The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer (Ningen no joken)

Click here for details and ticket information.

Kobayashi closes The Human Condition in the fiery embers of WWII’s bitter end, as Kaji struggles to lead his ragtag troop of survivors across enemy lines towards an ever more distant home. The most dream-like and cinematographically daring of the three films, A Soldier’s Prayer offers a truly visionary depiction of war as it glides through nightmare scenes of terrifying carnage, wastelands punctuated by intimate interludes with strangers along the way, including Takamine Hideko and Ryu Chishu in charged cameos as orphans of the storm and painful reminders of the lost world of everyday life. A war film that refuses to sentimentalize either death or valor, A Soldier’s Prayer brings to a heart-wrenching end the saga of Nakadai’s tenacious Kaji who hauntingly embodies the truly impossible moral dilemmas faced by those in war who refuse to look away from injustice.

The Shochiku Centennial Collection at the Harvard Film Archive presents: THE HUMAN CONDITION, directed by Kobayashi Masaki (screened in three parts), co-presented with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies