Background
Masaki Kobayashi was born on 14 February 1916 in Otaru, Hokkaido, Japan.
Masaki Kobayashi was born on 14 February 1916 in Otaru, Hokkaido, Japan.
A philosophy student, Kobayashi was taken prisoner by the Chinese during the war. On his return, he worked as assistant and scriptwriter to Keisake Kinoshita before himself directing.
Those of his films that have been released in the West suggest an accomplished but unadventurous talent. Kobayashi shows a familiar concern with the conflict between emotional impulse and ritualistic pattern, but the concern seems somehow obligatory whereas in Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Oshima it is profound and original. One has the feeling that Kobayashi keeps an eye on the art-house market outside Japan and that native themes have thus become diluted. Seppuku and Rebellion treat the infringement of society on the individual but, in the first, indulge in an orgy of disembowelling and, in the second, permit eoprodncer Toshiru Mifune a samurai extravaganza. The idea of Rebellion—of a samurai who rebels against the cynical manipulation of the elders in making and then breaking a marriage involving his son—is intriguing, but the resolution is conventionally exciting, bloodthirsty, and never poignant. One has only to recall that brief arc of suicidal blood in The Ceremony to feel Oshima’s greater gravity. Similarly, in Kwaidan, Kobayashi has resorted to three Lafcadio Hearn ghost stories as much in search of the exotic as to arouse the poetic and lyrical resignation that concludes Ugetsu.
Kobayashi’s major work is N in gen no Joken— The Human Condition—an immense humane account of a Manchurian factory owner who is victimized for aiding Chinese workers and then suffers terriblv in the war with Russia. The complete work is over nine hours long, gruelling, conventional, and a little portentous, but inescapably moving.
Tokyo Trial was a four-and-a-half-hour docu¬mentary on the Japanese war-criminal trials. It uses a great deal of newsreel, from many different sources, vet the film functions as a narrative.