I had a bit of a break today, given that I don't teach on Fridays. Thus, I was able to view a film that I had received earlier in the week, a classic from Japan called "The Burmese Harp" by Kon Ichikawa. It was first released in 1956, and received considerable critical acclaim.
The film is configured around a journey, one that mirrors the transformation of a soldier in the Japanese army who is faced with the fact of having to re-evaluate his ideals. He and his fellow soldiers are part of a squadron that finds itself stranded in Burma at the end of the war, and as the film begins, they are involved in a desperate retreat, treading across the jungles and plains of a dangerous landscape, moving stealthily and feeling utterly demoralized as they confront the fact that they are likely to be killed at any moment. The natives are hostile, and they know that they are being pursued by advancing allied troups who are bent on eliminating them. They are in a supremely exposed state, isolated with no news from the home islands.
What might have been an adventure story quickly takes a sharp turn into a more meditative vein to reflect on the meaning of solidarity and the values that serve to ground human beings. In the midst of this despair we are introduced to a lowly soldier who plays a harp and is tasked by his commander with playing as a way of comforting his comrades. In all other ways he is a nondescript character, humble and obedient but also cheerful, and he doesn't seem particularly adept as a soldier. For example, there is a comic episode where he is robbed of a robe by bandits, and is left with a skirt of husks, something that he accepts in good cheer.
After the company is captured and presented with the painful discovery that the war is over and that their side has lost, he is tasked with another mission by his sympathetic commander. He is sent as an envoy to try to convince another company of Japanese soldiers who are holding out on a nearby mountain to surrender. Why he should be chosen is a mystery, but I would suppose that it was due to the fact that he was perceived as being especially suited given his artistic sensibility. This runs contrary to the grain of what one would suspect, because one would imagine that another commander or other authority figure should have been sent to speak the language of those who were chosing to remain true to the military ideal of fighting to the end. However, one would have to surmise that his being selected had to do with the way in which he was able to soothe others with his music. In a practical society a few of us still hold out hope for a special commuicative nature of the arts, and it is this that lends its appeal to the character. Who can resist the lingering notes of a stirring melody, and the way in which it can stir the spirit?
This mission, unfortunately, has a harrowing outcome. The company that is holding out refuses to listen and instead stands by its zeal, one that is linked to defending personal honor and integrity, a code that seems particularly futile in light of how the unit has been surrounded by enemy troups. The encounter ends with a bombardment, and we are confronted with one of what will be many tableaux of futility, where bodies are piled in defense of an ideal that will come to seem increasingly pointless.
Having been mercifully rescued by a monk, the defeated Japanese soldier will steal the robes of his rescuer and venture out to rejoin his companions in a prisoner-of-war camp. Little does he know of how these robes will serve to usher in a transformation. Because he looks like a monk, he will be treated as a monk, and he will be subject to special courtesy by all the people that he meets. But this monk also forces him to re-evaluate himself and reflect on how it is that this erstwhile change in appearance reflects on the way in which human society, with all its articifial hierarchies, and indeed human identity, is all grounded on ephemeral codes. The courtesy he receives is authentic enough, and he is granted liberty of movement and even rescued as he collapses on a hot plain, but he himself is forced to reflect on the ideals that is driving him to rejoin his comrades on that desperate journey. Is he not also in pursuit of an illusion?
He trudges heavily and finds many instances of men, frequently fellow soldiers, who have died in a futile fashion and whose remains lie out in the open, consumed by birds and insects and other wildlife, with little to show for the life and love and individuality that comes to seem more and more precious. These people were also vibrant entities conscripted in the name of a false ideal, a political project that comes to seem more and more pointless. The idea of futility overcomes him as he reflects on how he was also beholden to the idea of military honor and to the defense of an imperial entity, Japan, as well as how he and every other human being is beholden to cherished programs that ultimately end in naught.
Like the foreign soldiers who wash over the Burmese landscape, human vanity is based on an idea of permanence and conflict and struggle when, in reality, all that is permanent is the soil and all that we can hope to do, as one of the Buddhist monks expresses to him, is to aspire to alleviate human suffering by any small step possible.
This spiritual transformation is very painful, and while he may not initially have understood the implications of the role he has assumed, the fact that he wears the robe of a monk allows him to step out of himself. We all need to do so as we proceed with our breathless lives, careening along according to this illusion of of benchmarks and a road and a career path and any of the many illusions we erect to guide us as we proceed in life, frequently giving little consideration to the bigger picture of human suffering.
And in this pageant of transformation and purification the music comes to represent a sustaining note precisely because it represents a pause, a break in the relentless pace of modern life and a time to stop and reflect on the idea of the eternal. It notes float in the air as they are plucked, and the melancholic strains continue to attract the attention of everyone, from the humble Burmese peasants and the turbaned soldiers of the British Empire (another ephemeral political project that was shortly to come crumbling down) to the Japanese POWs, especially those of the squadron to which the main character had belonged, and who haven't given up looking for him.
The landscapes are beautiful, etched into a composition which seems muted because it is in black and white, but also seems indefinably rarified and timeless for that same reason. To see in black and white is to learn to appreciate subtlety and not to be overcome by the sensory overload of color. And the temples and mountains and the barren landscape provide a diverse series of stopping points that necessarily indicate how the character is transformed and purified, and how he comes to yearn for stasis, like the many images of the reclining Buddha.
In one instance, he returns to the bank of a river where he undertakes to bury the corpses of a pile of Japanese soldiers who he had first encountered on his way to the prison camp. While digging a grave he finds a precious gem, something that elicits the amazement of the Burmese peasants who have been watching him as he was engaged in his self-appointed task. One of them tell him that this gem can only be a purified distillation of the human spirit, and our character tearfully clutches it to his own breast. A gem is a form of altered carbon that is transformed because it is subject to immense pressure, and in the same way suffering is purifying him and making him a more spiritual person, leading him ulimately to renounce his dream of returning to Japan.
This was a profoundly affecting film, as are many of the films from that decade of the 50s that I have had the opportunity to see, ranging from the works of Ozu and Kurosawa to those of Ken Miyazaki. It would indeed seem to have been a golden age in Japanese cinema, and perhaps this terrain was prepared by the experience of Japanese society at that time, and the soul-searching that accompanied the immediate post-war period. The Japanese were forced to examine those values that had seemed so cherished, and perhaps they were more open to a reflective cinema, one that was open to the exploration of illusions and to an assessment of how they had been seduced by the promises of Western modernity.
I look forward to continuing my exploration of Japanese cinema.
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