World War II
No historical event has had a greater impact on the history of cinema around the globe than the catastrophic devastation of World War II. The sheer volume of people involved from countries all over the world has meant that cinema has responded accordingly: I think that fewer individual subjects have been brought before the cameras than World War II in all of its ramifications. American films from Hollywood led the way during the war itself, performing a foundational propagandistic purpose designed to inspire patriotism amongst American citizens at home; those movies paid tribute to homefront sacrifices and honored the service of the fighting forces abroad. Once the war ended, other countries around the world began to tell their own stories, including Italy, Japan, France, Russia, Sweden, and more. A survey of the entirety of the film catalogue of World War II would number in the tens of thousands.
World War II also forms an important pivot point in the history of cinema around the world, as the devastation inspires a radical shift from classical storytelling, most clearly exemplified by Hollywood and its influences, to modernist storytelling, which did not take the assumptions made by classical storytelling for granted. The surge of New Waves around the world are made possible only by the aftermath of the war, when filmmakers could not ignore the scale of human catastrophe: 61 million people died, a truly astonishing number, especially when taken in the context of how World War II is often portrayed in American History classes as “the good war.” The fallout from the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan and the abject cruelty of the Nazi genocide of the Jews added an apocalyptic and ghoulish dimension to the death toll accumulated through worldwide, run-of-the-mill combat.
The war’s aftermath inspired the cinema of the Italian Neorealists, the French New Wavers, and the Japanese Modernists. Classical storytelling seemed less and less responsive to the concerns of a world that had experienced such horror.
Japanese cinema and akira kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa is the most popular and well-known Japanese director, mostly on the impact of his landmark entries in the samurai genre: Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), and Yojimbo (1961). Kurosawa made all kinds of films, however, and it would be a mistake to put him in too small a box. He made gangster movies, social dramas, police thrillers, literary adaptations, and historical epics. Across his filmography, there is an undeniable interest in the human being as subject, which some critics have labeled his ‘humanism.’ According to critic Stephen Prince, “Kurosawa’s films are frequently marked by an extraordinary compassion for he suffering that they depict, [but] what is curious and should also be noted are the ways in which Kurosawa’s cinema is not congruent with all the ideals that have been subsumed under the label ‘humanism.’” A number of his films express deep doubt in humanity’s ability to be good, exploring unspeakable tragedy and horror from an ambivalent position. Kurosawa often wants to believe in human beings, but just as often, he can’t quite convince himself to do it.
His 1950 film Rashomon is an excellent example of Kurosawa’s twin impulses. The film is a deeply upsetting depiction of a terrible crime; its images are dominated by ruins that invoke despair; and yet, there is the undeniable hope that springs from the film’s ending. Rashomon is an adaptation of a pair of short stories, which Kurosawa and his screenwriters fused together. The film is a landmark experiment in form, using non-linear storytelling and extensive flashbacks to tell the same story of an encounter in the woods among a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), a man (Masayuki Mori), and his wife (Machiko Kyo). The story is framed by a kind of chorus set in the ruins of the Rashomon gate, where three other men recount the horror of the different versions of the story they’ve heard. Kurosawa uses one of his directorial signatures, rain, to create separation between the past and the present—while the three men sit at the gate struggling to stay dry, the rain hammers down upon them, an incessant drumbeat that creates tension. Prince argues that Rashomon “seemed to reflect upon important philosophical questions: loss of faith in human beings, the world as a hell, the human propensity to lie.”
Let’s take a moment to focus on that gate. Kurosawa, like many Japanese directors working in the aftermath of World War II, had a difficult time processing the horror of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the sustained American bombing campaign of Tokyo. Japanese filmmakers working in this period used their films to attempt to confront the aftermath of the atomic bombs, finding expressive and creative ways to do so. The most obvious attempt to do this came in 1954 with Ishiro Honda’s monster movie Godzilla. The sequence of the monster lizard attacking Tokyo directly evokes images of the nuclear attacks and becomes a metaphorical way of dealing with the loss of life and national identity, if not a particularly subtle approach. This clip from YouTube is from the middle of the film—watch it and think about how this might have played to a Japanese audience in 1954, just nine years after the bombs were dropped on their fellow citizens.
For his part, Kurosawa approached the aftermath of the war in a few of his own films. 1948’s gangster film Drunken Angel is set in a run-down part of Tokyo; it tells the story of a drunken doctor (Takashi Shimura) who agrees to treat a self-destructive criminal (Toshiro Mifune) who has been stricken with tuberculosis. The gangster drinks too much and stays out all night, neither of which help his illness. It is not too far a stretch to read the gangster’s illness as a stand-in for radiation poisoning, a point underlined by Kurosawa’s repeated image of a brackish, disgusting swamp just outside the doctor’s office. The environment they inhabit is a nightmare world, infected and rotting. Though the metaphor of the pool speaks to the criminal element who controls the neighborhood and keeps good people in place through violence and menace, it also powerfully evokes a society reeling from a sickness it does not understand.
Kurosawa confronted the terror of the nuclear age more directly with his drama I Live in Fear (1955), which stars Toshiro Mifune as a man convinced that there will be another atomic bomb dropped on his city, in which he and all of his family will be killed. It is a paranoid fever dream of a movie, as Kurosawa splits the point of view—sometimes, he uses devices to evoke the central character’s growing terror, and at others, he distances himself from the protagonist to identify with the man’s frustrated family members who want him to move forward with his live without living in the grip of such horror.
Now, back to the Rashomon gate. Images like this of a ruined symbol of Japanese culture cannot help but evoke the devastation of the war, both from the atomic bombs and the traditional munitions used on Tokyo. The repeated refrain, “I just don’t understand it,” expressed by the woodcutter at the film’s outset, may just as easily be applicable to the unimaginable destruction wrought upon Japan both physically and psychologically. As Americans, we will never understand the emotional toll that those attacks took on the Japanese people. In fact, no other people on Earth really understand—even those who live in countries affected by nuclear accidents have human error to blame. Japan was the direct target of not one, but two atomic bombs. It is a massive psychological wound that plays itself out in the nation’s cinema. Kurosawa, in his own way, is attempting to reckon with these ideas in Rashomon, despite the film’s setting in the 7th century. In this way, his approach demonstrates the usefulness of metaphor. It would be difficult to miss the idea suggested by Godzilla, but Rashomon’s exploration of the nuclear age might slip by unnoticed on account of its comparative subtlety.
Kurosawa is one of the great masters of cinema, from Japan or anywhere. His interest in human beings as a subject is matched only by his facility with the camera. He is a great visual stylist whose moving camera inspired filmmakers around the world. His cinema also speaks directly to the aftermath of World War II, which shaped a number of directors and film movements around the world.
clip quiz - Postwar japanese cinema
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
SEVEN SAMURAI (1954, Kurosawa)
Japanese filmmakers in the post-war period often disguised their commentary about World War II in period pieces like samurai films. How does this fight scene from Seven Samurai seem to echo images of the war? |
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TOKYO STORY (1953, Ozu)
One of the major conflicts in Japanese society in the aftermath of World War II was whether people should go back to tradition or move into the modern world. How do you see that idea dramatized in this scene from Tokyo Story? |
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FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959, Ichikawa)
Japanese filmmakers didn’t just cloak their World War II stories in metaphor, but sometimes took on the subject directly. How does this scene from Fires on the Plain illustrate the violence of combat for Japanese soldiers? |
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TAKE AIM AT THE POLICE VAN (1960, Suzuki)
Some Japanese directors in the postwar period looked to American films like the gangster movie and film noir. Where do you see the American influence in this clip from Take Aim at The Police Van? |
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The thick-walled Room - japan and the cinema of defeat
The three most celebrated postwar Japanese filmmakers are Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi; though all began their careers before the war, Ozu and Mizoguchi had much more experience than Kurosawa, and he is generally considered to have done his most mature work in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat. Less cited, but no less effective a filmmaker, Masaki Kobayashi joined his contemporaries in wrestling with the impact of the war on Japanese society. For Kobayashi, as was the case with most Japanese directors post-1945, the war was inescapable and all-consuming.
Kobayashi’s biggest (literally) contribution to postwar cinema is in his epic adaptation of Jumpei Gomikawa’s novel The Human Condition, a story about a pacifist Japanese man who struggles to come to terms with the changing culture of Japan during the war years. Released in three parts in 1959, 1960, and 1961, the film adaptation totals ten hours, an epic about one man’s experiences of some of the most tumultuous years in Japan’s history.
Kobayashi’s protagonist in The Human Condition, the pacifist Kaji, is played by Tatsuya Nakadai, an actor who worked several times with Kobayashi, but also played many memorable roles for Akira Kurosawa, most notably as a pistol-wielding samurai in Yojimbo (1961). Nakadai was equally at home in edgy samurai movies, Japanese gangster films that focused on the yakuza, and in social issue dramas like Kobayashi’s Black River (1957), in which he plays the unscrupulous small-time gangster with the Americanized name Joe, who conspires with his gang to win the affections of the beautiful Shizuko (Ineko Arima) by staging a would-be rape that he rescues her from, only to commit the rape himself, and then forces a group of poor tenants out of their run-down tenement building in an attempt to establish a new business for himself to run—a brothel.
One of the most direct of Kobayashi’s postwar dramas is The Thick-Walled Room (1956), made more than a decade after the Japanese defeat, but set in the immediate years following the conclusion of the war and follows a group of Japanese soldiers who have been imprisoned as war criminals by the American forces that occupied Japan in the aftermath of the fighting. Kobayashi’s postwar films are typically incredibly critical of the American occupation, but The Thick-Walled Room is equally lacerating in its attacks on Japanese society, which he sees as marked by a brutal unfairness—in the case of these soldiers, they’re being held accountable for war crimes that were largely perpetrated by the wealthy and powerful, whether members of the imperial government or the highest ranks of the military, who have largely escaped punishment. It was so controversial at the time of its production in 1953 that its release was actually delayed by several years. It seems Kobayashi touched a nerve.
The Thick-Walled Room is a rank-and-file movie that follows the trials and tribulations of a group of incarcerated soldiers; like the American films that were made during the war, The Thick-Walled Room appeals to a kind of documentary realism that encourages the blend of fact and fiction. It is based on the diaries of actual prisoners, which gives the film’s events an air of authenticity. It can be quite bracing for an American audience to see the prison guards depicted in this way, but you have to remember that this is a film made from a Japanese point of view; to them, the American guards behaved cruelly, as if they seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in inflicting punishment on their defeated enemies.
While the American guards’ humanity is called into question, the film tries desperately to create sympathy for the incarcerated Japanese soldiers, who continue to pay the cost for a war that they merely fought, but did not instigate. From a visual perspective, the film consistently foregrounds the motif of prison bars, and not merely because of the setting; the repetition invites the audience to constantly consider who should be held responsible for the violence and upheaval of the war and the despair and dejection of its aftermath.
In many cases, Japanese cinema turns inward, with both the characters and filmmakers reflecting on the horrors of war and their own complicity in the tragedy—this is what a lot of Kurosawa’s movies of the period do. However, movies like The Thick-Walled Room rage violently against the unfairness of it all. Even though the war has ended, the soldiers imprisoned for crimes of the state that they had no say in continue to fight it from behind bars every day of their lives.
The film emphasizes this point through its exploration of the lingering effects of the war on the men’s inner emotional lives, even beyond their circumstances as prisoners. The Thick-Walled Room offers flashbacks to the jungle during the fighting, which create a visual parallel between the prison bars and the dangling vines, both of which trap the men inside. The combat flashbacks emphasize the moral anguish of the enlisted men, who are repeatedly forced to do inhumane things at the behest of their superior officers, which dramatizes the film’s core argument about the unequal punishment that has fallen on them.
Neither war nor prison are conducive to a man holding onto his fundamental humanity. One prisoner says, “Prison isn’t the place to drive the sin out of humanity, it drives the humanity of the sins.” His brother, on the other side of the bars, agrees: “Those who started the war are the guilty ones,” but their power and influence saved them from the harshest punishment, which was instead visited on the ordinary soldiers.
The prison of The Thick-Walled Room is, of course, literal, as the men are incarcerated for the war crimes of which they are accused. However, that prison is also figurative, as its state of mind extends far beyond the gates for these prisoners. If they were to be released, they would likely still carry the wounds of their combat experience, and then, on top of that, their time in prison. They aren’t allowed to forget and can’t move on in any meaningful sense; society won’t forgive them, so they become embittered, resentful, and trapped forever inside the social and personal psychological devastation of the war. The Thick-Walled Room demonstrates what a lot of postwar Japanese films seem to say in one way or another. Yoshiko, a prostitute, puts it this way: “The war drove everybody insane. We’re still insane, you know?”
The impact of the war on the affected countries cannot be overstated. In cinematic terms, the films made before the war and those made after almost can’t be compared to one another; there is a darkness, a heaviness, that hangs over many of those created in countries around the world in the aftermath of the fighting. It is a defining event in human history, and it shapes the twentieth century’s most important art form considerably.