A Film Canon

This astonishing film attempts nothing less than a political economy of war, curving the Sino-Japanese theatre around the production of a single commodity, and collapsing soldier and citizen into labourer-prostitute, thereby presenting labour itself as a military front; a site of opposition, exploitation and violent national self-interest. In place of the documentary Marxism that this might be expected to generate, Kobayashi substitutes an eccentric combination of discursive melodrama and technological sublimity, fusing an emotive, rhetorical, exhortative script with a widescreen vision of Japan as a landscape of powdered, pulverised human bodies, just as capable of being reorganised into the replica of Rodin's Kiss that opens the narrative, as into the lunar masses that form it's most pervasive backdrop. Not only does this disparity encapsulate labour supervisor Kaji's (Tatsuya Nakadai) agonising struggle between theory and practice, but it provides for the most abject, visceral elaboration of the crowd in cinema to date ("you'll be rationing food, disposing of excrement from ten thousand men, handling menstrual cases..."), as well as clarifying that the most effective way to continue this abjection is by transforming it into it's own self-generating source of erotic frisson ("The way to make caged men work is to satisfy seventy percent of their bodily lust"), epitomised by the extraordinary, misty, romantic encounter between a horde of prostitutes and an electrified fence. As a result, the preoccupation with reclaiming individual action and autonomy - or, rather, of escaping the omniscient, competing imperatives of profit, which suggests a far more compelling dialectic than that between 'humanism' and 'brutality' - ultimately coincides with the regeneration of the crowd as a conscious, cognitive entity, and the recognition that 'escape' is both a structural condition and fantastic limit of exploitation, as much as a definable, concrete act.