aigerimduisembay Burmese Harp (1956) directed by Kon Ichikawa is an emotional and thought-provoking drama that basically reveals the difficulties Japanese soldiers had to cope with as the consequence of surrendering to British army at the end of World War II. Although one group of soldiers agrees to surrender to the British, there is another group that would rather give their lives for Japan than to give up. Hence, the protagonist of the movie Mizushima, is sent to convince the other troop to surrender and «rebuild» the country again. However, Mizushima fails to accomplish his goal and persuade the soldiers of second group, which is why British army bombarded this group and killed everyone except for Mizushima himself. Although Mizushima's troop gets informed that their fellow soldier died, they still attempt to find him and look for any information about him. Meanwhile, Mizushima becomes a monk who decides to return to this motherland, Japan, only after burying the bodies of his countrymen.The movie seems to be very different from other US or European movies about the World War II. The main peculiarity of this movie is that it shows strong spirit and patriotism of Japanese soldiers almost in every scene. Their patriotism can be discussed from two different perspectives. The first example of loyalty to motherland is shown in second groups' decision to die rather than to capitulate. It depicts that their love for the country is much higher and more important than fear of death. Moreover, the first troop's decision to surrender to the British army for the sake of their own country is also a sign of patriotism. Even though it may seem quite paradoxical at first glance, this decision, very painful and at the same time deliberate, is the only source of considerable hope for the future which gives them an opportunity to start everything from the scratch. Hence, these two scenes illustrate deep sense of patriotism of Japanese people to their motherland. The movie's another peculiarity is the way it demonstrates the role of Buddhism during the time of war both for Japanese and Burmese society. There are some particular details in the film that give characteristics of Buddhism such as temples and statues of Buddha. It is shown in the movie explicitly that people had much respect for the Buddhist monks, for instance it is an honor for the citizens to provide monks food. Nevertheless, there might be one significant concern regarding the case of Mizushima. It is clearly seen that Mizushima did not have deep understanding about Buddhism as a religion, since he probably became a monk not due to pure faith, but due to an occasion. It is likely that he was influenced by a monk who took care of him after the attack of British army. Also as an experienced soldier hitherto, he was mostly driven by a tribute to the memory of the dead soldiers. Still throughout the film it can be noticed that his thoughts and perspectives seem to coincide with basic Buddhist concepts such as Four Noble Truths. In particular, the last scene is important in this context for it emphasizes the First Noble Truth stating that «Life is suffering».Taking into account the fact that the movie was shot in the second half of 20th century, I was delighted with the director's work and montage. The quality and content of the movie are quite impressive; they show that Japanese cinematography was developed pretty well even at that time and made its own contribution in a worldwide scale. Every scene is used properly to deliver main point. Also, emphasis put on separate details, such as harp played, a symbolic role in conveying collective spirit of the soldiers and their attempts to get more or less positive approach during such a hard time. The mere name of the movie, Burmese Harp, serves as a depiction of main topics illustrated in the film: patriotism, teamwork, respect, hardships of that time and more importantly hope. In general, Burmese harp (1956) not only managed to fully convey the feelings of Japanese soldiers at the time of surrender, but also to inspire people to stay strong and maintain hope for a better future.

Jackson Booth-Millard I found this Japanese film in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, I was hoping it would be another foreign film I would never have found otherwise and was enjoyable, directed by Kon Ichikawa (An Actor's Revenge, Tokyo Olympiad). Basically, set during the Second World War, Japanese soldier Private Mizushima (Shôji Yasui) is the harp player in a group composed by Captain Inouye (Rentarô Mikuni) who raise morale for the Burma Campaign by fighting and singing. They are offering shelter in a village, eventually realising that British soldiers are watching them, with their ammunition retrieved and the forces advancing, Captain Inouye tells the men to sing, laugh and clap to trick the British into believing they are unaware of their presence, the British soldiers do not fire, they sing along, the war has ended, and the Japanese surrender to the British. As Australian captain at a camp asks Mizushima to talk down a group of soldiers still fighting on a mountain, he agrees and has 30 minutes to convince them to surrender, he is almost shot by them before they realise he is Japanese, he climbs up and informs the Defense Commander (Tatsuya Mihashi) the war is over and to surrender. But after conferring with their commander, they decide to fight to the end, even after Mizushima begs them, he asks the Australians for more time, but him creating a surrender flag is taken the wrong way and they believe he is surrendering for them, he is beaten unconscious and left on the floor, he is the only survivor following a bombardment. An Old Monk (Eiji Nakamura) helps Mizushima to recovering from his injuries, one day he steals the monk's robe and shaves his head so he will not be spotted by a soldier, he journeys to the camp where his comrades were sent, but he finds many Japanese soldiers dead on the way, he buries them. Captain Inouye and his men cling on to the belief that Mizushima is still alive, eventually the buy a parrot to speak a phrase with Mizushima's name, and an Old Woman villager (Tanie Kitabayashi) takes it to a monk they suspect is actually Mizushima in hiding, she returns with another parrot with a reply rejection phrase. The old woman also gives the captain a letter, saying that Mizushima has decided not to go back with them to Japan, because he continues to bury the dead, while studying as a monk and promoting the peaceful nature of mankind, but he states when he has finished burying the fallen soldiers, he may return to Japan. Also starring Yûnosuke Itô as Village head. I was just about able to follow the story, about the young musician/harpist renouncing his homeland to remain in Burma as a Buddhist monk during World War II, sincerity does occasionally turn into sentimentality, but there are good military and musical scenes, and more than anything this epic film has great landscapes that accompany the great music, an interesting war drama. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Very good!

tieman64 1853. US Navyman Commodore Matthew Perry makes his way into Japan and forcibly opens the country up to international trade. After two and a half centuries of self-imposed, peaceful isolation, Japan henceforth begins emulating Western powers. After the Meiji Restorations of 1868, Japan not only conclusively shifts from a feudal society to a market economy, but embarks on an endeavour to assimilate Western ideas, technological advances and customs. To the chagrin of the Western Empires, it also spends the next few years aggressively expanding into neighbouring territories, encroaching upon Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Burma and the Philippines, all countries which had themselves been taken over by Europeans and Americans. The apple in Japan's eye is China, though, which Russia, France, Germany, England and the US are busy dividing between themselves via "Open Door Policies". These policies grant multiple international powers access to China, all to the detriment of China itself.Ticked off that the big Imperialists aren't letting Japan get down to some sweet Imperialism of its own, Japan launches the First Sino-Japanese War (1894) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904). Ironically, these expansions are funded by British and American bankers (Jacob Schiff famously provided 200 million in loans), to such an extent that Japan's outstanding foreign loan indebtedness grows from near zero in 1896 to 421 million yen in 1904 and then 2600 million yen in 1913. After about two decades of further pressure cooking, a complex cocktail of forces and/or contradictions eventually lead to all the world's major nations getting their collective grooves on. In Japan's case, a mixture of nationalism, exceptionalism, racism, stupidity, economic competition, mounting debts, the need to open up foreign markets to prevent local markets from collapsing (historial J.A Hobson would famously call capitalist oligarchy, rather than national pride, the "taproot of imperialism"), blockades, Western bullying and sheer confusion leads to a state of Total War. The end result of WW2? The two Imperialist upstarts – Japan and Germany – get bombed back to the stone age, whilst the old Imperialist Empires go broke and are forced to scale back their domains. The United States emerges as top dog.Two of the major war films in Japanese post-war cinema were "Fires on the Plain" and "The Burmese Harp", both by director Kon Ichikawa. Released in 1956, "Harp" follows Private Mizushima, a lowly member of Inouye Company. Mizushima plays a lute, whose music becomes Ichikawa's metaphor for a humanity which is suffocated during war time. The film's awash with bleak landscapes, craggy, war-torn and steeped in death, a canvas which the lute attempts to hold back with an aesthetic of its own. But it's no use. "Soil is blood-red," a title-card reads, "so are rocks.""Harp" finds Ichikawa drawing parallels between Japanese and British soldiers, the fighting class on either side identical in their humanity. Its climax points to Japanese concentration camps, the scientific barbarism of the atomic bombs and finally to monastic Buddhism, Mizushima's newfound path. It's a path which divides Mizushima from both his comrades and an increasingly secular Japan. If warfare remains the music of the gun, Mizushima's Buddhism embodies the music of the lute, an aural flame which he dedicates his life to fanning."Harp's" overriding tone is one of sadness. "Fires on the Plain" (1959), however, is suffused with blunt cruelty. It begins with a slap to the face and then the introduction of Private Tamura, a young man stationed in the Philippines. Tamura, we learn, has been ordered to kill himself with a grenade if he fails to admit himself to a hospital for healing, an absurd situation which informs the rest of Ichikawa's film. Whilst Tamura's countrymen prefer death to the dishonour of capture, Tamura rejects the nationalism and indomitable Yamato-damashii spirit of the army. He sees no dishonour in staying alive, and will do anything to survive. "Fire" thus offers the reverse of the spirituality and positive affirmation of Ichikawa's "Harp". It stresses the corporeal, the physical, its tone is nihilistic, and Tamura will cross any barrier in the name of self preservation, unlike Mizushima, who challenges himself and others to live humanely even within evil circumstances. Lost in a nightmarish odyssey, Tamura stumbles upon burning hospitals, corpses and vampire-like soldiers who cannibalise flesh, his narrative serving to undermine any measure of value or nobility wrongly ascribed to warfare. The film climaxes, in a scene evocative of Sam Fuller's "Big Red One", with Tamura shot whilst trying to surrender to an American soldier. His life's been lost for nought.Aesthetically, "Harp" and "Fire" are similar. Both are melancholic, at times shocking, and carefully juggle impressive wide screen photography with blunt close-ups of haggard faces. Both also feature dated scores, dip into excessive sentimentality and feature soldiers who are more dirty, dispirited and exhausted than was typical of Western war films of the era. This is not surprising. Before the revisionist and/or counterculture movements of the 1960s, British and American war films tended to be upbeat. Even Lewis Milestone ("All Quiet On the Western Front"), would get roped into directing gun-ho flicks ("Pork Chop Hill", "Halls of Montezuma"). Italian, Polish, French and Japanese war films, meanwhile, most of which fell under the umbrella of neorealism, operated under a completely different sensibility. Indeed, directors like Masaki Kobayashi, Andrzej Wajda and Rossellini were directing whole anti-war trilogies. 7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Paths of Glory", Suleiman's "The Time that Remains" and Kobayashi's "The Human Condition".

Cosmoeticadotcom While a bit sentimental, it never veers into mawkishness, and the full five or so minute reading is one of the great humanist documents in cinema, perhaps even greater than Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator. Mizushima claims his new mission in life is monkdom, and helping to bury the war dead, and promote peace in the world. The film then makes an interesting decision, and one virtually uncommented on in any of the criticism of it I've read. After the letter is read, the film's narration (which opens the film, and is rather sparse) begins again. All along, viewers have been led to believe- via closeups of the captain's face during other narrations, that it is he who has been telling this film's story from some indefinite time in the future. But, no; the speaker, as the camera move sin, turns out to be a wholly anonymous member of the unit; one who had no prior scenes nor close-ups.Imagine, as example, had Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, not opened with Call me Ishmael, and the reader only found out who the narrator was on the last page, and had to guess if the narrator was omniscient, or a member of the Pequod, only to be startled their guess was wrong. The reason this is so important, looking back at the film, is that a) the point of view change from the expected narrator to another recapitulates the confusion that the troop has over whether or not the monk they see is their comrade- thus letting the viewer 'feel' the confusion that the internal characters are feeling- albeit for a different reason, b) it makes the viewer question whether or not what has been shown is true or not, since we now know the narrator is not the reliable and honorable captain- a character we would trust as reliable. This ties the whole film back to the more fairy tale like quality of the source novel. The final reason, c), it forces the viewer to wonder whether or not he or she has assumed other things that were not so in the narrative, even if one accepts that all the anonymous private has revealed is true.This is an astonishingly effective device that Ichikawa employs, and coming on the heels of the straightforward and moving missive revelation by Mizushima, the audacity of Ichikawa's narrative sleight of hand erases any doubts over whether this film is great or not. It is as great a film as his later Fires On The Plain, which, narratively and tonally, is almost the complete opposite of this film. But, the fact that such a key element in the film has never been commented upon before shows how little most critics actually pay attention to the subjects they criticize, as well as how little they understand how even a small moment, or the slight use of a technique, can radically change the whole tenor of a work of art. This is too often because the critics approach art with their own biases in tow, rather than viewing the work on its own merits. Another moment that has gone critically unnoticed is the scene on the bridge, between Mizushima (dressed as a monk) and his troop. This occurs two times. The first time, the viewer is as confused as the soldiers are, but the second time, the narrator tells the audience it was definitely Mizushima. Thus, we know that Mizushima's ruse will be found out, and this diverts the narrative tension from will the soldiers learn the truth of Mizushima? to how will they learn it, and will they learn why? This is not an insignificant narrative change of direction, but one, again, which never seems to have stirred critics.The DVD, put out by The Criterion Collection, is well transferred- the black and white hues are brilliant. However, the DVD lacks an audio commentary- an increasing annoyance with Criterion releases ever since they went to their new C logo. There are too all too brief interviews with Ichikawa and Renataro Mikuni, who played the captain. There is a trailer, and only subtitles, again in white- another bête noir of Criterion, for white subtitles often are lost against the whites of a black and white film. Colored subtitles are a must if no English dubbed soundtrack is to be added. The insert contains an essay on the film by film critic Tony Rayns, but it's a rather pedestrian take on the subject. Akira Ifukube's score is solid; the only real highlights are the delightful harp playing by Mizushima.Overall, The Burmese Harp is a great film. It is not one of those razzle-dazzle works of art that is flashy, but it gets the job done, and invites rewatchings to elicit subtleties one viewing may miss. It also kills the old notion that all war films- even those with explicitly anti-war themes- end up celebrating war because of the battle scenes and those scenes which show individual valor. Both this film and Fires On The Plain kill that notion; the former by eliding almost all scenes of battle, and the latter by the sheer devastation of the results of war it shows. It certainly deserved its nomination for an Academy Award as best Foreign Film, as well as numerous other festival awards. Ichikawa's reputation is that of a serviceable studio director, and that may be true; but the two films of his I've seen are the equals of the best films made by the titanic Japanese triumvirate of Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Here's hoping he has a few more deviations from that norm others claim for him.