480 The Human Condition

[The Masked Marvel]

Seven Samurai did have two commentaries on it if that means anything.

#-o Thanks. I was indeed overreacting.

[aox]

a commentary on a 3.5 hour film is 200mb?

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Closer to 300 (assuming 192kbps, which I think is normal for Criterion's commentaries).

[Paupau]

I also think a four disc set is a little weird. I own the spanish version, and all three films are spread across 2 discs each. If i'm not mistaken, all dual layered. And still the image, tough very good, doens't compare with CC best efforts.

These films will really be a challenge to put on a single disc. Wouldn't be surprised to see some changes in the number of discs in the future.

[What A Disgrace]

Parts 2 and 3 are just a little over three hours in length; Criterion should have no trouble fitting them on a single disc. The Leopard and several others did it with no trouble, and they had commentaries. Part 1 of the trilogy might be split over two discs, with the extras also being spread between them.

[Tommaso]

Yes, this seems most likely, especially as the extras don't look as extensive as I hoped for. Nevertheless: =D>
After all these years of this set being announced, how great to see it's finally coming. Probably their most important release this year.

[TheRanchHand]

What?? No commentary??

[Fan-of-Kurosawa]

For me this is the most interesting release so far this year. =D>

Until now it was the Imamura box set but since I prefer Kobayashi from Imamura, I am more excited about this release. However, as many of you have already noted, the extras seem interesting but slim. A more comprehensive doc about the making of this 9+ hour epic could have helped a lot. To tell the truth, I am not so sure that I would have wanted a commentary. But anyway, I am very happy that this is coming. (especially since I don' t have the old Image release).

[HerrSchreck]

I know a commentary would have been nice, but seriously-- who can talk for over nine hours about a fucking film, no matter how grand, long, or epic in scope. Even if CC solicited the Richies and the Rayns' and the Jecks (or even Nakadai himself), I'm sure they all would have balked. It would have inevitably devolved into "Here we come to the point in the story where...", "Just LOOK at this FABULOUS shot," etc.

I'm sure all but the most publicity-hungry maniac would have "Nothanks"ed.

Kinjitsu: sorry I didn't see your question. No I didn't catch the tour of the new resto, which was part of a major Nakadai retro at the NYFForum. There was even an "An Evening With Tatsuya Nakadai" evening. Of course, you read it on the mail-in calendar and you commit with excesses of nuclear energy, then life sets in... a huge commitment-- you either see the whole thing or not at all.

[kinjitsu]

There is no reason for Part I to be spread over 2 discs. Certainly each film will comfortably fit on its own disc. This is three months off, so it's more than likely that they'll be adding more extras. And the idea of a nine-hour commentary is simply ludicrous.

Schreck, a pity you missed the screening at FF, but yeah, life takes over. Would have been an absolute treat to see Nakadai in the flesh.

It's been at least five years since I watched the entire film in one day on my old CRT. Rough going, but I persevered. The next time around should be a much pleasanter experience.

[ryan11]

but seriously-- who can talk for over nine hours about a fucking film

Quentin Tarantino. His film, your film, films never made, cling-wrap film - he could do it.

[knives]

but seriously-- who can talk for over nine hours about a fucking film

Maybe a different critic for each film, like an expanded version of what they did with Seven Samurai? Probably make it too expensive though.

[movielocke]

Part 1 had an intermission when I saw it in Los Angeles, I imagine they're putting part one on two discs, and parts 2 and 3 on one disc each. I'll netflix the latter two parts, I found the first part alternated between mesmerizing and tedious, so I mostly was frustrated with it, but good enough to watch the rest.

[Saturnome]

Each part is made of two chapters so as long it cut at a chapter ending I don't see much problems.

I remember renting the Image DVDs two years ago, not even sure of what it was. When part one ended, it was in the middle of the night and I wanted to watch the two other parts immediately. I slept and watched the rest the next day, even though I had five days to watch the whole thing. I can't think of many trilogies without a bad part, but here it felt like a single good film.

[arigato-san]

I wasn't so taken with the film overall. Despite some very solid cinematography, the central character is too naive/idealistic throughout, with very little sense of a personal journey, which is bizarre given the running time. Far prefer Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, although ironically it was Kobayashi who actually fought in Manchuria.

What do you mean by that? It was very much the protaganist's personal struggle with the system. In what way is his idealism unpersonal?

Kobayashi went through much of the same circumstances as the protagonist, only he did not get higher in rank, because he refused to, out of idealism himself. What is ironic about him being the one who fought in Manchuria?

I thought a very strong point of the film was the protagonist being disillusioned with communism at the end, and taking off for home. If you compare it with long films with the same subject matter, like Bertolucci's Novecento for example, the ending in the Human Condition is much more satisfying.

[Nothing]

Well, it's been a couple of years since that post, perhaps four years since I saw the film...

As I recall, the central character enters the war filled with an exaggerated humanism / optimism and a sense of moral certainty that never strays or waivers for a second despite all that he experiences and suffers. As such, the film functions not as a realistic portrayal of the war in Manchuria from the Japanese point or view, or as a study of the way that human beings behave in extreme circumstances, but, rather, as a conceit - and a conceit dragged out for 9 1/2 hours is spectacularly frustrating to behold.

Clearly, Kobayashi wishes to make a case, in terms of western morality, for the existence of the 'good' Japanese. To place the blame for Japanese war crimes both on the 'system' and a 'few bad apples' whilst arguing for the unswerving purity, goodness' and 'humanity' within the average Japanese individual (even the title, 'The Human Condition' is a plea across the cultural divide - "we are all human, we think and suffer just as you.") That he would seek to do this in 1959, only 7 years after the Allied forces pulled out of Japan, at a time when his country was still seeking to re-establish both its reputation and it's economy, of course makes total sense. Even now, many Japanese are reluctant to face up to their wartime history, let's be honest. That an American audience would be willing to buy into Kobayashi's argument makes sense also, pitting as it does the 'rational, human' protagonist, the character with a western moral mindset, against those who are 'evil', 'inhuman' and irrational. Indeed, similar excuse-making and dishonesty can be found in most US films about the American War and genocide in Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket being perhaps the one exception.

Interesting then that, in the case of both cases, it was a civilian, someone with no military experience, who was able and willing to cut to heart of the matter. If one wishes to be kind, one might say that Kobayashi was just too close to the material, with too much of a personal interest, to treat it with enough objectivity and rigour.

[arigato-san]

Why are you convinced the trilogy is just about the Japanese individual? It's as much about any individual. Kobayashi wasn't interested in objectivity in depicting events exactly as they were when he was in the army. He was interested in political objectivity. When a political ideals becomes an ideology, humanism dissappears and the individual becomes its victim. That's Kobayashi's real message. While western European filmmakers were embracing communist and socialist dogma's in the 60s and 70s, Kobayashi dimisses these dogma's and is way ahead of his time.

[Nothing]

Dissmissing communism and socialism is "ahead of his time"? Do you think free market capitalism is working? Anyway, this is all pretty much of a piece with a film whose primary purpose is to deny mass Japanese complicity in war crimes and genocide.

Incidentally

[Max von Mayerling]

Ok, I have not seen "The Human Condition," so the possibility remains that I may find myself in complete agreement with you, but I find it hard to believe that the director of "Harakiri" would create a 9 hour epic "whose primary purpose is to deny mass Japanese complicity in war crimes and genocide." I say that viewing Harakiri as being, to some degree, an indictment of Japanese culture, specifically the samurai class, (I know Michael is going to jump in here somewhere and make me look like the dolt that I pretty much am), which has more than a few connections to WWII Japan. And it is a film that also comments on the tendency to whitewash the historical record.

Again, I haven't seen "the Human Condition." So perhaps you're right. I just find it hard to believe, given my experience with Harakiri.

And I'm not trying to insult you or anything like that. I am just having a hard time understanding how, given what I know about the director, and what I've read, that the film(s) can be reduced to that.

[arigato-san]

Dissmissing communism and socialism is "ahead of his time"? Do you think free market capitalism is working? Anyway, this is all pretty much of a piece with a film whose primary purpose is to deny mass Japanese complicity in war crimes and genocide.

Incidentally

Ahead of its time as a filmmaker compared to western european filmmakers at the time. Don't rip what I said out of its context. I'm not saying there's no communists left in the world. There's communists in every country in the world.

As for free market capitalism, I don't believe it's a great system either, but that's en entirely different discussion and has little to do with the Human Condition Trilogy.

In Harakiri, Kobayashi puts the blame at the system in the same way he does in the Human Condition trilogy. Kobayashi was a rebel by nature and his fight has always been of the individual against the system. The film has got nothing to do about denying these facts, Did you miss the entire first part where Chinese workers are treated horrible by Japanese soldiers? If someone wanted to deny these war crimes why would he put it in the film in the first place? Are you sure you've actually seen the films?

Kobayashi was in the war himself as a red, and was hold under the same suspicion as the main character in the film. The only difference was that Kobayashi himself denied a higher rank than soldier. It makes The Human Condition in a way a hypothesis, but that doesn't change anything to the fact that Kobayashi was in Manchuria at the time. If you believe the main character is naive and too idealistic; Kobayashi himself was like this when he was drafted to Manchuria in 1942. If there's anyone that should be making a point about circumstances in Manchuria during the war it's Kobayashi.

[Michael Kerpan]

I know Michael is going to jump in here somewhere and make me look like the dolt that I pretty much am,

Not at all.

I won't comment on Human Condition unless my library buys it (and I can see it for free).

Right now I can only say: (1) Kobayashi doesn't resonate at all with me; and (2) I think he is naively credited with doing novel things (content-wise) that were not all that new. Not only did Yamanaka make far better films (IMHO) that took jabs at official culture (when it was dangerous rather than safe to do so). Also, Uchida's 1955 Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji seems to be overlooked.

On politics -- If one reads early American writings about post-war film makers, it is clear that Kurosawa and Kobayashi got plenty of extra points for being anti-communist (which made them "true humanists") -- while others (like Uchida and Imai) were downgraded because of their more genuinely leftist views.

[arigato-san]

If one reads early American writings about post-war filmmakers, it is clear that Kurosawa and Kobayashi got plenty of extra points for being anti-communist (which made them "true humanists") -- while others (like Uchida and Imai) were downgraded because of their more genuinely leftist views.

What do you mean by Kurosawa being anti-communist? Kurosawa obviously was a leftist filmmaker, with socialist beliefs. Do you get this out of his work or something he has said during his career?

As for Kobayashi, he had some bad experiences when he was a Russian captive that made him fall from his idealism. I guess you could call that anti-communist.

[FerdinandGriffon]

I'm sorry nothing, I really think you need to watch the film again before you condemn it as thoroughly as you have so far. I see little to no correlation between the film as you describe it and as it was when I saw it a couple of weeks ago at Film Forum.

Plot details inside...

First of all, Kobayashi's protagonist/surrogate Kaji is by no means presented as the "average Japanese individual". From the very beginning the idealist is constantly in conflict with not only the system and "the bad seeds", as you put it, but with his best friends, the men under his command, other communist idealists, even his wife. His remarkable, singular and perhaps ridiculous existence is continually remarked upon by those around him, usually with an odd mix of awe, disdain and pity. The best approximate for Kaji that I can think of in film or literature is Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, another tortured idealist and attempt at creating a "positively beautiful man". Like the Prince, Kaji's valiant attempt to live by a strong and unswerving humanitarian code ends in madness and violence. I don't know how you can say Kaji never strays or waivers for a second when in the last hour of part III he brutally beats a man with an iron chain before drowning him in a vat of urine and fecal matter, something that would have been inconceivable to the Kaji of Part I. But at the same time, his disillusionment is a slow and gradual process, and is in evidence from the very beginning of the trilogy.
As for the your reading of the film's politics, I find you just as far off base as with Kaji's character. The entire first part is about the disgraceful and inhuman treatment of Chinese and Manchurian POW's by the Japanese. Kaji has an incredibly difficult time controlling the viciousness of even his good friends at the labor camp, indeed he fails. Comfort women, a fact of the war that the Japanese government has difficulty acknowledging even today, play a prominent role in two of the films. In the third part, Japanese soldiers take advantage of not only the local population's women, but also orphaned teenage Japanese. Throughout all three parts, the Japanese army as revealed as the inhumane and ridiculous construction that it was. Once in the warzone itself, Kaji and his men kill. Kobayashi does not shy away from showing us, with horror and anger, the bodies of those that they kill. Kobayashi obviously has no sympathy for the government and army, and his attitudes toward the actions of the average Japanese are by and large condemnatory. As for his take on the Soviet occupiers, it is complex and often conflicted. The Soviet officers are a fairly even mix between Kaji-esque humanists and idiotic, pig-headed bureaucrats. The Soviets are unprepared and unequipped to properly take on the reconstruction of Manchuria, but many of their ideals are worthy, even if the implementation is not. It is interesting to note that many of the problems in the POW camp come about because of the greed and pettiness of the Japanese translators and liasons who are in charge of communications between the soldiers and the Soviet command.
It's a 10+ hour film. I could go on and on. But I hope that you (and others) will give the film another chance, so that you can find these things out for yourself. In my opinion, that's the very least that it deserves.

[Michael Kerpan]

What do you mean by Kurosawa being anti-communist? Kurosawa obviously was a leftist filmmaker, with socialist beliefs. Do you get this out of his work or something he has said during his career?

As for Kobayashi, he had some bad experiences when he was a Russian captive that made him fall from his idealism. I guess you could call that anti-communist.

Richie and Anderson -- and then Audie Bock -- contrasted the good humanists like Kurosawa and Kobayashi (who THEY deemed anti-communist), to the evil leftists (like Imai). I see (post-war) Kurosawa as a mildly leftist elitist, with a sense of noblesse oblige towards the lower orders, but with a lot more interest in art than in politics. ;~}

[Nothing]

Hmm. Well let me step back a minute. As I said earlier, it has been a number of years since I saw this film and I'm not so hot on the details. What does stay with me, however, is a general impression and one that I'm inclined to abide by - I don't recall that anything was unclear or that the film had done anything to merit a second viewing.

Let us say that Kobayashi takes what has come to be known as a Spielbergian approach. In telling the story of Japanese atrocities in Manchuria he perversely singles out a lead character whom he believes to be pure, a "good Japanese", just as Oskar Shindler is, for Spielberg, a "good German". Both directors do this, in part, because they believe it will make the film more accessible to a general audience, in particular a mainstream American audience with an untested Christian sense of morality. Secondly, this is an ideological choice, a refusal to accept that human beings are not essentially 'good'. Now the counter-argument, in the case of both films, is that, by placing 'hope' and 'goodness' at the centre of the narrative, the director fails to engage with the essential horror, the lack of hope and goodness, in the subject - the lack of absolute human morality that so clearly defines the events in question. Further, in the case of Kobayshi, by identifying this protagonist so closely with himself, it is not unreasonable to posit that the film is indeed making excuses, exonerating at least the director himself, if not wider swathes of the Japanese population by inference, from complicity in those crimes against humanity, separating the 'good' Japanese from the 'bad' or the "inhuman", separating them from the 'system' (n.b. if Kobayshi had acted with even 5% of Kagi's idealism I simply don't believe he would have survived the war). But, of course, there is no such thing as 'inhuman' and a 'system' is comprised of individuals. Far more useful then would be a film that helps us to understand - if not condone - the 'inhuman' mindset that led to these atrocities. A film that takes us into the psyche of the average Japanese soldier, or their leaders, or both, the ones who actually committed the war crimes.

The second failure, and the largest one, is simply dramatic - in placing such an intransigent and borderline credible moralist at the centre of his narrative, Kobayshi injects an inescapable inertia. Time and again 'bad' people do 'bad' things and, time and again, Kagi makes exaggerated expressions of horror and disbelief. He never undergoes any inner turmoil, never suffers temptation, never puts his own needs and his own survival first, even under torture and threat of death. In other words, there is never any arc whatsoever to his character. He seems not to be a part of what is taking place at all but, rather, an avatar for a the audience, mimicking and confirming their own moral reactions. I don't wish to sound like Robert McKee here, but this is a narrative film that spans not only an incredible amount of running time but a timeline of many years, so basic dramatic tenets surely apply. Instead, what we have is an unswerving, repetitive conceit that might survive 90 minutes but certainly not 10+ hours...

Imagine that the film begins in the same fashion but then Kagi lose his idealism. He becomes complicit, he commits war crimes himself to further his own survival and, by the end, he can kill without thinking, he is no different than those he initially despised... This approach would have been at once far more interesting, far more believable and far more psychologically and politically honest. But even a moralistic / Hollywood-style arc such as the one in Sirk's A Time to Love & a Time to Die, would have served the film better: a character who begins the film in complicity, executing civilians according to orders, who then experiences a crisis of conscience, (re)discovers a sense of morality and ultimately then takes actions against the status quo that lead - very rapidly - to his own death.

Let us also take the ending of the Sirk, in which Gavin is killed by the partisan. Even Gavin's character seems to understand in his moment of dying that it was far too much to expect the partisan to forgive him, to see him as an individual, to look beyond what he represents as a Nazi - that, indeed, he has shot civilians in the past, that no act of recompense can compensate - and that, although his death is in some ways a tragedy, on another level it is somehow fitting that he die this way... By comparison, in The Human Condition, we have this 'twist' at the end when Kagi realises - shock horror! - that the Soviet forces aren't going to embrace him as a 'brother'... Well, what an incredible surprise, how horribly mean of those nasty commies not to take the words of an Imperial army officer at face value... Worse, this revelation provokes no change in Kagi himself, he does not waver from his own moralism and self-righteousness, simply he grows disenfranchised with Soviet communism. Therefore, dubious politics aside, his character, again, does not change in any way.

To conclude then, let us briefly consider Fires on the Plain (a film I saw even further into the past than The Human Condition, although the memories glow far more brightly). There is a scene in which Tamura encounters a civilian in a deserted village, the civilian tries to surrender and Tamura shoots the civilian dead and takes his food supplies. This is a war crime, an atrocity and, yet, immediately, Ichikawa makes us understand why Tamura has acted in this way and, indeed, challenges us, the audience, to consider whether we would really act any differently in the circumstances. Even in this small moment, there is deeper psychological reality, greater historical insight and a stronger purpose to the filmmaking than in the entire duration of Kobayashi's misconceived 'epic'.