Ningen no joken I

“From a certain point, all my films deal with resistance to entrenched power. I think I’ve always questioned authority. That applied to my own life too, including my time in the military. After the war, a time finally came when we could address these issues directly,” commented Masaki Kobayashi, who began working on NINGEN NO JOKEN in the late 1950s, a nine-hour, unflinching indictment of the inhumane actions of the Japanese army in occupied Manchuria during the Second World War. Based on the mid-1950s autobiographical novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa and produced by the Ninjin Club, this sometimes graphically violent three-part epic depicts the journey of naïve idealist Kaji from being a conscientious objector and guard at a forced labor camp to eventually becoming a soldier and finally a Soviet prisoner of war.

NINGEN NO JOKEN I: Winter 1943: In exchange for exemption from military service, pacifist Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), who has communist sympathies, takes up a post which involves supervising Chinese forced laborers and a group of “comfort women” in a remote region of Manchuria. He moves there with his wife (Michiyo Aratama) and tries to improve the living conditions of the workers. At the same time, he has to defend his actions against the brutal representatives of the military authorities. When some forced laborers escape from the camp, Kaji is suspected of complicity. He is arrested and conscripted into military service. The Ninjin Club was keen to secure the services of Yoshio Miyajima for this film, one of Japanese cinema’s finest cinematographers, whose widescreen shots give the vast, barren landscapes and the oppressive realities of life a feeling of an echo chamber captured with great depth of field. (mg)