Apr 7

Rare Japanese Film Masterpiece “The Human Condition” at Film Forum in NYC

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By translator and writer Jamie Graves (Saitama-Ken 2002-2003)

Periods of great filmmaking seem to flower only under certain conditions, none of which seem to last very long. A relatively stable and industrialized society is needed just to provide the materials and conditions to shoot films, but truly great filmmaking only seems to spring up in the aftermath of huge social upheavals. The images of poverty and brutality in Italian Neo-Realist masterpieces like “The Bicycle Thief” and “Open City” had a jarring immediacy springing out of a society that had been rocked by poverty, a bloody invasion, and an increasingly oppressive regime. America cinema of the 1970s wrestled an increasingly fragmented society of alienated individuals in masterpieces like “Godfather Part II”, “Dog Day Afternoon”, and “Taxi Driver”. Recently places as disparate as Korea and Iran have begun to produce filmmakers whose works crackle and pulse with an immediacy missing from most American filmmaking. Something has been propelling them not just to make movies that can get made, but that they feel must get made.

It is widely acknowledged that Japanese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s popped with this sort of immediacy. Some mysterious confluence of a permissive studio system open to experimentation, a public hungry for rich, complex films and a generation of filmmakers with ambitious visions for cinema produced some of the world’s greatest moving pictures. From Akira Kurosawa’s brisk and savagely painted “Rashomon” and “Seven Samurai” to Yasujiro Ozu’s quiet and heartbreaking “Tokyo Story” and Kenji Mizoguchi’s exquisite and baroque “Tale of Ugetsu”, the era overflows with masterpieces that grapple with the essential questions of what it means to be moral, to be good, to be human. No film I have seen from the period addresses this as directly and as powerfully as the 1959 film “The Human Condition”.

Maybe because the era is so crowded with good work, and maybe because of its epic scale and length, Maskaki Kobayashi’s  “The Human Condition” (Ningen no Joken) is little known against many of the other masterpieces of the time. It has never been released on video in the US, and due to its sprawling running time of 9 ½ hours (spread out over three parts), it has rarely been shown in theaters. It showed for a few weeks in 2008 at New York’s Film Forum, and due to popular demand will be back again for a brief eight days starting tomorrow, April 8th.

You probably almost stopped reading this after you saw the phrase “9 ½ hours” but I’m going to do my best to convince you to take the time to get down to Film Forum on West Houston street sometime in the next week and catch at least one part of this incredible film. I was lucky enough to see all three parts of this last year, and I was completely enthralled for the full running time. As a visual experience it is nearly perfect, as an emotional experience it is tremendous.

Set during Japan’s occupation of Manchuria during World War II, the story follows one Japanese idealist as he attempts to reform and soften humanize the brutal imperial system. As the character makes his way from managing Chinese prisoners to fighting against the Soviet army to fleeing across Manchurian landscape, the entire scope of Japan’s short lived empire is painted out in the story of a single individual. Perhaps most remarkable is the pacing of the film; it hurtles from scene to scene, tension and suspense building like a political thriller. I kept thinking of great Russian novels with their explosive mixture of plot, well drawn characters, and thick questions into the nature of love, war, misery, cruelty, and yes, what it means to be human. (The Japanese title, “Ningen no Joken” means something closer to “The Conditions to be Being Human” than “The Human Condition”.)

As played by Japanese acting legend Tatsuya Nakadai, the protagonist Kaji seeps into nearly every frame of the film. In Japanese cinema Nakadai was something of a Marlon Brando or a Paul Newman; despite a face built for a bland leading man, he possesses a deep emotional intelligence that allowed him to disappear into difficult and demanding roles. As written in the screenplay, his character in “The Human Condition” is almost Christlike in his mix of intelligence, strength and compassion, but Nakadai somehow projects a fragility and humility that is incredibly compelling. His progress from idealist to pragmatist to a man simply scraping to survive is so fluid and natural you barely notice the change until after it has occurred. This is one of the great performances in the history of movies.

Made not even fifteen years after Japan’s surrender to the Allies, “The Human Condition” is the kind of film that was made not just because it could be made, but because it needed to be made. Just like the main character, the director served as a foot soldier against the Russians on the Chinese mainland. Despite his intelligence and obvious leadership qualities however, Kobayashi never rose above the rank of private. For years he chose to remain at the lowest possible rank, subject to the whim of short tempered and overworked officers, simply on principle. As he and his countrymen attempted to rebuild their country and their lives in the years following the war, the legacy of what they had seen and done continued to haunt them. Out of the stability of post-war Japan and the horrors of wartime memories we get “The Human Condition”, one of Japanese cinema’s greatest achievements and one of my favorite all time films.

The three parts of “The Human Condition” will be playing at Film Forum tomorrow, April 8th through Thursday, April 16th. More information available at http://www.filmforum.org/films/human.html.