16th
The Human Condition (1959 - 1961)
We should clear something up: no one with a sense of humor talks about “the human condition.” It’s too much of a drag. “A man is capable of the greatest ills and the greatest affections; he is torn between his limitless mind and his enfeebled body; he strives for life but sustains himself on death.” Well, sure. Of course. But: men also laugh when people get kicked in the nuts. They tear up at squiggly-lined muck like the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. They get up early for the sunrise and afterwards mutter “well, that was dull.” Men are complex, stupid creatures, absurdly shaped and motivated, and very often they are bored. To speak of “the human condition” as a serious conversation topic – one taken up with velvet gloves and furrowed brows – is sort of missing the point. But some people like missing the point. A particular sub-breed of homo sapiens enjoys looking at himself and his fellows with the utmost severity. You can find these rare beasts tucked back in darkened bar corners, often drinking aged scotch (scotch of a superb vintage), eyeballing the skittering, swaggering, slapping members of their species that hover beyond them in the light. These young men (they’re always young men) are very often thin, have a taste for the clothing of their grandfathers, and are actually, if you warm them up, alright guys. They just have trouble straightening up enough to leave those cozy dark corners, and, when courage is lacking, are happy to debate “the human condition” till closing time instead. They often – ahem – also enjoy The Cinema. Nice guys though. Tough to be around, especially when Great and Important thoughts preoccupy them, but nice guys over all.
Masaki Kobayashi’s film is the same way. Nice, smart, but tough to be around. The film is so long its audience is self selecting. It’s ten hours. Anyone willing to sit through a ten hour film, regardless of content, has already passed the initial and most important hurdle to “getting” the picture: they don’t have a lot going on, and so appreciate “serious,” attention-demanding art. The plot is large – huge – and set during Japan’s experience with The Big One. Tatsuya Nakadai plays Kaji, a late twenties engineer saddled with an unbelievably straight-spined conscience. The film’s three parts set Kaji agianst the great evils of the world. Part One sees Kaji facing off against both racism and classism in a forced labor camp; Part Two (the most dynamic) pits our man K against the whole of Japan’s machismo-dipped military culture; and Part Three (the main event) has Kaji/Nakadai standing up against (oh god get this): Communism. That’s right: the Reds. The picture and its filmmaker parents are hunting big ideological game and that alone - their willingness to tackle large and unwieldy topics in a medium most comfortable with shooting directions like “rack focus from cleavage to handgun. Rack focus back.” - is admirable. But it’s not always emotionally accessible. Kaji has a wife, a twittering little accessory of the worst anti-feminist sort – she’ll do anything, go anywhere, so long as she can stand next to her man and be ignored – and she’s the only keyhole into the sensitive, down-to-earth Kaji that must lurk somewhere inside Nakadai’s Rushmore-worthy visage. We watch the man, we admire him, but all that watching and admiring feels a little too heavy on the Soviet Realism style of observation: we see the man as he would like to be seen, but rarely as he is.
But the film has its own intentions and its perspective is consistent. It’s only fair to judge what is shown, not what was chosen for exclusion. Kaji is, as we observe him, alone. Like a thin bar room Socrates, Kaji has both compassion and contempt for his fellow men, each sentiment filling his whole being, but he can only engage these passionate considerations while straddling the mount, pontificating. He loves his fellow men because doing so elevates him; the movie never admits this vanity directly. Kaji is framed almost exclusively in isolation and always shot from below against a cloud flecked horizon; his face filled in just enough to give him equal footing with the background clouds and crags. If he shares the screen at all with other men, it is in carefully blocked shots, which must have required impromptu apple box platforms – Nakadai is a tall man, but I doubt that he was consistently two feet taller than all his co-stars.
I’m not telling you a lot about the movie, but really, there’s not a lot to tell. Kaji faces many clever variations on a single scenario: the weak are abused by the strong, and rendering aid gets Kaji bit on the Walter Cronkite. These little moral rat traps are engaging, and Kobayashi films them with such obvious assurance – varied shot structure, scene pacing, and locational ambiance - I found it very hard to grow bored. At the weekend screening I caught (yes, I too have little going on), I slipped off into five or six satisfying mid-movie naps, but always woke up excited to see what was next. The film never bored me, but it did exacerbated the normal consequences of sleep deprivation.
Quite a few directors – the ones who were hot in the ’70s – have stolen liberally from this film and from Kobayashi’s iconic, granite-monument camera style. Spielberg and Coppola in particular seem to have absorbed the master’s preference for deliberately structural mise-en-scene, and Kubrick lifted the first half of Full Metal Jacket directly from Part Two, though he swapped Kobayashi’s lonely humanism for his own tired opinion that man-is-an-automaton. There’s no real problem with this theft – “steal whatever isn’t bolted down” – and more filmmakers, in fact, should mimic this picture. Not its Andre the Giant tone, which is what it is, but Kobayashi’s dynamic, caught-in-the-act sense of image. Too many contemporary directors either bind themselves rigidly to the structure of the frame – square subjects for square shots – or ignore its boundaries entirely, hoping that unsteady motion alone with transport the audience to a frenetic state of box office bloodletting. Kobayashi’s shots are nearly always fixed in place, and absolutely always well composed – one gets the feeling of a knife hanging over a watermelon. Something has to happen.
The movie’s huge and I, unfortunately, don’t have the love or the patience necessary to break it down fully for you. I’ll suffice with a simple viewing guide. The Human Condition is recommended for:
-Teach for America participants who have not dropped out of the program
-devil-may-care iBankers in need of a corrective artistic tonic
-the lucky and the beautiful who think the nightly news is a poorly acted sitcom
-and anyone who still hums the Friends theme song while jogging.
Those of you who already find yourselves to be severe and scotch-loving need not apply but, let’s face it, you’ll end up seeing this one anyways.
