We tend to pay attention to recent films, but it’s good
to recognize that many good films have been made over the years that offer much
to enrich our perspectives. Netflix is one source for viewing older films, and
I regularly venture into these past treasures to explore what they offer.
This week I watched a Japanese film from 1956, The Burmese Harp, directed by Kon Ichikawa. It won several prizes and was nominated for an Academy Award for best
foreign language film. While any film from another country and another period
of history offers particular insights into other worlds and other lives, The Burmese Harp is especially moving in
its antiwar themes.
One way the film startles American viewers is that it is
told from the perspective of Japanese soldiers stationed in Burma at the end of
World War II. These soldiers are not the inhuman monsters American propaganda
portrayed them as. In fact, this group of soldiers is led by a captain who is
trained in choral singing and has his soldiers sing to raise their morale. One
soldier, Mizushima, is designated to
play the harp for the group.
The war ends, but
one group of soldiers continues to fight. Mizushima volunteers to go to them to
deliver news that the war is over and Japan has surrendered. A British captain
gives Mizushima 30 minutes to convince these soldiers to surrender before he
orders them shelled. The soldiers refuse to surrender, and all of them are
killed in the ensuing shelling. Mizushima, however, survives and is nursed back
to health by a Buddhist monk.
He dresses in a
monk’s robes and wanders the countryside, begging for food. He returns to where
the soldiers were killed and goes about burying them.
His own company,
meanwhile, believe he is dead, until one day they see a monk on a bridge who
looks like Mizushima. But the monk says nothing to them. The film portrays
these men’s care for one another and strong desire for Mizushima to rejoin them
when they eventually receive permission to return to Japan.
However, he stays
in Burma to live as a monk, but he sends them a letter that includes this
beautiful sentence: “Our work is simply to ease the great suffering of the
world, to have the courage to face suffering, senselessness and irrationality
without fear, to find the strength to create peace by one’s own example.”
The film is shot
in black and white and includes some stunning shots. It shows the horrors of
war without overdoing it, as in today’s films. But it also shows the humanity
of the Japanese soldiers. Clint Eastwood’s film Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) does this as well.
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