Masaki Kobayashi - Ningen no joken II aka The Human Condition II

Masaki Kobayashi - Ningen no joken II aka The Human Condition II

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053115/



Language: Mandarin | Japanese



English subs



Ningen no joken II - The Road to Eternity



Quote:

In keeping with the grandeur of its title, �The Human Condition,� adapted by Masaki Kobayashi from Jumpei Gomikawa�s six-volume novel, is anything but modest in scope and ambition. First released in Japan, in three parts, between 1959 and 1961, the film is a sprawling, crowded 10-hour epic of love, war, heroism and cruelty. Shot in a wide-screen format called Grandscope and set mainly in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation, it seems intent on leaving nothing out. Mountains, forest, marshlands; marriage, combat, hard labor; the call of duty and the obligations of conscience � that over-reaching title turns out to be a pretty fair description of what�s on screen.



But �The Human Condition� is also, and most memorably, an intimately scaled chronicle of individual experience. Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays its hero, an idealistic technocrat named Kaji, appears in nearly every frame, and it is his deeply personal anguish that provides an emotional anchor for this episodic, theme-heavy story. Mr. Nakadai, one of Japan�s great movie stars of the 1960s (and the subject of a fantastic retrospective at Film Forum that concludes with a three-week run of an immaculate new print of �The Human Condition�), looks a bit like a young Gregory Peck. And in this film he plays, as Peck often did, a liberal man of principle trying to uphold his ideals in difficult circumstances.



Taller than most of the other people in the film, or at least photographed to look that way, Kaji occupies an elevated moral plane as well. In conditions that become, for him and those around him, increasingly harsh and perilous, he insists on doing the right thing and on prevailing by reason rather than by force. As a young manager for a Japanese mining company in Manchuria (then the puppet state of Manchukuo), he writes a report proposing improved conditions for Chinese workers. His boss is a bit skeptical, but nonetheless sends Kaji, along with his adoring wife, Michiko (Michiyo Aratama), out to the hinterlands to put his theories into practice.



The mine is both a world unto itself and a microcosm of the larger society, rather like a frontier town in an old western. And Kaji�s experience there, detailed in the epic film�s first and longest part, �No Greater Love,� sets the template for what will follow. In trying to implement basic reforms, he must first deal with the complacency of his superiors and the corruption of the work-gang bosses who control day-to-day underground activity, and then with the harsh, arrogant authoritarianism of the military police, who bring in prisoners of war for slave labor.



Kobayashi, who served in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II � repeatedly refusing promotion above the rank of private as a form of protest � presents a cleareyed, devastating critique of his country�s military traditions, against which Kaji is ranged in an increasingly lonely and perilous struggle. After his experiment in bringing a measure of decency to the mine ends in personal catastrophe redeemed by a partial moral victory, he is conscripted into the army, where he tries, once again, to bring a measure of fairness and dignity to a system built on the corruption, coercion and the humiliation of the weak.



Even as he tramps across the blasted countryside with a few surviving comrades, fleeing the triumphant Soviet Army in 1945 � and even after the Russians take him prisoner � Kaji�s dogged reforming impulse survives. Bearded, ragged and wild-eyed, he takes on the air of a fanatic, but his zeal is always in the cause of gentleness and compassion.



Back at the mine, a friend of Kaji�s teases him for his high-minded moral ardor: �You�ll ride the humanism train, no matter how much it costs you.� The metaphor may be a bit awkward in English, but it captures the spirit of the movie all the same. Kobayashi was one of the leading figures in postwar Japanese cinema, a peer of Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa, though his critical reputation abroad never quite matched theirs. He was also part of a broader humanist tendency in world cinema. �The Human Condition� was made at around the same time as Satyajit Ray�s �Apu� trilogy and Luchino Visconti�s �Rocco and His Brothers,� and like them it is a work of large-scale realism grounded in a thorough but undogmatic left-wing political sensibility.



Perhaps because it keeps a skeptical distance from Marxist ideology, which demands at least the prospect of a happy ending somewhere in the future, �The Human Condition� takes a pessimistic, almost despairing view of its subject. Where is that train going? Some of Kaji�s companions take a romantic view of Japan�s Soviet enemy, imagining that it holds out a promise of democracy and equality. Kaji, though he is drawn to some aspects of Socialist thinking, never becomes a true believer, and ends up more of an existentialist hero than an exemplar of supposed political progress.



As such, he is very much a creature of his time � the late 1950s, not the mid-�40s � and �The Human Condition� can, in its speechifying moments, feel a bit creaky. But it is also, and more frequently, amazingly powerful in its emotional sweep and the depth of its historical insight. The human condition is murky, messy and perhaps unredeemable, but a great work of art can make you believe otherwise, however briefly (if nearly 10 hours counts as briefly). And whatever its flaws and infelicities � on such a large canvas the brushwork can hardly be perfect � Kobayashi�s monumental film can clarify and enrich your understanding of what it is to be alive.



























---my rip from the custom subtitled DVD on ADC---



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