Fires on the Plain

I got this movie out a week after the death of Ichikawa Kon - I suppose if there is one way to mark the passing of a great director, its to raise a glass of wine to him while watching one of his greatest movies. Ichikawa had one of the finest careers in Japanese film, but as he never had a distinctive style or theme he often seems to be overlooked compared to his near contemporaries such as Ozu and Kurosawa (he was a little younger than them, but not by much). He is one of those directors who defies auteur theories - its likely that his wife (who wrote the screenplay for this and many other of his movies) was as much responsible for the quality of the movies as he was. But at his best, he was as good as any Japanese film maker at the time. In particular, he had great technical skills, allowing him to tell complex stories in an accessible manner. But in terms of theme, this movie could hardly be simpler - war is hell. No really, its seriously hell.

Fire on the Plain doesn't follow the normal war genre rules. There is no real beginning - we start as the wretched Tamura, who is a regular private (although it is implied he is more thoughtful and educated than most of the others - at one stage it is shown he understands English, but he clams up when the others ask him how he knows it) is ordered to hospital, as his unit is already in an appalling state. The soldiers are defeated and starving to death. They are no longer an army, just a rag bag group of refugees - hunted by the locals, and pretty much ignored by the Americans, who have bigger fish to fry. Hunger and despair is driving the soldiers to the edge and beyond of madness.

In typical Ichikawa style, its not all just grim - its oddly funny in parts (a very black humour of course).

The high points of this movie to me are the outstanding performances from the leads and the vivid photography. The characters, in all their humanity, but also their complete loss of humanity, are all too believable. This is that rare film - one which will refuse to erase itself from your head, even if you want to forget it.

I recently saw "Nobi" ("Fires On the Plain"), for the second time. Of all Ichikawa's films, and most of his films - (the ones I've seen), even "Tokyo Olympiad", has a strong thread of despair running through them. This is one of the few films (especially as its from the Japanese perspective), that deals, uncompromisingly, with how ordinary soldiers deal with, and are prepared to go, to survive a war where no prisoners were taken. It's a depressing film, but it should be seen by all the people, especially the Generals and Politicians, who think war is an heroic endeavour.

When people think post-war Japanese cinema, they automatically think of Akira Kurosawa. His exported samurai epics have done a good job creating a sense of history, nobility and grace among the art cinema crowd. Yet arguably more important to Japan's unique cinematic history during that era, are the humanistic war stories brought to life by the likes of Masaki Kobayashi, Nagisa Oshima and Kon Ichikawa. Comprising a portion of the Japanese New Wave, these war dramas challenged their viewers head-on, illustrating the ugliness of war in all it's absurdity and horror. These movies were noble in their own way by angrily confronting the attitudes tolerated by Japan during it's peak nationalist period. Fires on the Plain is just as incendiary as it's title would suggest and serves as a prime example of such a film. It may also just be the most engaging and accessible war tale Japan has ever produced.

Set during the closing days of Japan's dominance in the Philippines, our sick, fatigued and jaded hero, Private Tamura attempts to survive the on-coming slaughter. Tamura is forced out of his unit due to tuberculosis; if he's not well enough to dig trenches than he's useless according to his superiors. He treks to the hospital just past the hills only to be rebuffed by the hospital who tells him if he can walk, he's not sick. Before he can return and presumably commit suicide via grenade, Tamura's unit is wiped out in a fierce battle with allied forces. He then wonders aimlessly through the countryside staving starvation, fatigue, death and worse still, fellow brothers in arms.

If Kurosawa is considered the Spielberg of Japan than director Kon Ichikawa is it's Martin Scorsese. Known less for an all-permeating thesis that seeps into his oeuvre, Ichikawa gives his work an idiosyncratic style and a visceral veneer. Throughout his career Ichikawa was known for taking on all popular genres, all of which balanced his knack for realism and expressionism. His worlds always have a beautiful wholeness and lets the pathos from each situation dig into the audiences cranium through all sides. Sometimes he accomplishes this with shock, other times with a mischievous sense of humor. One such iconic moment happens in Fires on the Plain when a platoon of soldiers march upon a pair of jungle boots. One soldier swiftly puts them on and discards his own, the next soldier takes the previous soldier's boots, and so on and so forth until Tamura looks down on the tattered remains of the last guy's boots, takes his off and keeps walking barefooted.

There are many more scenes of contradicting sentiments occupying the same earnest frame. We as the audience must decide whether we should laugh or cry or both yet we never feel the need to look away. There's a dark sense of realism that makes Fires on the Plain stand out from other contemporary works such as The Human Condition Trilogy (1959-1961). The realism, tinged with an expressionistic flare keeps us engrossed; pensively hoping Tamura and his fellow soldiers don't do the unthinkable.

As things become more desperate and deprived on the island of Leyte, the true intentions of the film start to soar with devastating economy. The film was adapted from Shohei Ooka's novel of the same name. Much ado was made at the time about Ichikawa's radical ending change which is surprisingly antithetical to the traditional Hollywood ending we're all so drearily used to. With Ichikawa's ending however there is no absolution, no completion, no sigh of relief. Much like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) the film's resolution comes with a simple message about the inhumanity of war.

Fires on the Plain is a frightfully good film that tells it's story through imagery both stark, maddening and sublime. Powerful in every sober sense, Ichikawa should be on everyone's short list of most important Japanese filmmakers. He's got a style full of contradiction yet permeating with an excess of feeling. I promise that once you've seen this provocative, bleak, heart-wrenching picture, you won't soon forget it.

This is probably one of the best examples of that film genre known as the anti-war movie. It is a story about a group a Japanese soldiers in the last days of the second world war,weakened,demoralized,and starving. The situation deteriorates even further when one of them resorts to cannibalism in an attempt to ward off hunger. As they shuffle their way through the jungle one notices their shabby appearance with their feet sticking out of their boots and a sense of resignation or futility about them. It has even an element of the absurd about it in one of the scenes when one of the soldiers pleads to a comrade to eat him. This portrayal of them appeals to one's sense of pity or sympathy regardless of what cause or nation they're fighting for. For their situation could be anyone's unfortunate fate if circumstances were unfavorable. If there is one thing this film can show or get across is that our sense of humanity or what makes us feel civilized, is but a thin veneer or facade that in the right or wrong situation can vanish. The stark truth as depicted in this movie is that we are only always a few steps away from returning to the jungle if given the chance. This reminds me of another movie"Lord Of The Flies" which was about a group of English schoolboys stranded on an island after a plane crash. After awhile they descend or regress into a bunch of jungle savages or barbarians losing whatever decorum or civilization they possessed.

A harrowing masterpiece on the sheer madness and despair of war, Fires on the Plain (Nobi) is not going to be to everybody's taste: this is a war movie in the truest possible sense of the term, one that resorts neither to flag-waving patriotism nor saccharine sentimentality. Nobi cuts deep, it's ugly, tenebrous and bleak as few things ever committed on celluloid will ever be. This is war behind the cannons, with no triumphs or heroes, no moral victories or defeats to be had, just a handful of gaunt and terrible-looking men strewn across a land ravaged by war like penitents fleeing a great disaster. The characters defy moral judgment because they are creatures beset by a great woe, a woe that does not permit questions of a moral nature. War and survival. Pitting one's will against the other's in a battlefield arena. The loser is simply removed from existence.

Tamura, soldier in the Japanese Imperial army, is discharged from his platoon and ordered to report in a nearby hospital on account of him coughing blood and being disliked by the rest of the platoon. He's told to never come back and instead commit suicide by hand grenade in case the hospital rejects him. Which it does. The hospital is nothing but a shack made of wooden planks and the hospital surgeon simply tells him that if he's capable of walking he's just fine. It is in that shabby excuse of a hospital that one of the most harrowing scenes of the film takes place. As the area is carpet bombed by American planes the doctors and those who can walk and sustain themselves flee from the hospital and into the woods. Moments before the hospital is blown to pieces, the gaunt and crippled figures of the sick and injured crawl out of it in every manner of posture, dressed in their sickly white robes, as if the building is some kind of beast spewing viscera and filth out upon the earth.

That is Nobi's greatest success; the stark and brooding depiction of the suffering of war in simple but evocative images, without melodrama or pseudo-heroism. Soldiers cross a marsh, wading knee-deep in mud, move across the opposite bank and into a field only to discover enemy tanks hiding in the woods, their lights shining like malignant eyes as they scan the dark. A procession of injured soldiers, dirty and half-mad, crossing a road, dropping to the ground on the sound of enemy planes. Buzzards feasting on a pile of dead bodies. An abandoned village. A mad soldier that believes himself to be Buddha sitting under a tree, covered with flies and his own excrement, offering his arm to be eaten by Tamura when he's dead. These are the images Kon Ichikawa conjures for our eyes, merciless and unflinching in their poignancy but honest and raw.

Nobi doesn't rush to get somewhere. It is content to follow Tamura's travels through the war-torn land as he tries to reach the regrouping center of Palompa, and observe the madness and obscenities of war. The movie wades through the sludge of the horror of war, slow and brooding, just like the characters it follows. The final thirty minutes with Tamura taking refuge with two deserters who feed on 'monkey meat' are the closest Nobi comes to adhering to conventional narratives and they're no less powerful for that matter. Strikingly photographed in black and white, with great performances from the cast, and Ichikawa's assured direction, Nobi is not only among the best war movies to be made but also among the finest of Japanese cinema.