Forty years ago, a quartet of directors decided to take a stand against the Japanese film industry's growing fixation with creature features, yakuza thrillers and the softcore porn flicks known as pinku-eiga. Yonki-no-kai, or the Club of the Four Knights, was formed to produce prestige pictures that would examine the social, political and cultural problems facing a world in flux. The young bucks of the nuberu bagu sneered that the enterprise was merely a gathering of old men. But Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Masaki Kobayashi were among the finest kantoku in the country's history, with the latter having been responsible for one of cinema's unsung masterpieces.  

Having abandoned his art history studies to join Shochiku's Ofuna studio in 1941, Masaki Kobayashi was conscripted into the Imperial Army just eight months into his apprenticeship. Despite seeing action in Manchukuo and participating in the defence of the Ryukyu Islands, he was a reluctant recruit and so detested the cruelty and conformity he witnessed that he refused promotion above the rank of private to avoid having to inflict either upon his fellow soldiers. As he later recalled: “I withheld myself from becoming an officer. I had a strong conviction that I must resist authoritarian pressure. I was wholly against the power that bore down on us, and I was against the war itself.” 

Kobayashi's conflict ended as a POW in Okinawa. But he was one of the lucky ones, as 500,000 of his comrades in arms were captured by the Russians – who had declared war on Japan the day before the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki – and only 30,000 ever returned home.  

In November 1946, Kobayashi resumed his career at Shochiku under the tutelage of Keisuke Kinoshita, a versatile talent who was renowned for his sentimental streak. Over the next six year, Kobayashi assisted Kinoshita on 15 features before he made his directorial debut with My Son's Youth (1952), a shomin-geki about two middle-class brothers discovering girls. Kinoshita was so pleased with his protégé's progress that he personally scripted his second feature, the love story, Sincere Heart (1953). But Kobayashi was keen to find his own voice and set up Shinei Productions to make The Thick-Walled Room (1953), a contentious drama written by celebrated novelist Kobo Abe that drew on the journals of minor war criminals to show that most of those convicted were merely following the orders of superiors who evaded censure. 

In addition to denouncing the Japanese militarist mentality, Kobayashi also criticized the behavior of the occupying US forces and, in order to avoid causing offence, Shochiku shelved the film until 1956, when it won the Peace Culture Prize. Deciding discretion was the better part of valor, Kobayashi kept his head down with four competent, but unremarkable shomin-geki. However, he ruffled more feathers with his investigations into corruption in baseball (I'll Buy You, 1956) and gambling, violence and vice around the American bases (Black River, 1957). But his determination to expose how individuals were defiled by the vitiating brutality of Japanese society was to find its most powerful expression in his next venture. 

Co-scripted by Zenzo Matsuyama, The Human Condition was based on a six-volume novel by Jumpei Gomikawa, to which Kobayashi had acquired the rights before it became a notorious bestseller. With the war still a recent memory and many vehemently opposed to any criticism of the Tojo era, Shochiku was wary of sanctioning such a provocative project. Moreover, the zaibatsu also baulked at financing a trilogy with a prospective running time of nine and a half hours. But such misgivings evanesced when Kobayashi threatened to resign and he started shooting in monochrome Grandscope in early 1958. 

The first episode, No Greater Love (1959), opens in Tokyo in 1943, with management trainee Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) complaining about the conduct of the war and espousing ill-informed opinions about utopian conditions within the Soviet Union. Convinced he will soon be drafted, he resists the urgings of his girlfriend Michiko (Michiyo Aratama) to marry. But he consents to a wedding after he is offered a personnel post at the Loh Hu Liong iron mine in occupied Manchuria.  

Arriving at the hellish outpost, Kaji quickly comes to abhor the corruption of the Japanese overseers and the sadistic savagery of the Kempeitai military police, who treat both abducted coolies and Chinese POWs as slave labor. However, he is equally appalled by the abuse meted out by the inmates to the 60 comfort women, who are delivered to their barracks each night. So, when a supply consignment arrives, Kaji himself resorts to violence to keep the starving workforce away from the carts, even though his actions are dictated less by fury or loathing than by the knowledge that their ravaged constitutions would not be able withstand a diet of lentils.  

Missing Michiko (they have one miserable night together in a store room), Kaji forges friendships with world-weary superior Okishima (Sô Yamamura) and the Chinese internees, Wang Heng Li (Seiji Miyaguchi) and Chen (Akira Ishihama). However, the majority of the labourers see him as just another despised oppressor, while his liaisons and attitudes incur the wrath of the vicious Watai (Tôru Abe), who taunts Kaji that he is an enemy sympathizer and “a filthy red.” Convinced that Kaji has been conspiring in worker escapes, Watai stages the public execution of seven culprits. But it's only after three have been inexpertly beheaded that Kaji intervenes and, by so doing, seals his own fate, as days later, he is conscripted.  

Hailed as a humanist masterpiece, No Greater Love won the San Giorgio Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In one interview, Kobayashi declared “I am Kaji.” But this was less a boast than an admission. While many saw Kaji as a beatific figure, he actually represents the conflicted persona of many ordinary Japanese during the Second World War, as both the oppressor and the oppressed. Kaji might aspire to the moral and political high ground, but he betrays his arrogance and naiveté by accepting a role within an inhumane regime in order to avoid a worse fate for himself. Moreover, he also contemptuously criticises the methods and motives of his colleagues and indulges in the reckless fantasy that he can single-handedly eradicate the bribery, brutality and black marketeering rampant among his compatriots, while ameliorating the conditions of the emasculated Chinese.  

However, Kaji does have his epiphanic moments, most notably when Wang Heng informs him that it's interaction rather than ideology that determines a person's caliber and later when he realizes that he will forever be scarred by the fact that he allowed three men to die before he could summon up the courage to challenge injustice and barbarism. Yet, in the second installment, Road to Eternity (1959), Kaji rapidly discovers that there isn't always time to implement the altruism of one's better self, especially in the heat of battle. 

Despite hoping for camaraderie at boot camp, Kaji soon learns that the army also condones extortion, bullying and intolerance. Consequently, he is again branded a pinko for his blind faith in the utilitarian benevolence of the Kremlin. Yet when fellow Marxist Shinjo (Kei Sato) suggests that they defect to the Red Army, Kaji lacks the conviction to follow his revolutionary example. Moreover, he also fails to protect the phlegmatic Tange (Taketoshi Naito) from the maltreatment of a sickbay nurse and even advocates that victimized misfit Obara (Kunie Tanaka) is subjected to traditional forms of martial punishment for his repeated inadequacy during basic training.   

Michiko notices a change in Kaji when she comes to visit. But even though he strives to relax the spartan regime when he is promoted to instructor, Kaji's betrayal of Obara (whose suicide only confirms his weakness to his commanders) mirrors his perfidy towards Chen at the mine, when he was goaded into slapping him in order to prove his ethnic loyalty. Yet Kaji readily demonstrates his allegiance and gallantry when he leads his infantry unit in a futile rearguard against advancing Soviet tanks. Having killed several enemy combatants, however, he finds himself one of only three survivors and he is soon forced to face the reality that the Communists are not the civilized agents of egalitarianism and fraternity that he had foolishly believed them to be.  

Unsurprisingly, therefore, A Soldier's Prayer (1961) is suffused with disillusion, first as Kaji wanders through the Manchurian wilderness and then as he wallows in a Siberian gulag. Once again attempting to prove himself to be a leader of men, Kaji tries to take command of a rabble comprised of shell-shocked stragglers, pitiless deserters, emancipated comfort women and terrified peasants uncertain of whom to trust. But the more he witnesses, as military discipline breaks down, babies perish and Japanese and Russians alike rape defenceless females, the more Kaji tries to distance himself from his experiences by taking refuge in confidential asides to Michiko, whose love alone gives him the strength to stay alive.  

Apprehended by the Red Army, Kaji finds himself again being pilloried, as his coarse captors accuse him of being `a fascist samurai'. Moreover, he also finds his principles being mocked by fellow detainee Kirihara (Nobuo Kaneko), whose scorn contrasts with the confidence placed in Kaji by a dispossessed farmer (Chishû Ryû) and the wounded Terada (Yûsuke Kawazu), who turns out to be the last person let down by his inability to impose himself upon a given situation.  

Yet Kaji only fully merits our pity when he escapes from the labor camp and trudges across hostile terrain in the hope of being reunited with Michiko. Denied charity by the vengeful Chinese he encounters en route, he expires within sight of the border, for, as Kobayashi averred: “To me, he had to die there. With his death, he lives in the minds of people for a long time as a symbol of the hope that we can eradicate the human tragedy of war.” 

It's doubtful whether Kaji ever fully perceives the enormity of his actions and inactions, his utterances and silences. Yet, with his demise, he finally embodies the ideals he has been spouting without much comprehension throughout his lacerating rite of passage. By contrast, Kobayashi chillingly demonstrates at each stage of Kaji's odyssey that despotism negates human emotion and prevents individuals from thinking and behaving rationally and, therefore, conditions them for being herded towards catastrophe. 

Now released in an exceptional new edition by Criterion, The Human Condition has been lauded for half a century as a paean to pacifism. In fact, there are only around 20 minutes of combat footage in the entire picture. Kobayashi clearly abominates warfare and the hawkish psyche that advocates it. But his primary concern is the manipulation and subjugation of peoples by governments and institutions and the part that apathy plays in permitting totalitarianism to thrive. Indeed, for the remainder of his career, he would continue to examine the plight of the dissident, the resilience of the individual conscience and the need for purgation, even in cases of coerced complicity. But he would never again couch his arguments with such audiovisual eloquence, intellectual rigor or dramatic intensity, despite producing such notable works as Seppuku (1962), Kaidan (1964) and Samurai Rebellion (1967). 

Ultimately, Kobayashi's collaboration with cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima, composer Chuji Kinoshita and actor Tatsuya Nakadai (who excels in almost every frame of this grueling epic) would be the most productive of his career. It certainly turned out to be more fruitful than his involvement with the Club of the Four Knights, as it disbanded after just one release: Kurosawa's commercial calamity, Dodes'ka-den (1970). But if anyone could appreciate that good intentions often come to nothing, it was Masaki Kobayashi.

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With the world waiting with anything but bated breath for the verdict of Isabelle Huppert's jury for the winner of this year's Palme d'or, the time seems right for a diatribe about the state of both mainstream and arthouse cinema.

They may keep critics and showbiz reporters busy for a few days, but will the features in competition at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival prove to be any less historically inconsequential than the largely underwhelming titles lauded at this year's Academy Awards? When the line-up was announced, Variety predicted that visitors to La Croisette would witness a `heavyweight auteur smackdown'. But how many of the big names competing for the most prestigious prize on the festival circuit actually deserve to be called `auteurs'?

There's no doubting the credentials of 86 year-old Alain Resnais, who, six decades after making his first film, shows no sign of slowing down with the comedy, Les Herbes Folles. But while Pedro Almodóvar, Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé all have distinctive styles, do they really conform to the type defined 55 years ago by François Truffaut when he was still an angry young critic?

Tsai Ming-Liang (who pays hommage to Truffaut in Visage) similarly appends a signature to his work, as does Ken Loach, although he rarely writes his own screenplays. But as for the remaining contenders, they are a glorious mix of ciné-provocateurs, calligraphic artisans and political polemicists.

Coming in the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the Cannes eruption of the nouvelle vague, the 2009 Oscars not only demonstrated the failure of the likes of Truffaut, Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard to transform mainstream cinema, but they also suggested that instead of making film-making more personal and audiovisually audacious, the likes of Les 400 Coups, Hiroshima Mon Amour and A Bout de Souffle succeeded only in furnishing the tropes that have made commercial movies more generic, artificial and crass.

In January 1954, inspired by Alexandre Astruc's theory of le caméra stylo and the writings of Cahiers du Cinéma editor André Bazin, Truffaut published an astonishing assault on popular film `A Certain Tendency in French Cinema' remains one of the most trenchant articles ever written about the so-called Seventh Art. In it, Truffaut denounced contemporary French directors like Jean Delannoy, Yves Allégret, René Clément, Marcel Pagliero and Claude Autant-Lara as `littérateurs', who were more concerned with doing justice to scripts by such psychological realists as Jacques Sigurd, Henri Jeanson, Robert Scipion, Roland Laudenbach and the team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost than in creating cinema.

Having savaged a number of recent releases, Truffaut dismissed this `cinéma du papa' and called for film-makers to follow the example of Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt, who invested their work with an artistry and personality that identified them as metteurs en scène rather than simply megaphone-wielding journeymen. Eventually, the names of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Roberto Rossellini would be added to this pantheon of `auteurs', as, indeed would Truffaut himself.

For the next few years, `auteur theory' became something of a touchstone for trendy critics. But a well-publicised feud between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael did much to discredit the notion that the director was a movie's sole creative arbiter and stars, screenwriters and producers have been scrambling ever since to ensure that everybody recognises their contribution to a picture's artistic legitimacy and box-office clout.

All of which leaves one wondering whether the much-vaunted nouvelle vague actually achieved anything worthwhile at all.

Pre-occupied with their own demise, the Hollywood studios largely resisted innovations like the jump cut, improvised dialogue and self-reflexivity. Indeed, apart from the machine-gunning montage in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and some slo-mo savagery in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), such artsy tricksiness was viewed with suspicion and was deflected off into anarchic TV shows, advertising and pop promos. However, these gimmicky techniques have subsequently been seized upon by the makers of mega-budget blockbusters in a bid to disguise the plasticity of their CGI effects or visceralise action sequences that would otherwise be devoid of imagination, ingenuity or excitement.

Despite their limited cinematic impact, New Wave aesthetics did make it on to film school curricula and the Movie Brats of the 1970s were quick to appropriate as many auteur affectations as possible, including that risible legend, `A Film By...'.

However, there's a vast difference between pushing the boundaries of an artform and promoting the cult of the celebrity director. The likes of Lucas, Spielberg, Dante and Zemeckis all considered themselves cinéastes. Yet they infantilised American cinema just as Altman, Ashby, Coppola and Cassavetes were persuading post-Production Code audiences to accept it as a medium for the kind of adult subject matter that international film-makers had been tackling for years.

Some may claim that the Oscar accolades for Milk and The Reader and the Cannes inclusion of films about Keats (Bright Star), Mussolini's wife Ida Dalser (Vincere), Palestine since 1948 (The Time That Remains), homosexuality in China (Spring Fever) and predatory grooming (Fish Tank) demontrate that the advocates of grown-up cinema triumphed in the end. But such politically liberal, artistically conservative features provide conclusive proof that we are deeply mired in another era of meticulously scripted, exquisitely designed and earnestly enacted mediocrity.

This cinéma du tableau will always do well during the US award season, as it maintains the illusion that there is more to the American film industry than bums on seats and balance sheets. But it's unlikely that there will be anything culturally significant in 20 years time about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon or Doubt. They are simply big-screen examples of masterpiece theatre that have been designed to make middlebrow audiences feel intelligent and allow self-indulgent directors to dub themselves auteurs and image-conscious stars to pose as thespians.

Cinema isn't dead. Far from it. But half a century has passed since it was last shaken up by theorists and practitioners who believed that moving images should do more than provide mere escapist spectacle. We are long overdue a movie revolution led by ideas rather than technology. But, with corporates palliating the masses with vacuous comic-book extravaganzas and superficial pseudo-literary melodramas, it's hard to see who will liberate an artform that hasn't even vaguely begun to fulfil it potential from the dumbed-down democratisation of the multiplex mentality.

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Blaise Pascal

In 1962, with the nouvelle vague already beginning to lose impetus, Roberto Rossellini announced in a Rome bookshop that cinema was dead. It wasn't a flamboyant public relations stunt designed to shame an admiring backer into financing a new project. It was the lament of a man whose belief in the power of the medium to better humanity had been enervated by the growing mundanity of mainstream cinema and the press's ceaseless obsession with inconsequential celebrity.

But, according to Rossellini, it wasn't just film that was in crisis, but culture as a whole. Consequently, he announced his intention “to retire from film and dedicate myself to television, in order to be able to re-examine everything from the beginning in full liberty, in order to re-run mankind's path in search of truth.” His first small-screen venture, The Age of Iron (1964), proved a critical calamity. But, when Jacques Rivette rejected the offer to make The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966), Rossellini took control and launched the final reinvention of his chameleonic career.

Having already helped pioneer neo-realism with the war trilogy that began with Rome, Open City (1945), Rossellini had survived the scandal of his adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman to create a cinema of angst and alienation that, regardless of critical indifference, had provided the foundation for film modernism. But with only the future auteurs of Cahiers du Cinéma able to recognise the audacity of his achievement, Rossellini left for India, where he refined the technique of observational objectivity so crucial to cinéma vérité in L'India vista da Rossellini and India: Matri Bhumi (both 1959).

Most 60 year-olds would have settled for such a diverse and influential filmography, especially as funds had proved elusive for such cherished topics as Petronius's Satyricon and a history of Islam, as well as lives of Caligula, Cyrus the Great, Catherine of Siena and the Lumière brothers. But, as he told Pope Paul VI during an audience at the Vatican, Rossellini was keen to break down the detachment and moral decay of modern life and make people think by showing them reflections of themselves in the past and Jean Gruault's adaptation of Philippe Erlanger's study of the Sun King afforded him the opportunity he had been awaiting to arrest the media's relentless “cretinisation of adults.”

Cartesius

Although the film's key theme is Louis's emasculation of a nobility that had caused the 1648 Fronde uprising that had threatened the Regency of Cardinal Mazarin (Silvagni) and Anne of Austria (Katharina Renn), there is also a very human side to Jean-Marie Patte's eponymous performance and this says much about the director's genius. Discussion has invariably centred on Rossellini's use of a remote-controlled Pancinor zoom lens, the plan séquence strategy imposed upon Georges Leclerc's camera and the tangibly exquisite authenticity achieved by production designer Maurice Valay and costumer Christiane Coste. But Rossellini's affinity with the office clerk chosen to be his star is even more pivotal. He not only exploited the diminutive figure's timidity to suggest the vulnerability that compelled Louis to reduce his courtiers to fops preoccupied with avoiding fashion faux pas and gaining admittance to such daily rituals as the lever and coucher, but he also turned Patte's inability to learn lines to his advantage by having him read from cue cards to give his expression an air of supercilious superiority.

However, respected actors like Pierre Arditi were accorded no greater latitude, as he later recalled of his experience making Blaise Pascal (1971): “[Rossellini] told me, ‘I can make a chair act,’ and I am a chair in the film, a good chair, but a chair all the same. He controlled me like a guinea pig to whom one says, ‘Go right, go left.’ I went right, left, I put my hand like this. At the moment of the ‘Memorial,’ the discovery of God, my hand had to go down like this, and then my head fall like this, and then I had to fall down because I finally had the revelation of God. It's the most successful scene in the film, but I had no voice in it. He based all his work on a style of gesture that was so precise that it ended up giving you the inner feelings.”

Surpassing Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) in its austerity, this rigour was essential for Rossellini to convey the Jansenist insularity that set Pascal apart from the rest of French society in the mid-17th century and brought down upon him the dread, suffering and repression that were necessary for him to exact the change in thought that would enable a world in thrall to faith, superstition and emotion to embrace science. Moreover, it ensured that Arditi conformed to Rossellini's jaundiced view of his subject: “No one who's not a kamikaze would make a film about Pascal, a very boring fellow who never made love in his life.” Yet even though he seems better disposed to Blaise's sister Jacqueline (Rita Forzano), who dies in a convent clinging to her religion after enduring Jesuit persecution, Rossellini allows the ailing Pascal to adhere to reason with the same determined dignity. 

At one point, a fictional meeting is staged between Pascal and René Descartes (Claude Baks) and Rossellini would return to the great dualist in Cartesius (1973). These films have much in common, but it's particularly interesting to note their link to The Rise to Power of Louis XIV in considering the impact upon a questing mind of the despotism of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu that fomented the civil war of 1648-53. Moreover, each downplays a key leitmotif - Pascal's wager (that the potential benefits make it sensible to bet on the existence of God) and Descartes's assertion, “I think, therefore I am.”

Cartesius is the least accessible of the French trilogy, as Rossellini respected rather than admired a man he had once branded “a son of a bitch, a coward, a lazy person.” Moreover, his mood was not improved by a contretemps with actor Ugo Cardea, who had read the Discourse on Method and wanted to impart his own interpretation on the dialogue. The main problem, however, seems to have been the fact that while his Descartes was trying to find metaphysical truth while remaining a devout Catholic, Rossellini's conviction that the public could be educated through television was waning. The loss of loved ones around the time of the production also sapped his morale and he appeared more intrigued by Descartes's psychological foibles than his philosophical curiosity. Thus, a film that was supposed to reveal the socio-political chaos that prompted Descartes both to leave France for the Dutch Republic and to write his most famous tract wound up saying as much about its maker as its anti-hero.

Around the time that this two-part drama was aired, Rossellini announced: “I no longer consider myself to be an artist of the cinema, one of that godlike coterie of directors producing masterpieces to stun the world. I now see myself as scientist and craftsman. For me, Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Matisse were also scientists. The cinema must become scientific, it must learn to dispense knowledge and awareness.” However, he managed to combine both enlightenment and artistry in his last masterpiece, The Age of the Medici (1972).

The Age of Medici

The charm of this epic study of Quattrocento Florence lies in its optimism. Everything seems possible in a city containing Cosimo de Medici (Marcello Di Falco), a banker who founded a dynamic dynasty, and Leon Battista Alberti (Virgilio Gazzolo), an author and architect who appreciated that great things would emerge from the miraculous confluence of artistic, commercial, technological and scientific advance. All aspects of life are touched by harmony and perspective and Rossellini is seduced by civilisation's potential.

It's also tempting to suggest that he sees himself (and perhaps all film-makers) in Cosimo, a benevolent dictator who took disparate temperaments and channelled their egotistical energies into the realisation of a grander scheme. Rossellini certainly succeeded in bringing the best out of cinematographer Mario Montuori, art director Franco Velchi and costume designer Marcella De Marchis and their visual evocation of a Renaissance world is complemented by Manuel De Sica's beguiling score and the wit and wisdom of a screenplay that Rossellini wrote with Marcella Mariani and Luciano Scaffa. Wiser heads (including Rossellini's exceptional biographer, Tag Gallagher) may have denied it, but this genuinely feels like historical neo-realism.

Having come to question the inconsequential fantasies of the present, Rossellini sought refuge and intellectual solace in the deceptively simpler realities of the past and he abandoned traditional shooting and editing strategies in favour of a zoom lens variation on the mise-en-scène technique that enhanced the authenticity generated by his use of atmospheric locations and non-professional actors. The research was meticulous in each case, but these four features are anything but the animated tableaux typical of so much heritage cinema. Instead, they offer insights into life as it could have been lived centuries ago and few, if any, period pictures have since matched them for intrepidity and brilliance.

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