The postwar period in Japan ushered in one of the great golden ages of cinema anywhere and at the forefront of that vanguard was Akira Kurosawa. Author Stephen Prince wrote a seminal book, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, about that groundbreaking director. However, there was a group of other worthy directors that have been identified, like Kurosawa, as “postwar humanists” by critic Audie Bock that helped define the cinema of that era who are not as well known. These other directors were Kon Ichickawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Masaki Kobayashi. And Prince has chosen Kobayashi as the subject of his second book length study of an essential Japanese director in A Dream Of Resistance: The Cinema Of Masaki Kobayashi (2017) published by Rutgers University Press.
Kobayashi only made 21 films in his career, however, many of them are still available on DVD today. Among these are his three 1960s period masterpieces: Hari Kiri (1962), Kwaidan (1964), and Samurai Rebellion (1967). However, he made his name with his epic 519 minute long anti-war adaptation of a novel by Junpei Gomikawa known as The Human Condition released in three parts (No Greater Love, The Road to Eternity, and A Soldier’s Prayer) in the years 1958-1961. In 2013 Criterion released a box set of some of Kobayashi’s lesser known films as Eclipse 38:Masaki Kobayashi Against the System featuring: The Thick Walled Room (1956), I Will Buy You (1956), Black River (1956), and The Inheritance (1962). So it would seem that the timing was right for a full-length study of one of the masters of Japanese postwar cinema.
Prince looks at some formative people, places, and experiences that can be seen as influences in Kobayashi’s films. For example, Prince discusses Kobayashi’s childhood growing up in a liberal family located in the majestic northern island of Hokkaido. There he grew up climbing mountains and roaming the woods of his native Otaru. His interest in cinema was piqued early by the influence of his famous actress cousin Kinuyo Tanaka, who had starred in some influential films by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Nikio Naruse, and Kurosawa among others. In college he became the disciple of poet and scholar Yaichi Aizu who would pass on his love of traditional Japanese arts that could be seen in Kobayashi’s period films. After joining Shochiku studios, he was drafted into the WWII where he was sent to Manchuria and would foster a lifelong antithesis to war and the army. This was most prominently shown in The Human Condition, however, it also manifested itself in several other films. Kobayashi would find a talented leading man, Tatsuya Nakadai, early in his career and work with him on his greatest films and to the end of his career. His mid career collaboration with the musician Toru Takemitsu is singled out as a significant creative collaboration during Kobayashi’s peak.
Once he returned to Japan from the war, he was assigned to work with his contemporary Kinoshita, before quickly earning the right to direct his own films. He made a number of competent minor films before his artistic break through The Thick-Walled Room (completed in 1953, but not released until 1956), which questioned the justice of the punishment of low ranking war criminals. A string of films critical of different aspects of society followed, before his international break through with The Human Condition. Then his series of period films that established him as one of the great directors in the world followed. After the rise of television, Kobayashi, like his contemporaries, suffered and did not have many chances to direct prestige films. That being said, Prince singles out three late career films that are worth seeking out in his later period: We Who Give Our Lives Needlessly (1971), Kaseki (1975), and the controversial documentary Tokyo Trial (1983).
Prince does an excellent job of illuminating the social, artistic, cultural, intellectual, personal, and philosophical aspects of Kobayashi’s films. He does this by using secondary sources to underscore insights in those areas. This is also achieved by giving the films detailed summaries-sometimes frame by frame descriptions of scenes. The tone of the book is not overly academic and should be of interest to fans of cinema everywhere. Kobayashi is a world class film maker and has directed some of the greatest Japanese films ever made, and is absolutely deserving of this full length study.
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