Ningen no jôken [The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity] (1959)

(On Cable TV, April 2022) I can appreciate the arguments of film purists arguing in favour of watching the film as faithfully as possible to the director’s intentions. After all, the first thing I do on each new TV is to turn off motion smoothing to get the 24-frames-a-second feel. But ultimately, the death of the auteur theory of media consumption is right – it’s up to the viewer to decide how they engage with the material to the extent of their tolerance. I used to have qualms about watching silent dramas in fast forward. But I don’t any more: that simple modification, taking into account the lower narrative density of that era, has saved me time and kept me sane through otherwise interminable experiences. Fans of director Masaki Kobayashi’s nine-hour trilogy The Human Condition will be aghast at learning that I watched much of the second instalment (technically parts 3 and 4) on 4x fast forward. But why wouldn’t I? The film is three hours long, in subtitled Japanese. Furthermore, the bottom line is this: I had a much better time watching the film in my way. I was done in less than an hour, kept up with the faster tempo and didn’t feel as if anything was left out. It helps that the film followed a familiar structure, sending its protagonist to boot camp before deploying to combat – there are similarities here with later movies such as Full Metal Jacket, and that’s the kind of guideline, coupled with the slow pacing of the film in the first place, that makes it easy to follow in 4x speed. I did dial down the speed back to normal during the third-act battle sequences, just to take in the helplessness of what individual soldiers felt like when facing a row of tanks advancing toward them – after more than two hours of very long drama, the film does kick in high gear during its climactic battle sequences. Still, that’s the kind of adaptation that proves my point: the pacing of the film until that point is too slow, so I sped it up. As a result, I did like this second instalment of The Human Condition well enough – I’ve watched better, but it wasn’t as excruciating as the first film’s full three hours felt like.