Masaki Kobayashi
小林正树
Japanese director, 1916–1996. Conscripted during the war, he refused promotion, was sent to Manchuria and was later held as a prisoner in Okinawa. He worked at Shochiku from the 1950s; his best-known films are the nine-and-a-half-hour trilogy The Human Condition and Harakiri. Conflict between an individual and an institution recurs throughout his work.
Career
Kobayashi studied philosophy and East Asian art at Waseda and joined Shochiku in 1941. Conscripted the following year and sent to Manchuria, he refused promotion beyond the lowest rank and ended the war in a prisoner-of-war camp on Okinawa. He began directing on his own in 1952.
The Human Condition was released in three parts between 1959 and 1961 and runs about nine and a half hours. Harakiri in 1962 and Kwaidan in 1964 each took the jury prize at Cannes, and Kwaidan was nominated for the foreign-language Academy Award. Samurai Rebellion and Fossils followed. He died in 1996.
