A Good Film Is One You Can Watch to the End｜Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition

What is a good film?

There are many possible answers, but I think it is “a film you can keep watching to the end.” Since films usually run about two hours, the question that troubles filmmakers most is how to keep an audience watching for those two hours. When, in the first place, did the custom that “a film runs about two hours” arise?

Surprisingly, long works of more than two hours have been made since early on. Kenji Mizoguchi’s The 47 Ronin (1941–1942), for example, made during the war on the military’s orders to raise morale, took as its motif Chushingura, the story of the loyal retainers of Ako so beloved of the Japanese, and ran about three hours and forty-three minutes across its two parts.

It was, however, shown in two separate parts, and each part on its own fit within the customary two hours. After the war, though, attempts were made to break this two-hour custom. One of them was Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). It ran 207 minutes as a single complete work and broke every convention of its time. Because it lasted three and a half hours, a five-minute intermission was placed within the film itself as a scene, and audiences could experience this unprecedented work in a single sitting. The film itself was a major production made over nearly a year of shooting on a budget seven times that of an ordinary film of the day.

Kurosawa had already won international acclaim with Rashomon (1950), and he staked his career as a director on this work, which he completed after overcoming fierce opposition from the producing studio, Toho, and the threat of cancellation. It certainly carried a strong “devotion” to the work, and one could say that this is why audiences could watch it in one sitting. Yet however strong a filmmaker’s devotion, whether a film can be watched to the end is, in fact, another matter.

There is a jinx in the film world, for instance, that documentaries, the genre that should carry the most devotion of all, are known as one of the genres least likely to be watched to the end. The problem, in other words, is not the strength of devotion. Devotion to a work is a given, and a masterpiece is born only when several other elements come together beautifully as well.

Once Kurosawa had proven that audiences would watch a long film, ambitious works appeared. One of them was Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (1959–1961), which was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest film of its day.

Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa, published from 1956 to 1958, the film is set in Manchuria at the end of the Pacific War and follows a young man named Kaji from 1943 to 1945. The great actor Tatsuya Nakadai plays the hero, an employee of the South Manchuria Steel Company. Just after marrying his wife, played by Michiyo Aratama, he takes up a post managing labor under harsh conditions, and he struggles to improve the treatment of the Chinese laborers, who are being worked like slaves.

The work unfolds in six parts, Part One “Pure Love,” Part Two “Fury,” Part Three “Longing for Home,” Part Four “Clouds of War,” Part Five “Death and Escape,” and Part Six “Wandering in the Wilderness,” and its total running time came to an astonishing nine and a half hours. This was not an attempt at a record for length. It had to do with the times. As Japan entered the 1960s, more than ten years after the war, in what came to be called “the season of politics,” the film answered a moment when those who had lived through the war were asking again, “What was that?” and “How could human beings do such cruel things?”

Naturally, everyone who appeared in it and everyone who made it had lived through the war. Tatsuya Nakadai in particular, who played the hero and died last year, said during his life that his sixty-five-year career as an actor had been a way of showing his will against war, and he practiced his opposition to war by acting until he died.

In the extreme conditions of war, most people did terrible things without a second thought, yet there were a few who kept struggling to remain human. Whether we go along with the crowd and do atrocious things, or guard our dignity as human beings even against the wind, always depends on our own will. This powerful message for the future, joined with the sense of mission of the filmmakers and actors who truly believed in it, produced a supreme work in which some nine and a half hours pass without being felt.

These are fine examples of films connected to their audiences through devotion. There is, on the other hand, a director of a contrasting kind, who went on making films one after another, calmly, like a craftsman, and achieved the groundbreaking feat that every one of them was “a film you can keep watching to the end.” His name is Mikio Naruse.

His way of making films was so groundbreaking that the young Akira Kurosawa revered him as his master for life, yet he is still seldom talked about today. Next time, I will talk about this man, Mikio Naruse.