Marriage within the Kohayagawa family takes on multiple meanings throughout The End of Summer, always dependent on the individual in question. For younger daughter Noriko it is an aspiration hindered by her sweetheart Teramoto’s decision to move away for work, while her elder sister Fumiko performs her duty loyally, raising a son with her husband Hisao. The pressure for their widowed sister-in-law Akiko to remarry is also quietly mounting, even as she quietly resists with the sincere acknowledgement that her youth is long gone – not that patriarch Manbei sees this as an issue when he controversially tries to reconnect with his old mistress. A widower of his age should not be considering the prospect of marriage, his family proclaims, lest he should embarrass them all.
As is the case in most Yasujirō Ozu films, Japanese tradition is at the forefront here, merging The End of Summer’s rigorous form, style, and content into a gentle meditation on those longstanding cultural values that have ensured stability across generations. Where his penultimate film sets itself apart is in the astounding elegance of the execution, even by his own standards. In terms of pure visual storytelling, this competes with only a handful of his greatest works, while pushing his geometrically precise style forward through rejuvenating colour photography.
Ozu rpresents the entire Kohayagawa family through the brown, earthy tones of their home and sake bar – dark wooden flooring, furniture, and panelling are the dominant aesthetic in The End of Summer.An elegant frame beyond the crowded angles of the family home, gently imposing the tree trunk and branches on these characters as we join their conversation.
Ozu’s layering of frames through corridors and doorways remains one of his most potent visual devices here, often containing his characters within the spaces of work, leisure, and domestic duty which define their day-to-day routines. There is often an extraordinary graphic harmony between people and their surrounding décor, symmetrically dividing a table at one of Noriko’s work lunches by gender, while running a pattern of brightly coloured bottles beneath them parallel to their staging.
Extraordinary graphic harmony in Ozu’s mise-en-scène, symmetrically dividing a table at one of Noriko’s work lunches by gender while running a pattern of brightly coloured bottles beneath them.
The End of Summer’s mise-en-scène also transcends conventional blocking choices, often suggesting the presence of specific characters despite their physical absence. When we transition into a scene with Akiko at an art gallery for instance, Ozu gently delivers a montage of floral paintings in an art gallery, while on a broader level he represents the entire Kohayagawa family through the brown, earthy tones that encompass them. Within their home, dark wooden flooring, furniture, and panelling are the dominant aesthetic, complementing their light bamboo drapes and striking an extraordinary contrast against their exquisitely patterned wallpaper and textiles.
Ozu uses mise-en-scène to suggest the presence of specific characters despite their physical absence, delivering a montage of floral paintings in an art gallery when we transition into a scene with Akiko at an art gallery.Patterned wallpaper becomes a trend towards the end of Ozu’s career, delicately framing his immaculately blocked ensemble.Bamboo drapes weave light, organic textures through domestic spaces, complementing the dark wooden décor.
As for Manbei himself, his personality and power are most strongly signified in the family sake brewery, often seen with barrels leaning obliquely against its wall in Ozu’s pillow shots. Their contents are the foundation of his small business, though in this modern era its future is looking frighteningly uncertain, as the need to merge into a larger corporation seems more inevitable with each passing week.
Marvellous pillow shots set around the family brewery, leaning rounded barrels up against the outside wall when business is prospering.
When Manbei suffers a heart attack, these shots consequently draw a parallel between the health of his body and his company. As Noriko rushes to call an ambulance, Ozu cuts through a series of familiar locations in their home that are now gloomily dimmed and emptied, before returning to the brewery’s exterior where the absence of barrels is poignantly noted. The graveyard shot that is additionally inserted here isn’t to be passed over either – Ozu’s careful editing weaves a mournful foreboding in the wake of this sudden illness, quietly hinting at the tragedy that has already taken the family’s beloved mother, and which will soon claim their patriarch and business as well.
Immediately following Manbei’s heart attack, Ozu lingers in this melancholy montage of the empty doctor’s office and family home, now void of life.The family business’ health is tied directly to Manbei’s – no more barrels after he is struck down by illness.
Throughout Ozu’s career, the encroachment of the modern world into traditional Japanese spaces has steadily become more central to his narrative conflicts, even as he maintains a nuanced standpoint on the issue. With a piece of the Kohayagawa family’s identity at stake, the threat of post-war industrialism is felt especially deeply here, yet at the same time Ozu savours the incongruence of this cultural clash. The blinking neon lights of Kyoto’s cityscapes are searingly beautiful, while views of temples through Venetian blinds and pagodas peeking over tiled roofs further develop the uneasy interactions between Japan’s past and present.
Kyoto’s dazzling cityscapes look to Japan’s future, stripped of those family businesses which were once the economy’s lifeblood.Ancient temples framed through office windows, depicting a clash of eras and values.
Quite unusually though, it is not just the younger generations subverting cultural customs in The End of Summer, but even Manbei himself. Every so often Ozu dismisses his characters’ polite reservations with glimpses of spirited humour, watching the elderly sake brewer play hide and seek with his grandchild, and elsewhere try to shake his employee’s tail while running off to his mistress’ home. His children’s concerns about this rekindled romance are understandable given its history, though now that their mother has passed, so too can we understand Manbei’s renewed desire for companionship.
Moments of levity in Manbei’s games with his grandson.Light comedy in Manbei’s sly escape to his mistress’ home, shaking the tail of his younger employee – even here, Ozu repeats shots to establish a sense of geography.
It is obvious upon meeting Tsune that we realise she is no wily seductress, but just another lonely parent seeking love, and ultimately proving her dedication to Manbei as she nurses him through his sickness. Happiness and fulfilment can clearly be found outside the family unit in The End of Summer, even if certain relationships are left ambiguous, such as the question of whether he fathered her daughter Yuriko. The rebellious streak that he and Yuriko both share only supports this speculation, particularly manifesting in her as a rejection of Japanese culture and adoption of a heavily Westernised lifestyle. Rather than the loose-fitting and slimming garb worn by Manbei’s daughters, she wears bright, eye-catching dresses that accentuate her curved figure, and her dating life primarily revolves around white American men.
Japan’s youth are adopting a Westernised culture, typified in Yuriko who dresses in bright dresses and dates primarily American men.
The two sequences where Ozu takes the Kohayagawa family outside the city and into the countryside thus mark a reprieve from this modern cultural conflict, even if it is exchanged for profound mourning in both instances. In the first instance, they hold a memorial service for their late mother in Arashiyama, where Ozu’s pillow shots turn their focus to forests and hills that have barely been touched by human civilisation. The second time they venture beyond their home though, the grief is far more potent, commemorating the passing of their beloved father.
Pillow shots as we transition to the countryside – note the formal rigour of these compositions, flooding the frame with greenery while running a brown, vertical beam through each shot.Foreground and background detail in Ozu’s compositions, running a line of gravestones diagonally across the frame while two lonely figures in mourning clothes keep their distance.
The small appearance of Ozu regular Chishû Ryû as a farmer observing the crematorium chimney with his wife is notable here, despite there being no direct interaction between them and our main characters. Judging by the crows gathering along the river where they work, they surmise that someone has died, and soon their suspicions are confirmed when smoke from that giant pillar begins rising into the air. “It’s not a big deal if an elderly person were to have died, but it would be tragic if it were somebody young,” the woman ponders, while the man takes a more positive spin on her indifference.
“Yes, but no matter how many die, new lives will be born to take their place.”
Chishû Ryû cameos as a farmer commenting on Manbei’s death from afar, bringing Ozu’s musings on mortality to a close.The crematory chimney is a poignant visual motif, marking Manbei’s final departure from the world.
It is merely the cycle of life, his wife acknowledges – a comforting assertion given the confirmation in these final scenes that the Kohayagawa brewery will indeed be sold off, ending an era in this family’s history. No longer do these adult children wear light colours and delicate patterns, but instead exchange them for pitch-black, funereal garments. Even after they leave the graveyard, the severe imprints they cast against the pale blue sky poetically resonate into Ozu’s sombre final shot, revealing two crows cawing upon a pair of headstones. They are the grief of the living that lingers with the deceased, but so too are they the souls of husband and wife joined in death, marking the resting spot where their bodies lay. Perhaps the celebrated traditions of marriage and family can secure a longstanding stability through this loss, yet The End of Summer does not underestimate the sorrow that it entails, composing wistful lamentations of life’s transient, bittersweet joys.
Manbei’s adult children no longer wear light colours and delicate patterns, but instead exchange them for pitch-black, funereal garments, imprinted against a light blue sky.Crows gather at the cemetery, and Ozu nails his final shot – these birds are the grief of the living that lingers with the deceased, but so too are they the souls of husband and wife joined in death, marking the resting spot where their bodies lay.
The End of Summer is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Whenever Toshiro Mifune’s rōnin strides through the streets of the small Japanese town in Yojimbo, he always seems to be accompanied by dust swirling in whirlwinds around his feet, underscoring his subtle yet formidable command over the atmosphere itself. He moves in straight lines, unwavering in his confrontation of whatever danger lies ahead of him, and supremely confidently that it too will bend to his mere presence.
He isn’t wrong in his self-assurance either. Akira Kurosawa builds a complex ensemble of characters in this gripping narrative, dividing many of them between two rival crime rings who have taken control of the town’s local trades, and each bidding for the service of this mysterious yet powerful newcomer who has wandered into their midst. When they barter for his protection, he does not even need words to push them up to the price he knows he is worth, instead simply meeting them with a cold, stoic silence. He is factionless, unswayed by their political ambitions and promises, and yet still recognising the necessity of at least some temporary alliances to achieve his ulterior motives – eliminating both warring gangs once and for all, and restoring peace to the village.
Kurosawa’s widescreen aspect ratio is crucial to his long shots, setting the scene of Sanjuro’s wandering into town with traditional Japanese architecture lining a wide, open street.
Even the identity of this wandering samurai seems concocted on a whim, taking inspiration from a nearby shrub when he is asked his name – Kuwabatake Sanjuro, or ‘thirty-year-old mulberry bush.’ He does not associate himself with any great clan of Japan’s Edo period, nor does he need to when his skill with a sword speaks entirely for itself. He is simultaneously every hero ever spoken about in Japanese folklore, and nobody at all.
The precedent that Mifune sets for Clint Eastwood’s own Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy is clear, with both being framed as lone figures that have walked straight out of legend and into the real world, though this shouldn’t be a surprise though given that Yojimbo was remade in the first film of that trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars. For all the rich aesthetic and cultural details unique to Japanese history here, pitting sake brewers against silk merchants in beautifully rustic sets, its structure speaks to far broader narrative conventions built into Eastern and Western mythology.
Kurosawa’s narrative in Yojimbo sits among his most compelling, exerting an influence over many westerns in the years to come, but it is also his cinematography that astounds in his meticulous arrangement of actors in the frame.An incredible blocking of faces here in Kurosawa’s deep focus imagery, placing the emphasis on the actors’ scheming expressions.
Kurosawa’s love of Shakespeare is evident in the intricate power struggles between the rival crime lords, with Ushitora having previously served as Seibei’s lieutenant before striking out on his own, and both now playing out their feud through kidnapping and trading hostages. It takes Sanjuro’s wit and manipulation to trick both gangs into their first public confrontation, seeing them nervously inching towards each other from either end of the main street while he sits on the sidelines, gleefully cackling at their exposed cowardice and hoping for mutually assured destruction.
Mifune sits between both sides of the gang war as a factionless unknown, and Kurosawa’s blocking in low angles during their battle sharply reflects this characterisation.
The sudden arrival of a government official is all the excuse they need to prematurely halt the battle before any major loss, though tensions have been irreversibly inflamed. When Ushitora’s sadistic brother Unosuke enters the picture, Kurosawa kicks the stakes up another notch, painting him as a ferocious adversary as he stands with a manic grin in front of the warehouse he has set alight. After Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai gives the next best performance here as Sanjuro’s villainous foil, possessing a similarly cunning mind yet lacking any sort of moral code. It is thanks to him after all that the feud continues to violently escalate, seeing the other gang match Unosuke’s destructive spectacle by stabbing holes in all their enemy’s sake barrels, and erupting fountains of alcohol across the brewery.
Tatsuya Nakadai may be second to Mifune in this cast, but he makes every second he is onscreen count, portraying a remorseless villain with a wicked grin.Dynamic imagery in the sake pouring out of barrels, escalating the gang war to all-out sabotage and property destruction.
True to Kurosawa’s penchant for such dynamic imagery, Yojimbo is brimming with visual majesty, using its widescreen aspect ratio and deep focus as a rich canvas for his epic showdowns. In his long shots of the town’s main road, he effectively turns it into a battle arena lined with taverns and homes that host nervous spectators. There is little privacy to be founded in these establishments, many of which are only separated by wooden beams that intrusively obstruct Kurosawa’s shots, while dramatic high and low angles bring a daunting gravity to the action unfolding just outside. The percussive, jazz-adjacent score that Masaru Sato injects into these scenes is not at all conventional fit for a film so rooted in the samurai genre, and yet the fusion here of jaunty, brassy melodies and traditional Japanese instruments rings out with a discordant confidence that matches Mifune’s own defiant, swaggering presence, similarly bucking cultural conventions.
The main road in town becomes a battle arena of sorts in Yojimbo, making for some gorgeous imagery loaded with symbolic weight.The divisions between establishments deny inhabitants any privacy, but also obstruct shots such as these to divide the foreground from the background.
It isn’t until the film’s extraordinary climax though that Kurosawa unites all these formal and stylistic elements together into its greatest scene, building a steady rhythm in the editing between Sanjuro’s restrained stride up one end of the road, and Unosuke leading his yakuza down the other. The dust which once blew in small flurries around Mifune’s feet is now whipped into the air through enormous gusts of wind, lashing his robes and hair while he persistently moves forward at the same measured pace, and in total command of his environment. With each cut between him and Nakadai, Kurosawa’s camera moves incrementally closer to both, studying their furious expressions until their shared acknowledgment registers – both men know this final fight will be the end for one of them.
Yojimbo’s greatest scene comes in the dusty showdown between Sanjuro and Unosuke’s men, as Kurosawa cuts between both sides and moves his camera in closer each time. Clearly an enormous influence on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.
Even when up armed with a gun, Unosuke is no match for Sanjuro’s blades, finding himself incapacitated almost right away when a dagger is thrown into his arm. Our hero makes short work of the rest of his men, cutting each of them down with his sword and only granting mercy to one young man he realises still holds onto a shred of innocence and regret. Like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers though, or Alan Ladd in the final scene of Shane, Sanjuro cannot continue living in the peaceful new paradise he has established, free from danger and crime. Kurosawa’s mythologising has rarely been so potent as it is here in Yojimbo’s circular arc, leading this lonely samurai back into the realm of wilderness and legend where he came from, ready to emerge whenever Japan’s commonfolk are most in need.
Sympathetic soldier, prisoner, and political pacifist Kaji seems to live multiple lives across the modern odyssey that Masaki Kobayashi lays out in The Human Condition trilogy. Through several years of Kaji’s time spent in World War II, he traverses virtually every inch of Manchuria in northeast China, bearing witness to experiences from all over the spectrum of life. Over time, encounters with birth, death, love, sex, culture, grief, conflict, faith, desire, and fear build towards a greater understanding of what it means to exist on Earth – and yet the wisdom Kaji is granted does not come with some enlightening inner peace. If anything, it only threatens the humanity which resides within him, as Kobayashi piles endless tests of moral endurance upon this man who strives for the betterment of society.
Few times in the history of film has a director adapted a novel with as sweeping majesty and creative invention as Masaki Kobayashi does here, rendering entire worlds of literary prose with astonishing cinematic magnitude. The Human Condition is an accomplishment of epic proportions, matched perhaps only by Gone with the Wind or The Lord of the Rings in its equal devotion to the source material and awe-inspiring spectacle. The title itself makes a promise of daunting philosophical scope which might seem more suited to an introspective drama than a war film, and yet Kobayashi’s harrowing examination of modern civilisation at its lowest manifests these abstract ideas on a pragmatically large scale. It is here in humanity’s darkest days that its most vital essence becomes both the strongest threat to widespread injustice, as well as its greatest target, turning Kaji’s soul into the last remaining battleground of moral fortitude.
Tatsuya Nakadai’s idealistic pacifist suffers a great deal through this ten-hour epic – he is tortured, imprisoned, and forced into gut-wrenching tests of moral fortitude that wear away at his principles.
This 28-year-old idealist might not see it at the time, but these are the stakes laid out when he is first assigned to the role of supervisor at a slave-driven mining operation in Manchuria. Even the imperial Japanese authorities who place him there realise how little he is cut out for the job, and yet the report he has submitted against the exploitation of Chinese labour has nevertheless inspired them to send him off for a test of his naïve, pacifist principles. When he arrives with his newlywed wife Mochiko, he also comes with huge ambitions in tow – a revised employment system, improved working conditions, and rationing plans are just the start of it. “Take care of the men and the ore will come out,” he declares, practically bringing it all back a results-driven work ethic.
Kaji finds few friends among either the labourers or administrators, often separated from the prisoners-of-war by barbed wire.
The delivery of 600 new ‘special’ workers who have been taken as prisoners-of-war becomes his first trial. The moment the train doors are unlocked, the gaunt, half-dead men come pouring out like zombies, swarming Kaji and his fellow administrators for any food or water they can get their hands on. That he is driven to violence as a means of control so early in this series immediately introduces a crushing hopelessness – if he can’t maintain peaceful leadership now, then what does this mean for him later when more pressure is inevitably applied? In the aftermath, it becomes apparent that 12 men died from overheating in the carriages, and 150 others escaped upon arrival. Failure is a companion Kaji will come to know very well in his journey.
Kaji fails his first test to deal with a new batch of prisoners, instantly crumbling as they grasp at food and water.Watchtowers often in Kobayashi’s mise-en-scène in the first film, keeping an omniscient eye on Kaji’s actions.
Kobayashi has no reservations in landing us right next to him through these physical and emotional challenges either. Divided into three films respectively subtitled No Greater Love, Road to Eternity, and A Soldier’s Prayer, this ten-hour trilogy uses its length to gruelling effect, with each death and personal defeat accumulating in subtle increments towards a mountain of despair not even Kaji can bear.
Perhaps even more crucial to the vivid experience of The Human Condition than its scale is Kobayashi’s bleak, rugged photography, advancing in stylistic virtuosity with each film. Though not as widely recognised as his Japanese contemporaries Akira Kurosawa or Yasujirō Ozu, his mastery of visual composition through blocking rivals both, even as he is largely working with stark, desolate landscapes. A total dedication to building out the background of even relatively minor scenes consistently shines through the trilogy, connecting Kaji to hostile environments and enormous crowds of extras. In the labour camp setting of the first film, watchtowers frequently loom over him in low angles as he talks through barbed wire to embittered prisoners, always keeping that constant surveillance in the back of our minds. As these men are sent off to work at the mines, Kobayashi lines hundreds of them up in zig-zag paths across rocky hilltops and valleys, and pans his camera along their enormous trail from one horizon to another in a single magnificent shot.
An extraordinary achievement of blocking for Kobayashi, keeping up an extraordinary stamina across this entire trilogy as he works with hundreds of extras.
When Kaji departs the labour camp and is forced to serve in the Japanese army, the harshness of Kobayashi’s scenery continues to transform, pitching him against new threats within yet another corrupt institution. The depth of field present in his cinematography impresses even more when we find ourselves in army camps, its rough interiors lined with wooden bunk beds upon which soldiers are staggered across all levels of the frame. The power dynamics are evident in this staging – much like at the labour camp, Kaji is ostracised for his Communist-adjacent politics, while other recruits like the similarly rebellious Shinjo and the meek Obara also find themselves targeted by their more nationalistic peers.
In smaller scenes as well, Kobayashi’s deep focus photography lends itself well to some brilliant compositions that sketch out the power dynamics around Kaji, from being an outsider among soldiers to leading a group of refugees through the wilderness.
This instalment, Road to Eternity, clearly sets a standard of war film which would echo through history, especially providing the inspiration for Full Metal Jacket with its bifurcated structure split between boot camp and the battlefield. The suicide of the deeply tormented Private Pyle in Stanley Kubrick’s film mirrors Obara’s here too, though this death carries a tinge of bitter irony when the rifle’s misfire inspires a renewed desire to live – “Is that a sign that I shouldn’t? Yes! After all, one can die at any time” – before incidentally killing him a few seconds later.
Kobayashi’s dark sense of humour is clearly integral to his approach of such weighty material. The cruel fate which drew Obara to his tragic end is the same which leads virtually every other character along winding roads towards their inevitable destinies. For Kaji especially, there is a circular poetry to his journey that transforms him from a supervisor of a Japanese camp to a prisoner in a Soviet camp, inflicting the same inhumane punishments against him which he once sought to combat.
Circular poetry that mirrors Kaji’s status as leader and prisoner at a pair of labour camps.
Kaji’s integrity has been tested many times up to this point, even seeing him brutally murder a fellow Japanese soldier to keep his hiding spot, and yet this is the first time his Communist sympathies are directly challenged. When he tries to express them to his captors, he comes up against a language barrier that the corrupt translator ensures stays in place, and the political hypocrisy of those in charge similarly weakens his resolve. The theoretical equality of this supposedly classless ideology is nowhere to be found in this punitive, hierarchal institution, and Kaji’s impassioned monologue towards those Soviets he once expected to be allies falls on deaf ears that cannot understand his Japanese.
“In your urgency, supervision grows slack. You stick to inflexible rules. Good intentions are suppressed, and evil is tolerated. The fact that socialism is better than fascism isn’t enough to keep us alive!”
In environments as aggressive as this, even the most basic human communication cannot function, leaving those who do share some level of understanding to bond on more intimate levels than normal. Therein lies another key aspect of the ‘human condition’ – the desire to seek companionship effectively becomes a form of emotional starvation in times where common empathy is lacking. For Kaji specifically, it is his love of Mochiko which remains his core motivation when all his principles are stripped away, but even he feels the lure of extramarital attraction in her absence. A sweet but fleeting connection with a nurse in a military hospital almost develops into an affair, yet simply ends on friendly terms with him teasing the possibility that they might see each other again.
Mochiko has relatively little screen time compared to Kaji, but it is an incredibly significant role that motivates him to stay alive through even the worst of circumstances.
This is no romantic Jacques Demy musical though, bringing distant lovers together by whims of fate. Every scene of intimacy in The Human Condition hinges on the understanding that anyone could potentially die at any time, and that this moment of ecstasy may be all they have left. Hearing that prostitutes will be visiting the camp ignites joy in the Chinese prisoners of the first film, and the alliance built between those men and women fosters some of the strongest relationships of the entire series, with both working together on multiple escape attempts.
For Kaji, it is Mochiko who motivates him – for many other men in the Japanese labour camp, it is the prostitutes making frequent visits who incite a spark of warmth they can’t find elsewhere.
Later when Kaji abandons the army and finds himself leading Japanese refugees through dangerous forests and wastelands, Kobayashi orchestrates yet another profoundly affectionate scene between those whose lives have been destroyed. As most of the men and women make love in a farmhouse, Kaji sits by a campfire with another woman seeking warmth. Sensing his judgement of those inside who are married, she mounts a poignant defence of them, while Kobayashi sensitively dollies his camera slowly in on her face.
“Even if we get home alive, how many of us can return to our former lives? When women and soldiers spend fleeting nights together, they always talk about returning home together. When flesh meets flesh, it really seems possible. But at dawn the soldiers are strangers again. They get restless and anxious and grab their weapons and sneak off.”
At this point her monologue turns into voiceover, as Kobayashi detaches his camera from the conversation and starts moving it into the farmhouse. A single, parallel tracking shot glides across a row of beds, upon which bodies wrap around each other in sexual embrace, and yet whatever pleasure we expect to find is muted. As she mourns their collective futures, a faint sob can be heard in the background, and a montage unfolds of their distraught faces crying into each other’s arms.
“We’ll never get home. We’ll never see our loved ones again. We don’t even know how long we’ll live. We all share the same fate. We’re all ruined. We eat only to keep our strength from failing.”
For a director so dedicated to epic imagery, Kobayashi is notably skilled at depicting the psychology of his characters, entering the deepest recesses of their mind. Close-ups like those in the farmhouse offer a glimpse into emotions shared by entire communities, but within Kaji’s own story too we often get voiceovers of his immediate thoughts paired with Tatsuya Nakadai’s haunted, wide-eyed expressions. His performance is nothing less than breathtaking, especially when one considers where it starts and finishes, mapping out the erosion of every belief that defines Kaji as an individual until all he is left with is a single, primal desire to return home. Hatred gradually settles into his soul, and finally wins out in one of the trilogy’s greatest shots that smothers his face with darkness, leaving only a thin sliver of light to illuminate the bitter anger in his profile.
A close-up worthy of Ingmar Bergman, illuminating Nakadai’s profile with a thin sliver of light while the rest of his head sinks into darkness.
Once Kaji’s mind is infected with the madness of war, so too does Kobayashi’s cinematography throw its axis off in chaotic canted angles. After a devastating battle which unfolds like a horror film in Road to Eternity, Kaji ventures into the wilderness in A Soldier’s Prayer with a few troops by his side. For the first time he finds himself beyond the reach of any corrupt institutions, and instead bucks up against the devastating power of the natural world. Tilted tracking shots stumble with them in total exhaustion, bearing resemblance to similar visual devices innovated by Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov from around the same time, as delusional voiceovers echo through his mind.
The Third Man, Do the Right Thing – and you can add The Human Condition to the short list of films that display some of cinema’s greatest canted angles.
It is an incredibly effective technique that Kobayashi touches several other times in this trilogy, most notably during the execution of Chinese prisoners-of-war after an attempted escape. Kaji’s world is totally tipped off-balance as he kneels beside them in agony and empathy, looking almost like he too is condemned to suffer his own parallel spiritual death. Kao is the only one among them to put up a fight in furious protest, and when he too eventually gives in, Kobayashi physically moves the camera to straighten out his final canted angle as if in quiet resignation. “This is your true form. The face of a man, the heart of a beast,” Kao spits at the hopeless Kaji before his demise. These words cut deep, ultimately spurring Kaji to take the moral high ground against his fellow Japanese – but for what? The purity of his own soul? His courage is admirable, but the actual change he can affect is minimal.
Then again, perhaps the inspiration expressed by a colleague upon his departure from the labour offers some justification. It is but a tiny spark of hope in a series that shows us time and time again the powerlessness of individual morality. Even as Kaji trudges through distant, snowy fields in his final days, utterly drained of those ambitions and convictions which defined him as an individual at the start of The Human Condition, he is fuelled solely by the last remaining shred of his humanity which could not be destroyed – his love for Michiko. It persists in hallucinations of her elated voice welcoming him home as Kobayashi frames his frozen, bearded face against dark, angry skies, and drives him right up to his final steps.
True transformation in Nakadai’s performance, wearing years of emotional torture as he staggers aimlessly through an icy tundra.
In the end, it is Kaji’s body which gives up before his spirit. Perhaps this is the core of the human condition, Kobayashi posits, finally distilled into its purest form – a desire for goodness persisting not for some moral high ground, or even in some false belief that it will reliably prevail over adversity, but simply because it is our most base, natural instinct. In this moment, every minute of Kobayashi’s epic, ten-hour trilogy can be viscerally felt, and we are left with nothing but the lifeless remains of humanity destroyed by the very same war it created.
The Human Condition trilogy is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Ingmar Bergman’s first film shot on his home island of Fårö is also the first in his unofficial Faith trilogy, though this does not mean that Through a Glass Darkly was the start of his efforts to confront humanity’s troubled relationship with God. The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring preceded it by a few years, after all. Still, this is a far more contained study than either. Perhaps this is to its slight detriment, given that those other films land with greater formal ambition and impact, but this chamber drama is nonetheless an impressive continuation of his long-running spiritual quandaries.
Gunnar Björnstrand’s biblically-named David is the lonely patriarch of the small family vacationing on the rocky Swedish isle where this story is set, becoming a flawed, God-like figure to his children searching for some divine connection. He suffers from severe writer’s block, and as such finds that his only source of inspiration comes from his daughter Karin’s mental illness. It is a major insecurity for him, especially when he sees how easily ideas for new plays and operas flow from his son Minus. He is envious and self-absorbed, and so he withdraws into his anxious mind, holding back the love his children so desire.
David is representative of God in this family, withholding the love which his children crave.
For Minus, it spurs on a desperate desire to hold a thoughtful conversation with his father, while for Karin it manifests even more severely as a schizophrenic desire to contact the voices in her mind – one of whom she is convinced belongs to God Himself. As the most volatile character, she is the centrepiece of Bergman’s drama, and yet it is David who is at the root of its family issues.
The final member of this quartet is Karin’s husband, Martin, played with intellectual grace by Max von Sydow. He is emotionally independent of David, and yet due to the abundant empathy he has to offer his troubled wife, he is drawn into conflict with her father upon discovering his secret diary entries chronicling her illness.
“You know how to express yourself. You always have just the right words. There’s just one thing you haven’t the slightest clue about: life itself. You’re a craven coward but a genius at evasions and excuses. In your novels you’re always courting some god. But let me tell you, your faith and your doubt are very unconvincing. All that’s apparent is your ingenuity. Have you written one word of truth in your life as an author? Your half-lies are so refined that they look like truth.”
Bergman’s dialogue can be eloquently cutting, but the emotions it is conveying can never be reduced to outright contempt. Beneath it all, these characters hold great affection for each other. The trouble comes in trying to express those feelings in the absence of paternal guidance, which is magnified to an even greater extent by the isolation of the island where they are vacationing. Its seascapes are tranquil yet sparse, composed of two vaguely distinct shades of grey divided by a long stretch of horizon, while thin wharfs stretch out into the negative space from stony shorelines. Small clumps of vegetation dot these images, while in the distance a lonely lighthouse stands atop a cliff.
This is Bergman’s first film shot on his home island of Fårö, and the scenery pays off beautifully in framing the family drama. These are isolated characters, and the scenes of them wandering stony shores carry a bleak beauty.
The interiors aren’t much more inviting either, with the torn wallpaper and wooden floorboards offering these characters little warmth. Inside a shipwreck that Karin and Minus escape into from the rain, Bergman even designs a set that could have been from Andrei Tarkovsky, crossing rotting beams across the frame at all angles and trickling water into its collapsed base. Pushed right into the back of the shot we find the siblings huddled together, essentially imprisoned inside a giant manifestation of Karin’s unstable psyche.
This shipwreck makes for one of the film’s most powerful scenes, offering feeble shelter from the rain to Karin and Minus and becoming a giant manifestation of her unstable psyche.
Such stark minimalism leaves a rich canvas open for Bergman’s typically superb blocking as well, underscoring the imbalance between characters in two-shots that subtly darken one face and illuminate the other, and frequently hanging on them for minutes at a time without cutting. Sven Nykvist’s lighting is incredibly precise in these close-ups, passing shade over one half of David’s face while deep in contemplation, and specifically highlighting Karin’s wandering eye as she lies next to Martin at night. Like a conductor playing multiple instruments, Bergman orchestrates his staging and performances perfectly, each hitting different frequencies yet harmonising them within a shared doubt in the existence of a caring God.
Bergman is never content to just shoot his actors’ expressions – he is always lighting them according to the emotion of the scene, and highlighting specific features of their faces.
Harriet Andersson especially benefits from such austere photographic treatment, frequently becoming the camera’s central subject as Karin’s condition worsens and her desire to meet God intensifies. What starts as her hearing the non-existent sound of a calling bird eventually develops into more sinister voices coming from behind a wall, instructing her to commit shameful acts and delivering warnings of God’s impending arrival. When the figure she believes to be Him finally does appear, the invisible sight she witnesses is mortally terrifying – a spider with “cold and calm” eyes, and a “terrible, stony face.”
Karins is a brutally complex character, writhing with fear and anticipation as schizophrenic voices fill her head. Clearly one of Harriet Andersson’s finest performances.
It is effectively a vision of religion that is brutal and unforgiving, but it is also one which is opposed to the representation of God in David. His love may be questioned at times by those who struggle to connect with him, but it persists nonetheless. “I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence or if love is God himself,” he ponders to his son. “For you, love and God are the same,” Minus answers.
To the young teenager, the significance of this brief but meaningful discussion has less to do with its subject matter than the fact it happened in the first place. “Papa spoke to me,” he mutters in disbelief, rediscovering his faith in his father through a tangible demonstration of his love. For these children, it is life’s most fundamental necessity, driving them further from reality the more it slips from their grasp. Equally though, Through A Glass Darkly savours those moments of profound affection when they do appear in even the smallest demonstrations, recognising how such powerful connections lead its characters towards a pure, redemptive grace.
Bergman ends Through a Glass Darkly on the perfect scene and final line – “Papa spoke to me.”
Through a Glass Darkly is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Perhaps the last time a major Hollywood genre had such a significant re-invention before 1961’s A Woman is a Woman was the year before, when Jean-Luc Godard deconstructed the gangster film with his self-reflexive, uniquely French sensibilities in Breathless. It isn’t surprising that he was so quick to move on given his improvisational style of filmmaking, challenging traditions of perfectionism with reckless abandon, and thus moving world cinema into a new age along with other French New Wave auteurs. Though Le Petit Soldat was shot directly after Breathless, it was this loving pastiche of Golden Age movie-musicals that was released first and became his follow-up effort, splashing a vibrant world of primary colours and nonsensical gags up on the screen to prove that the success of Breathless was no accident.
In relating this postmodern melange back to the movie-musical genre though, there is a biting dissonance at play – notably few songs can be found here at all. Instead, soaring strings, swinging pianos, and swaggering saxophones offer instrumental interludes between lines of dialogue, giving the impression that these characters are always on the verge of breaking out into a song. Or maybe their conversations of poetic banter are the songs, just as Godard’s jump cuts between frozen tableaux are equivalent to dances, translating conventional musical expressions into the ever-evolving language of cinema.
Godard finds the cinematic substitutes for theatrical expressions, here turning a dance into a montage of frozen poses in tableaux.
In bringing these creative choices directly to our attention, Godard puts forward a challenge in our ability to absorb ourselves completely into the lives of his characters, especially as they monologue, wink at the camera, bow to the audience, and verbalise their actions as stage directions. The highly-curated artificiality of classic musicals is also evoked in the production design of Angela and Emile’s apartment, bursting with flashes of scarlet in costumes, set dressing, props, and even a single red rose standing out in a bunch of white ones.
Bowing to the audience – self-aware on every level.A deliberately artificial curation of production design in the reds, far removed from the location shooting of Breathless.
On one level we can read this lack of naturalism as a deliberate denial of entry into this world, but at the same time, this is Godard – he’s not going to take that away from us without at least turning it into a cheeky gag. In one scene, Angela flips an egg up past our line of sight, walks away to answer a phone, and then catches the egg when she returns, subverting all laws of logic with a throwaway non-sequitur. It is natural for a film flinging so many formal experiments out there to occasionally miss, and yet with its whimsically self-conscious attitude to its own structure, A Woman is a Woman remains remarkable for how seldom this happens.
A fair share of this creative genius must be credited to Anna Karina too though, who in her first released collaboration with Godard matches his magnetic and self-aware style filmmaking with a strikingly similar attitude to acting, playing the camera with her bright, expressive eyes and bold costuming. She also carries the few musical numbers of the film, singing acapella at the strip joint which her character, Angela, works at. As beautifully vivid neon colours shift across her face caught in close-up, she holds our gaze, the camera transfixed by the mesmerising performance she is delivering right into its lens.
Gorgeous neon colours flashing across Karina’s face as she sings to the camera in close-up. Nicolas Winding Refn would surely have to be at least somewhat influenced by this.
While Karina commits to each of Godard’s wildly creative tangents and farcical fourth wall breaks that seem to answer the questions milling around this screenplay about whether this film is a tragedy or a comedy, she also takes the time to reign herself in for quieter, more vulnerable moments. As Angela begins to consider a life beyond her image as a sex symbol, her insecurities around her womanhood begin to surface, and questions of maternity become more immediate. She yearns for a state of authenticity in which doesn’t feel the need to present herself as feminine, but also doesn’t feel the need to push back against that as some sort of statement.
“I think women who don’t cry are stupid. They’re modern women trying to be men.”
Relationship troubles between Angela and Emile, though Godard keeps us at a distance.
But it is not a melancholy, contemplative tone Godard wishes to leave us with. There may be tragedy in Angela’s struggles, but she lives firmly within a world of comedy. Just as Breathless closes out on a piece of French wordplay that doesn’t translate so well to English, so too does A Woman is a Woman wrap up with a brief conversation playing on phonetics that could be easily missed by foreigners.
“Angela, tu es infâme.” (Angela, you are shameless)
“Non, je suis une femme.” (No, I am a woman)
As much as Godard adores American culture in all its extravagant, musical spectacle, it is his love of the French language which gives this playful, fourth-wall breaking screenplay its spark of inspiration. In its last seconds as the camera tilts up from the post-coital banter between Angela and Emile, the word “Fin” shines in neon lights through the window, this absurd, vibrant world getting in the final word on its own structure with a cheeky smile and a wink.
A quippy ending like so many great musicals, then a camera tilt up to reveal the final frame.
A Woman is a Woman is not currently available to stream in Australia.
Unlike so many other auteur filmmakers closely associated with movie-musicals, Jacques Demy was no American working within a restrictive Hollywood studio system – this is a French director who stepped up to the plate in 1961 with his enthralling debut, Lola, and thus began his own cinematic revolution contained within the larger French New Wave movement. While not quite the full-fledged musical that his later efforts would be, Lola is instead about as close as a film could get to being a musical without intermittently indulging in songs. In fact, there is only one number to be found, “Lola”, sung near the halfway mark by French actress Anouk Aimée. This song, much like the film’s title, is named after its leading character, who herself is named after the iconic Marlene Dietrich character, Lola Lola. Similarities to the German cabaret singer of the 1930 film The Blue Angel are abundant, particularly in Aimée’s enthralling performance as a beautiful, talented woman with a long line of suitors, receptive to their charms but ultimately unwavering in her singular focus.
Anouk Aimée is mesmerising as Lola, commanding every second of screen time, most of all in her one, big musical number.
The relative lack of songs should not be taken to mean that Lola unfolds with any less panache, vigour, or sensitivity than a traditional musical though. In the same year, 1961, Demy’s French contemporary, Jean-Luc Godard, also deconstructed the genre in A Woman is a Woman, similarly using an instrumental score beneath scripted dialogue to imitate the rise and fall of emotions conventionally expressed through musical numbers. But where Godard’s effort is marked by bright colours, self-awareness, and his trademark dissonance, Lola is far more elegantly muted in comparison. Demy would later indulge in striking colour compositions in his most famous musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but this is his first and only film shot in black-and-white, and as such it is rather through his brisk tracking shots, soft natural lighting, and rhythmic cutting that his delicate artistry shines through.
Unlike other French New Wave directors, Demy turned away from Paris, and instead used the beautiful city of Nantes as his choice of shooting location.
Though it is Josef von Sternberg who is honoured in the character archetype of the titular Lola, Max Ophüls is the one who Demy pays tribute to right up front in his opening credits. The Ophüls influence is certainly present in the way Demy glides his camera gracefully through his streets and sets, but it can also be found in his feminist-tinted meditations on fate, which underlies the form of the entire narrative. Whenever one character in Lola is drawn to another, there is almost always a slightly obscured nostalgia behind the attraction, with the object of their attraction often bearing similarities to a man or woman they once loved. The most obvious case of this is in the real past shared between Lola and Roland, an old friend she runs into by chance on the streets of Nantes. While he pursues her, Lola herself seems more hung up on another former lover, Michel. This longing becomes the motivation for her fling with American sailor and Michel-lookalike, Frankie, who himself strikes up a friendship with Cécile, a 13-year-old girl that reminds him of his sister back in Chicago, and who, coming full circle, reminds Roland of Lola.
Within this tangle of faint reminiscences, Cécile stands as the only one clear-minded in the connections she forms with others, having not yet been tainted by the pain of long-lost memories. When Frankie takes her to the fair, Demy draws us away from the immediacy of the moment in his swelling score and slow-motion photography, as if to turn this into a pure, nostalgic impression that she will never fully recapture. Though Cécile is one of the lucky few who can live in the moment without the burden of the past, the emphasis on the celebration of her 14th birthday underscores the transient nature of her own youth, indicating that one day she too will find herself pining after old memories.
A glorious slow-motion sequence as Cécile runs through the fair with Frankie, a young girl’s first love in bloom.
With the ghosts of old lovers, friends, and relatives emerging in vague associations all throughout Lola, the physical manifestation of one such memory towards the conclusion seems almost too good to be true, despite it keeping with the tradition of happy musical endings. Why is it that Michel returns to whisk Lola away? Is this abrupt resolution really all that earned? That any of these characters who are so bogged down in bygone days might actually have a future seems impossible. As Lola drives away with Michael towards her new life though, the figure of Roland walking the opposite direction down the street catches her eye. And just as she has always done whenever teased by a hint of the past, she once again turns backwards to linger on what could have been.
This bitter sting in an artificially sweet ending may be a departure from the traditionally optimistic fare of movie-musicals, but Demy is not a cynic at heart. In his characters’ foolish devotion to the past, we can see his own love for cinema history, as he aims to evoke a similar joyous innocence to those musicals that inspired him – yet in holding Lola back from becoming a proper musical itself, and by adding in notes of such ambiguous regret, there is a purposeful incompleteness to this feeling. For Lola, and for everyone else around her, their nostalgic yearnings are never-ending attempts to reclaim a feeling that never existed, but as Roland reminds her just before their final farewell, “There’s a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness.” And just as that is enough for Lola as she moves on, it too becomes enough Demy in his wistful musings over his love of film.
Demy’s use of natural lighting is superb, making white shades seem to glow and then finding glorious frames such as these within windows.
Lola is currently available to stream on Stan, Mubi Australia, and Foxtel Now.
