The Human Condition.

"The three-part fuming World War II bummer The Human Condition (1959 - 61) - considered the magnum opus of socially critical Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) - runs just shy of 10 hours and is an arduous watch in ways beyond its creator's intentions," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Based on Jumpei Gomikawa's ambitious novel and seasoned with Kobayashi's own experiences, this overly melodramatic trilogy set in Japanese-occupied Manchuria depicts the dehumanizing brutality of war with on-the-nose pedantry, never subtext, and offers little richness to Western eyes already adjusted to the next half-century's deeper anti-war tales."

Updated through 7/21.

For the L Magazine's Mark Asch, this "is not 'the finest achievement yet made by the cinema,' per historian David Shipman's existing-to-be-pullquoted pullquote. (He also nominated it for a Nobel...) It is, though, a never less than engrossing field study of a belief system in contact with the world, composed by Kobayashi in classically delineated, high-contrast space that would make his peak 60s works self-contained worlds for thought-out consciousness."

At Film Forum from tomorrow through August 7.

Earlier: "Tatsuya Nakadai in New York."

Update, 7/18: "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," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "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.... 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."

"In the first chapter, No Greater Love, our hero is in a position of power," notes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "Next, in Road to Eternity, he is in a position of obedience. Then in the breathtaking A Soldier's Prayer, he has devolved to a position of abject desperation, at the mercy of a God who seems all but ignorant of his plight. From a factory to the army barracks to the mud and dirt of the open field, the central theme of The Human Condition involves man turning against his fellow man, using such devices as employment, rank, and nationality to rationalize the abuse."

"So many melodramatic ironies and such broad, sweeping indictments can produce a wearying effect, especially when Kobayashi's ambitious-to-a-fault attacks treats the message-mongering as a blunt instrument rather than a scalpel," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "It's Nakadai who makes this impressive yet flawed screed worth your time commitment. His transformation of Koji from idealist to leader, protector, killer and finally, a haggard ghost of man offers a powerful example of humanity being slowly, painfully stamped out."

"Nakadai's performance as a man of Christlike forbearance, who travels to the edge of human endurance in a doomed and lonely struggle against an evil society, is both moving and charismatic," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "That comparison is not frivolous, by the way; Kobayashi was profoundly influenced by Western philosophy, cinema and religion, to the point of being called 'anti-Japanese' by some of his countrymen. (I feel virtually certain that this movie was an influence on Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima.) Kobayashi's wide-screen landscapes (shot by Yoshio Miyajima), depicting the lonely human figure against a natural world that knows and cares nothing about him, combine wonder and mortal terror."

Update, 7/21: In Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin tries out a comparison with Fassbinder's Berliner Alexanderplatz: "[S]trangely, surprisingly, both projects share a haunted fascination with national and historical trauma that is almost entirely unique and unparalleled in cinema, the obsessive nature of their pursuits for answers about their nations' shameful descent into self-destruction fueling not only marathon runtimes but also torturous passion play narratives featuring stubborn protagonists whose education in the horrors and hypocrisies of the world unfold in relentless, punishing accretions of indignities. There's an instructional quality to Kobayashi's humanism as well as Fassbinder's theatricality: Kaji's encounters with bureaucratic fascism, militaristic brutality, sexual exploitation, and animalistic selfishness play out as stations on the road to personal and universal annihilation in the same manner in which Franz Biberkopf's run-ins with Nazis, gangsters, communists, and prostitutes gradually acquire profound significance and stand for a greater level of collective shame and guilt."

Posted by dwhudson at July 17, 2008 7:37 AM