The Human Condition I: No Greater Love · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands in the middle of an enormous frame. Behind him the Manchurian plain runs flat to the horizon, bleached white by Yoshio Miyajima's hard winter light, and the GrandScope lens stretches the world so far to either side of him that he looks like a single comma in a long, indifferent sentence. This is Kaji. He has just been handed the thing he wanted: a post running a mining operation his own way, a chance to prove that humane treatment of the Chinese labourers will also be the more productive treatment. The shape of the image already knows how that ends. The frame is too wide for one man to fill.

I want to watch this opening movement of Kobayashi's ten-hour cycle as a film caught on a hinge that Gilles Deleuze gave a name to: the crisis of the action-image. To see why that opens the film up, start with what the action-image normally is. In classical cinema a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the act resolves the situation. Someone sees a wrong, moves against it, the wrong is righted. Deleuze called the grand version of this the large form: a whole encompassing situation, which he named the synsign or the encompasser, bears down until a decisive act transforms it. No Greater Love is built out of exactly this machinery. The mine is a near-perfect synsign. Watchtowers, fence lines, parade grounds, the assembled rows of 'special workers,' guards above and labourers below, all of it composed into Miyajima's geometry of confinement, a total milieu visibly demanding that someone act inside it. And Kaji acts. He reforms the rations, he intervenes, he sets his decency against the foremen and the Kempeitai. Force against force: the binomial, man against the system.

Then every act fails to resolve. This is the crisis Deleuze diagnosed in postwar cinema, the point at which a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. Kaji perceives with terrible clarity, and clarity is his curse, because his perceptions never close into acts that change anything. The dossier calls the film's engine the dread of inevitability, and that is precise. The circuit of see, then do, then transform keeps snapping at the second hinge. We are not waiting to learn whether Kaji will succeed. We are made to live through each compromise as it arrives.

Where the act fails, watching takes its place. The executions and humiliations of the labourers are staged frontally, in depth, without sensational embellishment, demanding that we witness rather than be thrilled. Kaji becomes what Deleuze called a seer, a voyant, a man reduced to looking at what he cannot stop. These are pure optical situations, opsigns, moments where the only thing left to a character is to see. This is the doorway out of the action-image and into the time-image, and Kobayashi keeps Kaji standing exactly in the doorway. André Bazin is the relevant theorist here: the frontal long take refuses the reassurance of montage, declines to cut away to spare us or to convert atrocity into rhythm, and holds the event in real space and duration so that witnessing becomes unavoidable. The patient, accumulative editing belongs to the same ethic. Scenes of negotiation and degradation play at length, dead time in which nothing advances the plot, which is how the slow erosion of an ideal registers as lived time instead of incident.

The staging carries the argument by itself. Kobayashi wedges Kaji between strata, management above him, labourers below, military police at the edges, so the frame literalizes the doomed mediator. The wide format alternates the vast milieu, the plain and the compound, with the taut line of each confrontation, the rhythm Deleuze called respiration space. And the crowds of forced labourers are composed in depth as a dividual, a mass rendered as one suffering body, the collective Kaji can never break back down into individual people he might actually save.

None of this came from nowhere, and naming the debts matters, because film is a discourse and this is one of its chapters. Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff handed Kobayashi the long-take, deep-staged tragedy of a conscience ground down by an institution it cannot escape. Ikiru gave him the conscience-against-bureaucracy template, which he recast in military dress. The Best Years of Our Lives, through Gregg Toland, supplied the deep-focus principle of composing social pressure into a single frame rather than cutting to it. His apprenticeship under Keisuke Kinoshita, audible in Twenty-Four Eyes, taught the restrained pacifism carried by performance and a sparse score, here written by Kinoshita's brother Chūji. And Black River was his own dry run, the first pairing of Tatsuya Nakadai with the Miyajima camera in high-contrast monochrome.

What did the film do to film? The humanist war epic almost always locates its meaning at the front, in courage and sacrifice. Kobayashi pushed the whole moral weight back into the administrative system that feeds the front, into a ration cut and a labour ledger, and then did something stranger still. He built an action hero who cannot act, and made three and a half hours out of watching him fail. He kept the grand architecture of the action-image and quietly hollowed out its motor. So watch it again for the frame. Each time Kaji is about to do something, notice how much of the image the system occupies and how little is left for the man. The widescreen is the argument. The question the film hands you is the one Deleuze's later books would chase for two volumes: when seeing clearly no longer leads to acting effectively, what is a person for? Kaji doesn't know. Neither, if we are honest, do we.