Japan drama
1959
bw 105 min.
Director: Kon Ichikawa
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1428L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Tamura (Eliji Funakoshi), the hero of Kon Ichikawa's overwhelming
Fires on the Plain, may be the lonliest man in the history of
the movies--lonlier than the spiritual pilgrims of Bergman, Bresson,
and Dreyer. He is a soldier in an army that, in defeat, has turned its
back on him.
It's 1954, on Leyte island in the Phillipines: Japan's forces are so
decisively beaten that they have abandoned all pretense of solidarity,
of camaraderie--of the basic resposibility of men at war to protect
each other. In the movie's first scene, the tubercular Tamaura--who
has been discharged, still sick, from a feild hospital, because there
isn't enough room for the patients and the staff--is told by his angry
squad leader that he must return to the hospital; His own unit won't
accept the burden of sustaining him in a debilitated state. The
officer sends him on his way with six miserable-looking potatoes and
one bleak piece of advice: If the hospital won't take him back, he
should kill himself.
After this grim scene, Tamura sets off on a journey through an
unimaginably hostile landscape. The U.S. Army controls the roads. The
Filipinoes hate the Japanese for having turned their farmlands into
battlegrounds. Ans Tamura's fellow soldiers are so desperate and
hungry that some, in full retreat from their humanity, fall back too
far, to the terrible refuge beyond the line that finally seperates
civilization from savagery: They will kill other men for food.
In the 1952 novel by Shohei O-oka on which this film is based, Tamura
reflects: "For people like us, living day and night on the brink of
danger, the normal instinct of survival seems to strike inward, like a
disease, distorting the personality and removing all motives other
than those of sheer self interest." Tamura--consumptive, starved and
often delirious--wanders in a kind of moral daze. He's in hell, but
he's not quite ready to enlist in the army of the damned; while he
fights off the swarming enemies without, he continues to battle the
ravenous enemy within.
Fires on the Plain is, of course, an anti-war film--maybe the
most persuasive and powerful ever. But it's more than that: not merely
a relentless series of vivid, shocking tableaux, but also a lucid and
eerily pure inquiry into the mysterious workings of the human will.
At every stage of Tamura's episodic trek across Leyte, the nature of
his choices changes. As, one by one, elements of what we take to be
normal life abruptly dissapear, the hero has to figure out how to act
within this constantly narrowing set of possibilities, and, in the
end, whether it's worth acting at all. The story, written for the
screen by Natto Wada (the director's wife), unfolds with the cruel
logic of a nightmare, pushing Tamura further and further from his men
until finally, without solace or sustenanace, he turns away from the
camera and walks off, receding into the immense distance towards an
uncertain fate. It's tempting to call the movie an existential
fable--but that label would diminish it, too. Fires on the
Plain is unique and irreducible: It takes us through unspeakable
horrors to arrive at an unnamable beauty.
The only movie that remotely resembles Fires on the Plain is
John Huston's 1951 Stephen Crane adaptation, The Red Badge of
Courage, which like Ichikawa's film, evokes the inferno of war
with such sensual immediacy that the scarred landscapes and the
ragged, exhausted soldiers have a feverish kind of vitality. In a way,
Ichikawa is the Japanese Huston. He is a brilliant interpreter of
literary texts, and he has been so prolific and versatile in his
nearly 50-year film career that film scholars and autuer-ish critics
tend to give him short shrift. Of his dozens of movies, only a handful
have been released in the U.S., and even those few are remarkable
diverse. The claustrophobic, perverse erotic comedy Odd
Obsession (1959), adapted from a Tanazaki adaptation, The Makioka
Sisters (1983), which is lyrical and expansive. Enjo (1958),
from Mashima, is a formally austere study of spiritual torment. An
Actor's Revenge (1963) is a reckless, invigorating melange of
styles, as flamboyant and bloody as a Jacobean tragedy. And Tokyo
Olympiad (1965) is a virtuosic documentary essay on the pleasures and
rigors of athletic competition. Most tellingly, his other antiwar
film, The Burmese Harp (1956), is entirely different from Fires on
the Plain: The earlier movie is dreamier, more contemplative, and
infinitely more optimistic--the defeated Japanese soldiers remain
bound by their love for each other.
In Fires on the Plain, there's no such confort. Here all men
are islands, and Ichikawa's stark widescreen compositions make the
distances between them look impossibly vast. The Everyman hero winds
up alone with himself; his only consolation is that he has, at least,
managed to salvage from war's devestation a self that he still
recognizes as human. When he walks away from us, towards the last of
the movie's many unreachable-seeming horizons, he appears to be
heading not for some ultimate frontier of defeat but into a harsh
radiance whose source only he can see. And when the screen goes dark,
the blackness looks absolute, and terrifying; it strikes inward, with
a suddenness of grace. Fires on the Plain is a great movie: an
intimate and blindingly clear vision of apocalypse.
--Terrence Rafferty
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