Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer

1961 · Masaki Kobayashi · The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer on Sightlines

Snow, and one dark shape in it. No horizon worth the name. The shape is a man walking, and the frame is wide enough that he reads as a speck, a single mark of black on a white field that runs past both edges of the screen. Ten hours of film went into putting him there. He has argued, refused, reasoned out loud with officers; he has kept a dwindling column of men alive across Manchuria; he believed in the Imperial Army until it came apart under him and then in the Soviets until their camp turned out to run on the same fuel. Now there is the snow, and a body in it, and the body stops.

Deleuze's two books on cinema turn on a test you can run from your seat. Does someone perceive a situation and act, and does the act change the situation? When the answer is yes you are inside the movement-image, the action-image at full power, the machine most films run on. Kobayashi builds the trilogy out of that machine and spends its entire length dismantling it. Deleuze has a name for the process: the crisis of the action-image, characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He found it in Italy after the war. It is here too, in Japanese widescreen, arriving at roughly the same date by a different road. The vocabulary earns its keep because without it the film just looks like pessimism at length. With it you can see that what Kobayashi is doing is structural. He keeps the shape of the war movie and takes out its engine.

The shape is what Deleuze calls the large form: a vast situation presses on a man until he acts, and the act transforms it. A retreat, a band of stragglers, enemy lines to slip behind, a wife to reach. Any war picture would recognize the parts. The large form also breathes in Deleuze's account, out to the huge milieu, in to the taut line of the action, out again. Shochiku GrandScope and Yoshio Miyajima's photography do the outward half magnificently: deep, balanced, graphically severe frames in which a figure is set against horizontal miles of snow, mud and sky. The inward half never comes. The line never tightens into a decisive act. Kaji crosses, endures, is taken prisoner. Three hours of inhale with no exhale.

The journey itself is what Deleuze, reading Mizoguchi's long takes, named the line of the universe: a zig-zag stringing together spaces that have nothing in common. Kobayashi's runs retreat, wilderness, peasant villages, Soviet camp. Ugetsu is in the trilogy's bones, the unhurried staging that lets land and weather dwarf a person. Usually such a line discloses something hidden. Here every new place discloses the same thing, hierarchy and the men at the bottom of it, and the camp's ordered geometry answers the trackless chaos of the flight with no improvement in it.

The snowfields are not a setting. Deleuze's term for space that has stopped serving action is any-space-whatever, and its white variant is exactly what Miyajima builds: silhouettes against pale skies, bodies reduced to specks in immensity. Nothing can be done in a field like that. That is why it is the last image.

When action goes, looking and listening are what remain. Deleuze calls this the pure optical and sound situation, an image you can only watch and a sound you can only take in, with no move available. Chūji Kinoshita's score stays out of the wilderness; it is saved for lament and climax, and the long passages are given to wind, footfalls and silence. Kaji becomes a seer, a voyant, someone who witnesses and endures rather than acts. Tatsuya Nakadai's performance is the proof. The articulate protester of the earlier parts thins into a man whose only remaining activity is lasting, and the end takes his speech away entirely. Speech had been the last redoubt of his conscience, and the film knows it.

The cutting protects all of this. Ordeals play out at something near their real duration; the film holds on hunger instead of cutting past it. Deleuze's word is temps mort, dead time, stretches where the action does not advance and the everyday is simply held. Bazin defended the long take because it keeps the ambiguity of the real intact and refuses to pre-chew the world for you. Kobayashi puts duration to a harsher use. You pay for this film in time, the way Kaji pays in mileage, and the refusal to give you the relief of faster cutting is a moral decision made at the editing bench.

Late in the second book Deleuze describes a cinema of the body: once the link between perceiving and acting is cut, the body stops being an instrument and becomes the thing that carries time. Mud, frost, wounds, the slow arithmetic of starvation. The debt here is specific and Japanese. Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, two years earlier, had already reduced the soldier to a black figure crawling over scorched ground and located war's horror in the degrading body rather than in battle; Ichikawa's Burmese Harp had made the wandering ex-soldier a moral witness, filmed as a silhouette against terrain. Kobayashi inherits both and adds what Deleuze calls the line of slope, an irreversible descent toward ruin. He stages it as successive circles of collapse. Retreat, wilderness, village, camp, snow.

And Michiko. A wide frame always implies more space just outside it, the relative out-of-field, the room next door, the road ahead. For most of the trilogy Kaji's wife occupies that sort of elsewhere: south, home, reachable in principle. As the possibility of return recedes she turns into the other kind, the absolute out-of-field, a beyond that cannot be located on any map. The widescreen frame is what makes the change legible. The image keeps pointing the same direction after the elsewhere it points at has quietly stopped existing.

The trilogy argues out loud as well. People state positions and the film reasons through them, close to the discursive novel it adapts, which places it in a line that starts at Grand Illusion, where war is indicted entirely through camps, dialogue and men negotiating rank. Paths of Glory contributes the cold institutional geometry and the tracking of one principled man through army machinery. Behind both sits Potemkin, where the cutting itself made the case, collective cruelty and awakened conscience staged as a thesis. Deleuze's name for an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve is the discourse-image. Kobayashi ends by conceding the problem. Ten hours of argument, and the answer is a body in a snowfield.

Deleuze later said that modern political cinema begins from a hard fact: the people are missing. Not merely oppressed. Missing. The collective in whose name one would act does not yet exist, or has been broken. Kaji has two candidates and loses both. The army is a machine for grinding men, and the socialist state he had idealized reproduces the cruelties he resisted under Japanese command. What is left of the crowd is a handful of stragglers who are at once his responsibility and his burden. Kobayashi reached this in 1961, two decades before Deleuze wrote it down.

What the film did to storytelling deserves naming precisely, because it is Kobayashi's own invention and it runs against the grain of the epic. Epics accumulate. This one subtracts. Its method is to remove, one at a time, every support that made moral action legible: army, then nation, then ideology, then comrades, and last the goal of the journey. The plot is a sequence of tests with no conventional combat spectacle anywhere in it, and the structure is arithmetic in reverse. A conscripted director who is widely reported to have refused promotion as a pacifist gesture found the one shape that could carry that refusal at scale, and proved that a film can win its argument by losing it. The movement-image's whole apparatus can be run until it is exhausted, and the exhaustion can be the meaning.

So watch it for where the music is not. Watch the width of the frame and ask what the empty two-thirds are doing. And keep one question open, because the film keeps it open too: is the man in the snow the defeat of conscience, or its final form, the only shape conscience can take once every institution that gave it somewhere to go is gone? Kobayashi holds the shot and does not say. What you carry out is a weight. That may be what he meant by the human condition.

Concepts in play

crisis-of-the-action-image — The film's engine is 'not plot in the conventional sense but a relentless testing'; it removes, one by one, 'the supports that made moral action legible — army, nation, ideology, comrades, and finally the goal of reunion itself,' so Kaji can no longer act adequately on what he sees.
action-image-large-form — All the parts of the large form are present — the disintegration of the Kwantung Army as encompassing situation, a dwindling band led south, enemy lines, the wife to reach — but no decisive act ever transforms the situation.
respiration-space — The Shochiku GrandScope frame and Miyajima's deep compositions give the vast milieu-space magnificently (solitary figures against horizontal expanses of snow, mud and sky) while the taut line of action never arrives.
line of the universe — Kobayashi 'stages the film as a descent through successive circles of collapse: the retreat, the wilderness, the peasant villages, the Soviet camp' — a zig-zag linking heterogeneous spaces, with Ugetsu's landscape-dwarfed long-take staging as the named craft debt.
any-space-whatever (emptiness) — 'The endless Manchurian snowfields of the final passages': stark contrasts, silhouettes against pale skies, 'figures reduced to dark specks in white immensity' — space that no longer serves as a setting for action.
pure optical and sound situations — Kinoshita's score 'punctuates rather than saturates,' leaving 'long stretches to wind, footfalls, and silence'; the wilderness soundscape is 'the near-absence of human sound against natural noise.'
voyant / the seer — Nakadai charts 'the earlier films' articulate protest giving way here to endurance and, finally, to a solitary, wordless extinction' — a witness and endurer rather than an agent.
temps mort — 'Long, patiently developed sequences that let ordeals play out in something close to real experiential time'; the cutting holds on suffering and privation rather than cutting away, 'an ethical as much as a formal decision.'
cinema of the body — 'Physical detail — mud, frost, hunger, wounds — is foregrounded'; Nakadai works 'largely through physical deterioration and controlled interiority,' the body carrying duration once action is unavailable.
entropy / degradation — A descent through successive circles of collapse, extending Fires on the Plain's grammar of 'the starving body's degradation rather than battle spectacle' toward an irreversible end in the snow.
out-of-field-absolute — Michiko's 'remembered presence functions as the film's fragile north star — the "old life" the synopsis names — even as the possibility of return recedes': the wide frame keeps pointing at an elsewhere that ceases to be locatable.
discourse-image — 'The dramaturgy is essayistic and dialectical... characters argue positions, and the film thinks through them,' descending from Grand Illusion's critique-by-dialogue-and-camp and Potemkin's montage-as-thesis, and closing 'with devastating restraint, in the negative.'
the people are missing — Kaji 'discovers that the socialist state he had idealized reproduces the same cruelties he had resisted under Japanese command,' while the crowd he leads is 'both Kaji's responsibility and his burden' and dwindles to nothing.

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