DVD ADDICT

Oblique atrocities

FIRES ON THE PLAIN ("Nobi", Japan, 1959, b&w) directed by Kon Ichikawa and starring Eiji Funakoshi, Mickey Curtis and Osamu Takizawa. Anamorphic widescreen transfer (2.35:1), in Japanese with optional English subtitles. Extras include video introduction by Donald Richie, new video with reminiscences about the making of the film by director Ichikawa and actor Curtis, essay by film scholar Chuck Stephens. Criterion DVD 378 (Zone 1, NTSC).

PLALAI FAIFA

In his video introduction to this new Criterion edition of Kon Ichikawa's harrowing anti-war film, Donald Richie reports that the director told him not long ago that there is no way he would ever be permitted to make such a film now. In the present age of denial - there were no sex slaves, nothing unseemly happened at Nanking, and so on - its despairing view of war and, indirectly, of Japanese militarism would not go down well at all.

In adapting Shohei Ooka's novel Fires on the Plain for the screen, Ichikawa and his script-writer wife Natto Wada look directly and without comment at the breakdown of moral order that overtook the defeated and starving Japanese troops in the Philippines at the end of the Second World War. Their film version is even more pessimistic than the book it is based on. In an excellent essay by critic Chuck Stephens that Criterion include with the release, Stevens points out that they got rid of the core of Christian morality at the centre of Ooka's original story, leaving a movie, free of any ideology, that is an attempt to define what Ichikawa calls "the limits in which a moral existence is possible."

It begins with a hard slap to the face of foot soldier Tamura (Funakoshi) by his enraged sergeant. Tamura, who has tuberculosis, has been ordered to a field hospital but been sent back to his unit by the staff because there is no room for him there. The location is the island of Leyte in the Philippines, the year is 1945, and even those few remaining Japanese soldiers who have not been killed or gravely wounded are so starved and emaciated that the tubercular Tamura looks healthier than many of them. The sergeant orders him back to the hospital with orders to kill himself with his hand grenade if he is rejected again.

Not only is he refused again, but almost immediately after he arrives at the hospital it is destroyed by American bombs (a scene of crippled and limbless soldiers writhing their way out of the collapsing building like worms is just one of the movie's indelible images). The near catatonic Tamura flees into the deadly Filipino countryside, where he will pass through an increasingly horrific series of experiences that seem configured to erode away what is left of his humanity.

The movie witnesses them as a sequence of hellish episodes that are given an otherworldly feeling by widescreen black-and-white cinematography that integrates majestic, misty-shrouded jungle and mountain landscapes with images of rail-thin Japanese soldiers slogging across them like zombies (Ichikawa semi-starved his cast and required them to become dirty and grubby). The human world seems to have been left far behind.

Among the transgressions against humanity that are shown or implied in Fires on the Plain it is cannibalism that seems to be seen as defining the "limit in which a moral existence is possible". It is alluded to, semi-jokingly, early on, but becomes more central to the story as it progresses. It also becomes a kind of ultimate test for Tamura, although Ichikawa makes it clear that even morality as basic as refraining from killing companions for food has no redemptive power in the debased world war has created in this film.

In a documentary included on the DVD, Ichikawa recalls making his way to Hiroshima directly after the atomic attack to try to track down relatives who lived there. He found them alive, but also got a full view of what the bomb and its radiation had done to the city and its inhabitants. His feelings found release in films like Fires on the Plain, which, as Stephens notes, he intended as a "total denial [and a] total negation of war," and the earlier, less brutal Harp of Burma.

It is very oblique in the way it alludes to the atrocities that the Japanese committed in the Philippines but one short scene sticks in the mind. The Americans are driving around in jeeps inviting Japanese stragglers to surrender. Tamura, hiding behind a bush, is about to do so when another Japanese soldier emerges from the foliage first, with his hands raised. A young Filipina soldier immediately emerges from the jeep and cuts him down with machine-gun fire, and continues to shoot while struggling to push away the American soldier who is trying to stop her.

After almost 50 years Fires on the Plain remains one of the most devastating of all anti-war films. Like Masaki Kobayashi's three part, 10-hour The Human Condition and the Byelorussian director Elem Klimov's Come and See, it is wrenching to watch but leaves you branded with the intensity of its vision.

Bangkok Post

Last Updated : Sunday April 08, 2007