The 206th Best Director of All-Time: Masaki Kobayashi

Hey, I saw Kobayashi’s 9 hour The Human Condition film in December and wanted to talk about it on here. I think it’s quite an exceptional work of art and I’ll try to avoid going in too deeply on the film’s plot to avoid significant spoilers but there’s only so far I can go with that before I just write nothing at all.

Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the greatest actors of all time, is unforgettable in his performance as the pacifist Kaji which takes place over 9 hours of film. We spend a huge amount of time with him during which he showcases virtually every emotion a human can express; he changes so much from film to film and it takes an actor of his caliber to make it as believable as he does. The first thing we see Nakadai doing in the film is presenting a report to the Imperial Japanese authorities in the early 1940s about the proper treatment of prisoners in labor camps, and immediately this gives him the ire of the Japanese authorities who are determined to work said prisoners until they are just bones and skin (and probably dead) for their resources. So, to punish him, they give him command of a labor camp and tell him to put his theories in practice, whilst setting up every angle they can to watch him fail.

Over the course of this film, Kobayashi and Nakadai excellently portray Kaji’s descent from a hopeful idealist throughout the first film, to a hardened, focused, serious, more realistic soldier in the second film following his activities at the work camp in the first, to his final loss of belief in the goodness of humanity in the third film after journeying through hell, and well, not quite back. We watch as he’s forced to abandon his principles as a humanist, whipping prisoners after disobeying his commands and destroying his morals by allowing them to consort with prostitutes at the prodding of the military police, and as a pacifist by violently resisting the Soviet onslaught into Manchuria by leading a suicide attack against a Russian tank division (though it’s in the second film so he and his men succeed) at the end of World War II, and the effect that coming to the realization that the world is a much harsher place than he imagined in the beginning has on Kaji psychologically, to the point that not once but four or five times he is forced by circumstance to kill his Japanese brothers to save himself and those he loves, having in the past indirectly led to the deaths of some of the few friends he made at the hands of his superiors, which cast a shadow over him so great he found it hard to forgive himself.

Kaji is isolated and alone for much of the film. He deeply loves his wife, and often thinks about her when forced to do great evils at the work camp and the memories of his simpler life as a better man, and upon imagining his pain in being forced to fight in the war she comes to visit him at boot camp, which is actually allowed by his commanding officer due to his being the best soldier in his unit. In the third film, having lost hope of anything else in the world with his experiences fighting the Soviets, he has given up his efforts to cleanse the world of its more vicious elements (though he never stops helping every civilian he comes across) and only the thought of returning to her arms drives him forward.

That being said, he is not completely alone. The great So Yamamura (Tokyo Story, Princess Yang Kwei-Fei), here in No Greater Love as a military officer and Kaji’s second-in-command at the labor camp, gives a very effective performance as Kaji’s foil, one of the few military officers who is a humanist like Kaji is yet has the life’s worth of experience that Kaji does not have at first and is able to straighten out some of his more explicitly leftist impulses to keep a working relationship with the more genocidally-inclined officers. They’re sort of a von Sydow and Bjornstrand from The Seventh Seal, I like to imagine. The scene at the end of the film where they describe their great admiration for eachother and how much they taught eachother (Nakadai how Yamamura hardened him and Yamamura how Nakadai reminded him of the goodness of people) is so emotionally touching. In Road to Eternity, he is mostly dismissed as a Red (communist) by his fellow soldiers who blindly believe that Japan will vanquish all its enemies with a single sword swipe, but still strikes up a friendship with the runt of his unit, bullied like Kaji by all the older soldiers (actually Road to Eternity clearly inspired Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and I don’t mean because the first half of it takes place in a barracks; it goes further than that but I won’t say why so you guys can all find out yourselves) and makes a connection in a military hospital with a young nurse, who he nearly steps into an affair with and another like-minded soldier in a wonderful segment. In the final film, A Soldier’s Prayer, he and one other soldier, Terada, a private in the unit he commanded who he had an antagonistic relationship with in Road to Eternity before their bonding together in battle with the Soviets, lead a group of pilgrim soldiers and civilians out of Soviet-occupied Manchuria, yet despite being fully surrounded by people just like him for the first time, and even meeting old friends from his past, he has already lost so much to this ungodly war that it is no solace to him. Especially, after finding himself in bad positions he had put others in in the past (whether willingly or unwillingly) in both the latter two installments he drives further to the brink as he finds he has no one to help him as he could not be there to help those others he had hurt.

The first film, No Greater Love, is the weakest of the three stylistically I think but it is still a wonderful piece of art. The editing and Dutch angles during the prisoner execution scene near the end as Kaji is forced to watch make for terrorizing cinema and you also have the repeating foreground-background shot throughout the whole 3 hour length where the foreground changes repeatedly but in the background you have long lines of Chinese laborers walking down jagged paths in the camp sort of like the jagged path shot in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House? (I believe Drake has a screenshot of it on Kiarostami’s page). This shot is also visible on the front cover of the Criterion release of the film. The conjoining conspiracies by the prisoners to escape the labor camp and the Japanese officers, who eventually become aware of the plot, to let it happen and pin the failure on the despised Nakadai and Yamamura, make for an electric narrative that never fails at being interesting and intense cinema. There’s a huge cast of supporting actors from other famous Japanese films of the era (often taken from, of course, Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi’s films) and Kaji has to juggle all of these personalities at once and is given ample time to do so over the long runtime. Kobayashi of course includes visual motifs throughout the film (and the other 2) as well such as the use of barbed wire to signify imprisonment (felt by Kaji as much as the prisoners). It’s very well-shot but has an utterly fatal flaw at the end where a prostitute is angry at Kaji for failing to save her boyfriend, a laborer, despite her pleading with him for his life, and as the film ends and Kaji walks off into the sunset with his wife the prostitute just keeps running after them screaming names at him and throwing dirt at him and it’s just such a terrible way to end the film. I cannot emphasize how much I hate this ending enough and all Kobayashi had to do to fix it was remove the woman from the ending and it helps the film a great deal.

The second film, Road to Eternity, is rated lower than No Greater Love on both Letterboxd and TSPDT but I believe it to be a slightly stronger film (I don’t believe this is because I had the advantage of seeing how Kaji changes from the first film here either, I genuinely believe it to be artistically superior). Kobayashi used compositions of bodies clearly inspired by Kurosawa in the first film, but in the next film, Kaji now being in the IJA (Imperial Japanese Army) and with the further emplacement of military discipline around him, these compositions become ever stronger; there are so many shots where a character is shot walking down a line of men separating him from the camera (blocking) or shots looking down a street with a never-ending line of men down it, among other similar compositions, and they are done with even greater style than No Greater Love. The training segments in the film where Kaji is beaten down by so many fellow soldiers who should be his brothers but aren’t are harrowing to witness and culminate ingeniously when he takes out his frustration on one of the only friends he made in the boot camp, who is not nearly as good a soldier as he, and the friend receives a brutal punishment for failing a training exercise as a result. The camp also involves a second subplot between Kaji and another “Red,” Shinjo, who plans to desert to the Soviet Union, and asks Kaji to come with him. After these two subplots merge incredibly in a manner I won’t reveal, Kaji heads to the front and here the film loses its way a little as there are just so many long segments, not bad ones but inferior to the previous segments I feel, of him fighting off some of the more jingoistic soldiers in a nearby unit who inflict harsh punishments on Kaji’s men for their poor discipline for such a long time. The ending, however, is an absolute whopper in comparison to No Greater Love’s; the first battle scene in the whole of The Human Condition after about 5-6 hours as Kaji is ordered by his superiors to launch a sucide attack against Soviet tanks, in an ingenious flurry of editing (I almost don’t even want to describe the scene just so you can experience it completely freshly when it happens), gunfire, and explosions as he and his men hopelessly fight the far better-equipped Russian forces and Kaji is forced to make some tough choices with little time to waste in order to secure his survival and that of his men in the fight, ending with a particularly fateful decision by Kaji that changes his life forever. It’s quite a spectacular final act and far better than the ending of the first film.

The third film, A Soldier’s Prayer, is the best of the trilogy and it is not close. Kaji has faced squalid labor conditions, opposition from Japanese officials, and fierce military training, but it is not until facing true, genuine warfare that he starts to truly lose it. This film is really the story of Kaji’s effort to escape Manchuria back to Japan with a small army of Manchurian settler Japanese civilian refugees and IJA deserters and is a series of epic battle set-pieces that go on for hours (I mean that in a good way) as he gets involved in constant warfare with Chinese and Korean partisans, Soviet troops, and even fellow Japanese forces still fighting the bad fight. We delve deeply into Kaji’s headspace in this film, to a greater extent than in Kobayashi’s previous installments and there are a number of long segments watching Kaji walk in Dutch angle tracking shots that are quite visually special as he appears to be collapsing under the pressure of taking care of all of these people in this harsh environment. Kaji no longer tries to negotiate here; outside of when conversing with Japanese soldiers he encounters, Kaji shoots first then talks, realizing now that when at war, that is the only course of action you can fully rely on. We even get freeze-frames here from Kobayashi as Kaji recalls the horrors of the past films that he failed to act to prevent, the fact of which comes back to devastate him in his most difficult hour here in A Soldier’s Prayer. There is a similar relationship to that in the first film between Kaji and the soldier he met at the hospital in Road to Eternity with that soldier playing sort of the Yamamura role like in the first film. We note Kaji’s transformation over the films here as he is almost disgusted at the idea of burying some Chinese he killed after they killed a prostitute who was a member of his party, to which Tange, his friend, is shocked to see Kaji forget the humanity of his enemies. There’s a fantastic flashback montage as we watch the slow, agonizing death of a soldier Kaji was close to and the exploration of the blurry line between necessary action and war crime is explored to no end throughout the film. The editing between the closeups of Kaji and his unit of men as they listen to the Soviet soldiers nearby singing Katyusha is another excellent montage segment. There are sections of the film perhaps tread on Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letter Never Sent but that does not change that this is still an amazing and absorbing work, and easily artistically the strongest of the 3 films. The ending, which, in this case, I will not start to describe, is masterpiece material and truly an all-timer, and a hell of a cap to 3 of the most engaging hours in cinema. This film is the most outright declaration of Kobayashi’s worldview of any of his films, he himself having been a pacifist IJA soldier in WW2 which caused him to make this film in an effort to tell his story of the war from a perspective often forgotten in historical studies of Imperial Japan. I will say this though, that Kaji ends up in much the same place as he started the full 9-hour film, even if his position may be drastically different.

I did not watch all 3 in one day, this film is 9 hours long so instead I watched them all in sequential days. I do not yet believe it to be Apocalypse Now, but it proves that Coppola’s masterpiece is not entirely unapproachable when it comes to the bottom line of adapting war with cinema, and it firmly established Masaki Kobayashi as one of the finest directors of Japanese art cinema (even if he wasn’t quite Kurosawa), and brought to the world one of its finest actors in Tatsuya Nakadai. I find it pretty hard to grade on an all-time level because of how unwieldy it is in terms of its length (not criticizing the length, it’s all great cinema but ranking a 9-hour film alongside a bunch of 90-minute films make it more difficult) but still it keeps your eyes glued to the screen as you unearth the contents of this momentously epic film.

Oh man, this guy is gonna skyrocket once you watch The human condition trilogy, and deservedly so. I don’t think I could leave him out of the top 100.