Seen on DVD: Fires on the Plain depicts war as damnation on earth

War is always being depicted in cinema in all of its ugly aspects. But perhaps, war as hell on earth is no more vividly and unapologetically, if not also more poetically, portrayed than in Kon Ichikawa's "Fires on the Plain" (1959, Japan). It is set at the tail-end of World War II (particularly in the Leyte province of their once-occupied country, the Philippines) and takes the vantage point of the imperialists (the "enemy", if one may say so) - the Japanese themselves. But the perspective isn't of the mightily victorious kind, but ironically of the hopelessly defeated one. The film centers the defeat on those who immediately carry the brunt: the frontline army soldiers, who are haplessly abandoned by their superiors after the imperialist reign has totally collapsed. We particularly meet here one such frontliner, Private Tamura (played by Eiji Funakoshi), a sickly soldier. 

At the film's start, we see Tamura being reprimanded and sent away by his commanding officer for being so "coward" as to return still from the battlefield after defeat, not to mention that it has been found out that he's afflicted with tuberculosis, thus posing a risk to the health of those in the camp. It's a long and uneasy scene of plea and admonition between the private and his superior, ultimately leading to the former being sent away in order to have himself taken in by a hospital. If no hospital will have him admitted, then the penultimate recourse is for him to commit suicide, having become virtually useless as he is. Needless to say, when Tamura comes to a military hospital, he is outrightly pushed away, as he is one too many already to be admitted and his disease is too risky for all the other patients in the cramped and ill-equipped hospital. 

And thus actually begins the unfortunate soldier's journey through the hellish landscape of war. The manner in which Ichikawa and writer Natto Wada (the director's wife) adapted Shohei Ooka's novel onscreen has religious intimations. That is to say, Tamura's lonesome trudging along the war-ravaged landscape is like a pilgrim bearing his/her cross in a spiritual sojourn. Or it can also be compared to navigating some horrifying stations in Dante's Inferno. The black-and-white images of death, destruction and debasement that Ichikawa shows onscreen are unflinching, ungarnished and indelible, which make the film's anti-war message clearly palpable. Such a message has an added resonance and gravitas as it comes straight from a filmmaker hailing from the defeated and disgraced country and just merely a little more than a decade after the Second World War ended. If in the same director's Chekovian "The Makioka Sisters", the relatively-peaceful and bright-colored pre-war world is just on the brink of collapse, here in "Fires on the Plain", the world is now totally under the weight of the crumble brought about by war. 

Unlike a religious pilgrimage, however, there's no enlightenment or divination being seeked here by the soldier's journey. Rather, it's a pure confrontation with the horrors of war, meant to crush, instead of uplift, one's soul. That's why "Fires on the Plain" fittingly serves as the yang to the yin that is "The Burmese Harp", also an anti-war film by Ichikawa that came two years earlier. The soldier in the latter film slowly undergoes an overhaul of morality and principles by embracing the vocation of monkhood, through which he can help spread peace, harmony and solidarity among mankind, such values lending themselves well to the subdued and quiet nature of the film. Whereas Tamura in the former film appears to be eternally damned as he is sucked further down into the vortex of hell that is war, offering no redemption or grace whatsoever, such resolution consistent with the film's bleak and defeatist outlook. "The Burmese Harp" and "Fires on the Plain" are spiritual twins: the one redeems through salvation, while the other punishes through damnation. 

It may well to note one particular illustration of the damning aspects of war, something which Ichikawa himself emphasized in interviews and discussions about the film and was quite a taboo at the time of the film's release. In fact, of all the war movies that I've seen, not one has even barely considered the subject. And that is, the act of cannibalism. Its depiction in the film, though not graphic in the "Cannibal Holocaust" sense, is still disturbing and disarming. It's like maggots feasting on an already-festering wound. That a man crushed and beaten by war - in mind, body and spirit - would resort to such an abominable act underlines the basest depths to which such a monumental catastrophe can push us. It's certainly the ultimate horror, a regression to our primitive impulses, at a time when man was supposed to have reached already an advanced stage as to conduct a globally-destructive war. A tragic irony of modern civilization. 

The film's title takes on a literal significance: a damning hell on earth. 

A forsaken frontliner soldier trudges through the hellish landscape of war in Kon Ichikawa's disturbing anti-war masterpiece "Fires on the Plain"