To Be Human

Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light" and Masaki Kobayashi's "The Human Condition" arrive on DVD.

Reygadas is one variety of participatory arthouse cinema, and Masaki Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition” (1959-61) is another – 9.5 hours long, divided into six feature-length sections (but originally released in three three-plus-hour parts), this hyper-ambitious mega-movie, photographed in the best of the era’s chrome-&-ash style, is formally orthodox, but its extreme-novel content is something else. Essentially a Job story designed to indict the entirety of Japanese culture, Kobayashi’s story (from the novel series by Junpei Gomikawa) lives up to its heady title: Japanese icon-hero Tatsuya Nakadai is the wide-eyed Kaji, a pacifistic middle-class manager despairing, at the outset, of getting conscripted into WWII. An opportunity to travel to Manchuria to manage a POW-manned mining operation seems to be his ticket out of trouble – but his troubles, which are both gargantuan and caused in large part by his own humanism, have only begun. His efforts at treating the Chinese prisoners fairly and non-violently is his first mistake (particularly after a foreman demonstrates the electrical fencing by tossing a dog onto it); as Kaji’s trials carry on with the hours, and he is eventually drafted and put through military indoctrination, his congenital aversion to brutality is met with constant brutality, and every factor of Japanese military culture becomes a holy tribulation. Then he gets sent into battle, facing the Russians in Manchuria (an arena I’ve never seen depicted before from the Japanese perspective), and war itself turns the tables.

Twisting through, in a sense, an all-out Japanese version of a reform-crusader saga that leaps into “Full Metal Jacket” before seguing into “Fires on the Plain” (the entirety of it recalls the what-the-fuck-is-next structure of “Apocalypse Now”), Kobayashi’s epic doesn’t let anybody off the hook. The Russians are corpulent rapist-killers – “Reds should be better” than the Japanese and Nazis and “even the Americans,” Kaji moans – but the full battery of accusations directed at Japanese authority, Japanese masculinity, Japanese bureaucracy and Japanese colonialism is tantamount to a case brought to the World Court. But that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t make its statements with almost infinite variation and subtlety, and the beleaguered hero is as much scorched and crucified as is the very idea of the individual in modern society. The circular plotting, drowning up to its hairline in injustices, cries out for a movie-world act of bloody rectitude. But no: “The Human Condition” is Biblical in its purity and punch.

“Silent Light” (Palisades Tartan Video) and “The Human Condition” (Criterion Collection) are now available on DVD.

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