams and our own mental satisfaction are what we can control.
Yes, he retreats into fantasies of returning home at the end, and dies believing he is reunited with Michiko. In dramatic terms, once we hear this reunion play out on the soundtrack, as a dream, we know that it won’t happen in real life.

There’s a link between this and the un-fulfillable ideals and pipe dreams Kaji had at the start, and the nonsensical bullshit that poisons the minds of almost all the Japanese soldiers. Terada has fully drunk that Kool-Aid when we first meet him, and Kaji warns him he will end up dying a dog’s death; but despite being de-conditioned, Terada dies a dog’s death anyway, and dies calling out for Kaji. Did it ultimately make any difference that he lost those poisonous illusions he had before? As with the Chinese prisoners, did his faith in Kaji (and the alternative illusions he represents) ultimately do Terada any good? And does it mean anything, or make anything better, that Kaji then inflicts the same fate on Terada’s killer? At its bleakest, the film seems to suggest that these people all die like animals, and any ideas to the contrary are just constructions of the mind.

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

#239 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Mar 30, 2023 10:31 am

Road to Eternity: Part 2
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This section continues to recapitulate the camp, this time with Kaji again as embattled reformer. It goes as expected, with arrogance, suspicion, and in-group mentalities producing endless cruelties. But I think my favourite part is the collective hope, manifesting almost as delusion, that Japan can still win the war. It gets to the point that one officer even tries to claim that losing Okinawa was part of the plan all along, that the allies are falling right into Japan's hands. The atmosphere is of an empire in decline, holding on only through irrationality and the cruelty it begets. The movie is full of people who refuse to accept the situation they're in, and those who do are either like Kaji, hopeful that they can be humane, or like his friend the officer, pessimistic and sure they are to die. The rest argue fitfully between duty (an increasingly unpersuasive abstraction) and self preservation.

The war scenes are of course utterly hopeless. There's no heroism, no chance for it. The whole enterprise is badly mismanaged. All that endless training with its supposedly necessary cruelty, and it amounted to nothing. Again, Kobayashi shows his talent for action. The battle feels crushing and hopeless, with no sense that the Japanese could ever have mounted a serious defense.

Random thoughts:

-Kaji explicitly mentions his own compromise, saying: he "sold his soul for a military exemption." Kaji now seems to've arrived at a point of total rejection, believing his mistake was to've participated in the war in any capacity.

-The film ends on a point of silly melodrama. Kobayshi can't help himself, and overdoes things. There is something unconvincing about a man in a war declaring himself a murderer. I don't buy it. It feels contrived, like it's setting up a new dramatic arc.

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

#240 Post by Black Hat » Sun Apr 02, 2023 10:23 pm

Superb insights all around and I wish it didn't take me the whole month to finish this.

Having found Harakiri and Kwaidan mesmerizing with Samurai Rebellion a different but equally riveting experience I was looking forward to finally diving into this.
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The flushing out of what Kaji is supposed to represent made aspects of the film I felt were overwrought go down much easier. What hasn't been remarked upon too much is the relationship between Kaji & Michicko. What Kobayashi seems to be saying is that the most important aspect of the human condition, what makes life worth living, is love. The power of love is the counterbalance to the constant cruelty of humanity.
Mr Sausage wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 10:14 am
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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.
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Indeed. Kobayashi's mastery of design, which solidified itself over his next two films, really stood out, especially in part 3 where he uses the tools of cinema to show us the psychological changes happening to Kaji. There were some unusual, abrupt cuts in part 3 I didn't understand, and would love to know the reasoning behind those choices because they seemed to lack the precision exhibited everywhere else.
Sloper wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:54 am
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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.
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Kobayashi's greatest strength is his obsessive attention to detail and he meshed that beautifully with Nakadai's rapidly changing, emotional, theatrically extreme performance. They're such stylists that it really is incredible how perfectly complimentary they were to one another.
Mr Sausage wrote:
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. 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.
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I think the point is plain to us but, for Kaji the experience was a necessary pivot point. Also, I would argue Kobayashi gives you the effect it had on human behavior through his relationship with Michiko. I thought having Obara in part two and especially Terada in part three, who pledges his devotion to him, was a clever way to have someone fill the Michiko role for Kaji. Normally you would think the women who showed up would fill that void and while the nurse came close Kobayashi didn't do that with the other two female characters. In fact, besides Kaji, of course, the nurse, prostitute, and refugee(Takamine) are the film's most complete characters. The way he gives these women humanity, and agency, running counter to the societal view was yet another critique of Japanese society.
knives wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 2:54 pm
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There’s no real discovery to be had and Kobayashi as a resulting isn’t a researcher nor an observer.
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Not sure what you mean by this, can you expand it? Because to me he, more than most filmmakers, shows his work is coming from personal observation and experience.

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

#241 Post by knives » Mon Apr 03, 2023 4:54 am

I was comparing him to Imamura who’s known as something of an anthropologist. Kobayashi for all the personal experience he lays into the subject is working in a more theatrical mode with a more formalized idea of what will happen.

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

#242 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Apr 03, 2023 10:16 am

I find Kobayashi's film to often be (sometimes far) better looking -- pictorially -- than Imamura's -- but far less insightful. And while Imamura's characters seem more "crass" they also strike me as (in a more essential way) to be more subtly presented.

In another odious comparison (involving directors excelling in quasi-painterly excellence) -- It is funny, I feel far more in sympathy "politically" with Kobayashi than with Mizoguchi, yet I vastly prefer (most of) Mizoguchi's films. Even after 20+ years I have not quite figured this out....

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

#243 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Apr 03, 2023 10:50 am

A Soldier's Prayer Parts 1 and 2
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A very good war movie of the picaresque variety. Does well capturing many of the brutal realities of survival. Which I suppose is Kobayashi's point, how one maintains one's humanity in bestial circumstances, where food and water are the prime motivators. Tho' I'm not sure one can learn any lesson from it, as Kaji maintains his moral character as a matter of course rather than through the kind of choices set up in the previous parts. He even refuses to cheat on his wife, even going to far as to call the opportunity prostitution (a sadly moralistic moment in a movie that earlier condemned judgemental reactions towards sex workers).

That's something I thought bordered on melodramatic, Kaji's dogged devotion to his wife, his attachment to a love so pure it carries him through everything, even the brutalities of war, like a beacon of salvation. I suppose that's why Kaji wanted to fix her in his mind on that last night together, but there's a large part of me that wanted the movie to register certain realities, that people from the past can begin to disappear in your mind as your life changes radically, that you can begin to forget even what people look and sound like, that the past can come to seem like another time. Or even that your dogged image of people can become ossified and cease to represent the real person. I won't go so far as to say it was unpersuasive--Kaji is after all a rather fixed individual; but it does sit somewhat awkwardly beside the movie's attention to physical and social reality elsewhere. It makes Kaji come across as more an idea of a person than a person. He does have an annoying tendency to declaim how things are in a sententious manner, anyway.

My favourite sections had to do with women, both Kaji's conversation with the former prostitute searching for her sister, and his conversation with the woman across the campfire in the village. The latter especially was refreshingly clear-eyed in her observations and her sadness. I wish Kaji had loosened up and shared her humanity for a moment, but he stayed a rock up to his final, unnecessary reproach. Kaji's moralisms worked better in the first two parts, which were set up as clear ethical situations. Here, in the looser picaresque section about chance and survival, Kaji's moralisms seemed out of place.

Random thoughts:

-Kaji does prove the officers from Part 2 right: he's an exceptional soldier, with an indomitable will that commands authority.

-The movie is nicely circular, with Kaji both starting and finishing in a work camp (with the thudding irony that the saviour of POWs ends as a POW).

-Was Kobayashi a socialist and/or communist? A late scene does seem to honour the communist party, what with the party member being the more noble man in the interrogation, and his moment of kindness to Kaji being framed with a giant poster of Stalin behind him. The film doesn't valourize the Red Army, but it seems pretty onboard the communist party and socialism in general. That said, Kaji does later complain that the leadership seems smug and selfish, tho' he also thinks the POWs are not enemies in the class struggle.
The Human Condition was a fascinating experience. I think it's a good movie. I'm not sure it's an out-and-out masterpiece. When I compare it to Ichikawa's two big war movies, The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, it suffers from the comparison. Those are undoubtedly masterpieces. And Kobayashi's film doesn't compare well with Imamura's conception of survival instincts interacting with social structures, either, tho' it also tackles the social aspects of survival. There's something too tendentious and ideological about Kobayashi's project. Something about it that feels, I don't know, dutiful. There was a lot I liked, especially the action scenes and the social microcosms, and also a certain amount I thought held it back.

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