MUBI

After watching The Human Condition (1959-1961), one gets the feeling that Akira Kurosawa was like the quitter(s) in Masaki Kobayashi’s trilogy. They called Kurosawa a coward (he tried to commit suicide). They accused him of not confronting the enemies of his times (he preferred ghosts of the national past to living devils). They said he didn’t give his villains a face or put on too tough a battle. But then the Russians or the commies don’t come across as the real villains in The Human Condition. The real enemies of the people of Japan are the Japanese themselves. Kurosawa makes exactly the same point over and again in most of his films, doesn’t he? Take The Bad Sleep Well (1960) or Red Beard (1965) for instance, aren’t they similar to The Human Condition in their themes minus the political exposition?
While I enjoyed the sword fight in Harakiri (1962) (it was otherwise a dull movie), I think Sadao Yamanaka’s Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937) is far superior in its representation of the reality of a Samurai family fallen on difficult times. If Kurosawa does seem Hollywoodish like Satyajit Ray (another filmmaker accused of being ’ too Western’), Kobayashi’s dependency on novelistic device to use space and time doesn’t necessarily mean that he makes an impact as one would expect from such a great polemic. Perhaps that is what David Thomson means when he says Masaki Kobayashi isn’t quite original like Yasujiro Ozu or Kenji Mizoguchi (and Kurosawa is not as great as the two masters).

A rather harrowing experience.

At first I was upset that my one-dvd-at-a-time netflix plan would not allow me to marathon it, but in retrospect, I am glad that I watched it over the course of a week.

Nine and a half hours is a lot of time to realize a character, and during that time I developed a lot of respect of Kaji, who started out as a naive youthful idealist who made a lesser-of-two-evils moral sacrifice in order to spare himself the dehumanization of war. Even being placed in a position where he himself could be the cause of much suffering, he did his best for those under his charge. His idealism constantly failed and landed him in increasingly horrible situations, but even as he made certain sacrifices for the sake of survival, some of which were painful to watch, he retained his human spirit and sense of morality.

This film also contains some of the most sweeping, beautiful shots of the sky and clouds ever filmed.

9 and a half hours of war atrocities and human suffering. Beautifully filmed, poetic eloquent language, and a very depressing ending. If I had to count any flaws was some of the acting was really stupid. Plus in the second part there was A LOT OF soldiers slapping. I mean every fuckin scene was someones face getting slapped. The Human Condition will go down as the ONLY fuckin War epic where soldiers constantly bitch slap each other.

Favorite quote from the movie:

Man is not poetry and morality, he’s just a lumpy mass of lust and greed that absorbs and excretes.

I watched this Criterion Collection dvd that I bootlegged from the internet over the course of 3 days, haven’t got into the special features but when I have $80 bucks to spare in the future if I don’t spend it all on weed then I’mma buy The Human Condition DVD boxset and you should too!

A solid 9.5 out of 10. One of the best epics of War about the ridiculous of the military and the fuckin HUMAN CONDITION…what human fuckin beings will do to SURVIVE!

WATCH IT NOW!

Rarely have I seen a movie that attempts to encompass everything that makes up the human spirit. And The Human Condition subjects a man to the many facets of war, that which tends to destroy that very spirit. Nakadai plays arguably a career-defining role in Kaji who desperately tries to retain his humanity only to find himself in circumstances that force him to gradually strip that away for that most basic of human needs: survival. But more than anything else, The Human Condition portrays so apt the paradox of man: how can a man fragile in flesh muster such drive, such motivation to move forth? It is that intangible factor that makes the human condition most intriguing. And few movies have captured that better than this.