Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi shot The Human Condition in a widescreen process called Grand Scope, and that’s exactly what he achieves with this magnum opus, which clocks in at nearly 10 hours. This blunt and beautiful, black and white epic follows the metamorphosis of Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), a Japanese pacifist living in occupied China during the final years of World War II.

With a heavy hand, and even heavier heart, Kobayashi (Kwaidan) adapted Jumpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel into a trilogy of films made between 1959 and 1961. Coming a mere generation after Japan’s defeat, the stunning Human Condition pulls no punches, openly questioning the elemental nature of the society that waged war and occupied foreign countries to exploit their natural resources and labor. It also offers up Kaji as a sacrificial lamb, an everyman who believes in human decency and dignity, but is faced with a monolith of brutality wherever he turns.

Part 1, No Greater Love, finds Kaji making a life-altering decision to avoid conscription and marry his beloved Michiko (Michiyo Aratama). He leaves his desk job at a steel company to become the labor manager at an iron ore mine in southern Manchuria, planning to implement the egalitarian ideals he espoused in a report to Japanese upper management. But his posting seems like a cruel joke (the first of many), since no one wants to change the corrupt status quo. Despite his efforts to avoid it, the war soon comes to Kaji when the Kempeitai (military police) bring POWs to the mine as forced labor.

It doesn’t take long for the reformer to become a martyr, and Kaji vacillates throughout The Human Condition between taking the hits for others and being a hot-headed, impulsive leader his contemporaries unquestioningly follow. Part 2, The Road to Eternity, finds Kaji as an Army recruit who makes a surprisingly effective soldier, although he can’t stomach the “personal punishment” techniques that pass for military discipline, which involve numerous beatings and violent hazing methods.

The soul-crushing conclusion, A Soldier’s Prayer, details the disintegration of the Kwantung Army as starvation, guerilla warfare, and infighting between Japanese refugees are followed by oppression imposed by the Soviet Union’s “people’s army” (who call Kaji a “fascist samurai”).

Watching The Human Condition in one fell swoop, its creaky melodramatic conventions emerge. Kaji’s travails soon feel repetitious; a series of encounters with self-satisfied petty tyrants so enraged by his humanism that they escalate their cruelty and make it their personal mission to annihilate him. In the last half, women come and go in waves, each a surrogate for the absent Michiko, and Kaji’s long-lost comrades conveniently reappear, although they offer little more than fleeting moral support.

Kobayashi’s view is fatalistic, not triumphant, with Kaji put in the position to personally atone for the war. During an arduous final journey that sees Kaji systematically stripped of everything he holds dear, the audience will also feel that they’re trapped on a long bleak march to nowhere. A monumental anti-war statement, The Human Condition demands devotion and takes no prisoners.

© 2008, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.

Director: Masaki Kobayashi | Writers: Zenzo Matsuyama and Masaki Kobayashi | Adapted from the novel by Jumpei Gomikawa | Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima | Music: Chuji Kinoshita | Art Direction: Kazue Hirataka | Editing: Keiichi Uraoka | Producer: Shigeru Wakatsuki | Released by Janus Films | Running time: 574 minutes | In Japanese (some Chinese and Russian) with English subtitles.

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai (Kaji), Michiyo Aratama (Michiko), Chikage Awashima (Jin Tung Fu), Ineko Arima (Yang Chun Lan), Keiji Sada (Kageyama), So Yamamura (Okishima), Akira Ishihama (Chen), Shinji Nambara (Kao), Seiji Miyaguchi (Wang Heng Li), Toru Abe (Sergeant Watai), Masao Mishima (Manager Kuroki), Eitaro Ozawa (Okazaki), Koji Mitsui (Furuya), Akitake Kono (Captain Kono), Kyu Sazanka (Cho Meisan), Kokinji Katsura (Sasa), Jun Tatara (Hino), Michio Minami (Yoshida), Kei Sato (Shinjo), Kunie Tanaka (Obara), Taketoshi Naito (Tange), Yusuke Kawazu (Terada), Susumu Fujita (Naruto), Minoru Chiaki (Onodera), Kyoko Kishida (Tatsuko), Reiko Hitomi (Umeko), Keijiro Morozumi (Hironaka), Koji Kiyomura (Hikida), and Nobuo Kaneko (Kirihara).