Ningen no joken I

“At some point, all my films deal with resistance to entrenched power. I think I've always questioned authority. That was true for my own life too, including my time in the military. After the war, there was finally a time when we were able to address these issues directly,” says Masaki Kobabyashi and began working on NINGEN NO JOKEN at the end of the 1950s, a nine-hour relentless indictment of the inhumane actions of the Japanese army in occupied Manchuria during the Second World War. Based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa published in the mid-50s and produced by the Ninjin Club, the three-part epic depicts the path of naive-idealistic Kaji from a conscientious objector of a forced labour camp to a soldier and finally to a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp.NINGEN NO JOKEN I: Winter 1943: In return for liberation from military service takes over The pacifist, communism-oriented Kaji (Nakadai Tatsuya) the post of supervisor of Chinese forced laborers and a group of “comfort women” in a remote region of Manchuria. Together with his wife (Michiyo Aratama), he relocates and tries to improve the workers' living conditions on site. At the same time, he must defend his measures against the brutally acting representatives of the military authorities. When some forced laborers flee the camp, Kaji is suspected of complicity. He is arrested and drafted into military service. The Ninjin Club worked to hire Yoshio Miyajima, one of the best cinematographers in Japanese cinema, whose widescreen footage lends the barren, vast landscapes and the oppressive realities of life a deep-focused resonance space. (mg)