An old antiwar film from Japan

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.

There are many excellent antiwar films, such as Grand Illusion (1937) and Paths of Glory (1957), that are worth watching. The Burmese Harp is one more to add to that esteemed list.

Are art and violence connected?

This summer’s tragic shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Madison, Wis., raise a question that often comes up with such events: the relationship of art and violence.

The July 19 shooting by James E. Holmes in Aurora happened in a cineplex at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. 

The shooting  on Aug. 5 at a Sikh temple in Madison killed six people and wounded three others. The shooter, Wade M. Page, had performed in notorious white power bands, such as Youngland, Intimidation One, End Apathy and Definite Hate.

Did the movie or the music contribute to the killings? Or do they reflect the violence in our culture? Or are the relationship of art to violence different in the two incidents?

In a July 26 New York Times article, “Don’t Blame the Movie, but Don’t Ignore It Either,” Stephen Marche claims the answers aren’t so simple.

He writes that while we have largely passed the point where we ask whether art causes such disasters, a new cliché has taken hold “that insists on an absolute separation between violent art and real violence.”

He claims that real violence and violent art have been connected historically. “Some of the most violent scenes in American history have emerged from theatrical spaces,” he writes.

One example was the Astor Place riot in 1849, which started in competing performances of “Macbeth,” one by the Englishman William Charles Macready and the other by the American Edwin Forrest. “The theater in that case brought to the surface underlying tensions that were rampant in New York at the time,” he writes, “between immigrants and nativists, between the lower classes and the police. More than 20 people died in the ensuing struggle.”

Further, he notes that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln during the play “Our American Cousin.” Booth was an actor and was imitating Brutus from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”

Holmes allegedly said, “I am the Joker” before opening fire, and an employee at the jail where he was arraigned told a reporter, “He thinks he’s acting in a movie.”

This does not show that the Batman movie caused the shooting, but it does point to the power of art to affect individuals prone to violence.

In an Aug. 8 New York Times article, “The Sound of Hate,” Robert Futrell and Pete Simi write about “hidden spaces of hate” where Neo-Nazis, who often straddle the worlds of white power and mainstream society, thrive.

One of the most important of these hidden spaces is the white power music scene. “Neo-Nazis are particularly adept at incorporating music into just about every aspect of the movement,” Futrell and Simi write, “having grasped the medium’s capacity to bring adherents together into shared experiences and sustain communities anchored in Aryan ideology.”

This music scene drew Page to the movement. While the music conveyed anger, hatred and outrage toward racial enemies, it also created “a collective bond that strengthens members’ commitment to the cause,” they write.

Isn’t this what churches do? We use music as well as sermons and prayers in our worship to help bind us together as followers of Jesus Christ.

The obvious difference is that our hymns (we hope) do not promote hatred and violence but love and peace.

Art has power we should not ignore, but in itself it does not produce violence. That requires an already fertile field.

A poet and prophet for our time

Bruce Springsteen's latest CD, Wrecking Ball, gives voice to the sorrow and anger many feel who are suffering under the injustices of our economy. It also expresses the gospel (good news) of welcome offered by God's embrace.

The CD opens with one of my favorite songs on it, "We Take Care of Our Own," the kind of anthem Springsteen has become known for. I read the refrain, "Wherever this flag's flown / we take care of our own," as both an ironic indictment of current practices in our country (i.e., we don't take care of our own) and as a call to live up to our ideals. Like a good prophet (there are bad ones, according to the Bible), Springsteen is "knocking on the door / that holds the throne" as well as "stumbling on good hearts / turned to stone." He challenges the powers that ignore the poor and feels with the poor who are being trampled on. Then he calls on the community (the United States) to take care of our own. A simple yet powerful request.
"Jack of All Trades" is narrated by a man trying to assure his "honey" that "we'll be all right" as he pursues work that others may not want to do. He wants to be hopeful that "we'll start caring for each other / like Jesus said that we might," but he realizes that "the banker man grows fat / working man grows thin." By the end, he's so frustrated that he admits, "If I had me a gun, I'd find the / bastards and shoot 'em on sight." In good folk tradition, Springsteen tells a story that expresses the feelings of many who struggle to believe "we'll be all right."
As if to show that he's not really in favor of using guns to oppose injustice, the next song, "Death to My Hometown," a rollicking Irish tune, vents its anger at "the marauders [who] raided in the dark / and brought death to my hometown" but encourages people to "get yourself a song to sing / and sing it 'til you're done. / Sing it hard and sing it well / send the robber barons straight to hell." Singing our sorrows together gives us courage and helps us stand against "the greedy thieves … / who walk the streets as free men now." It's not hard to figure out who he's referring to.
The haunting "This Depression" carries the double reference to economic and personal depression and confesses, "I need your heart." Don't we all.
The title track tells listeners to "hold tight to your anger / and don't fall to your fears." Like many other songs on this CD, this one says, Don't deny what you feel, but don't let it control you. This raises the question, How do we gain the strength to do that?
The CD's final three songs use gospel and hip-hop to express both the community of the faithful and the broad arms of God that embrace us all. "Rocky Ground" uses biblical references and calls listeners to "use your muscle and your / mind and you pray your best. / … The Lord will do the rest."
"Land of Hope and Dreams," another of my favorites, moves me to tears as it pictures a train that "carries saints and sinners," including losers and winners, whores and gamblers, lost souls, the brokenhearted, fools and kings. On this train, "dreams will not be thwarted / … faith will be rewarded." That strong hope can keep us going.
The final song, "We Are Alive," reminds us that our faith carries us beyond suffering and death. It begins with the reminder, "There's a cross up yonder on Calvary hill." It promises that "though our bodies lie alone here in the dark / our souls and spirits rise." Springsteen here and throughout this inspiring CD calls us "to stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart" and proclaims, "We are alive."
I don't want to get technical about whether Springsteen is a prophet in true biblical fashion, but he has the unique position of being able to speak to a wide audience, and he uses that podium, his art, to feel the pain of those downtrodden to speak it. He also calls us to care for each other and stand together. And he provides the hope that only faith can provide.
 

God in popular music

Popular music includes a plethora of artists and styles, and our tastes vary dramatically. So we cannot think of it too simplistically. And in general we tend to simply enjoy the beat, tap our feet or let ourselves be absorbed in the sound. We probably don’t often think about what messages it has for us.

And when or if we think about popular music, we may not usually think about whether or how God is present in it or what it might have to say to us. But three new books help us do just that.

Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God by Christian Scharen (Brazos Press, 2011, $17.99) looks at “the paradoxical nature of human hope and despair, joy and suffering, and the ways God is revealed in the midst of it all—from various points of view, including Leonard Cohen, the blues and Scripture.”

Scharen quotes a line from a Cohen song that reads, “there is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.” Music often reveals the cracks in life, the sorrows we experience, but also hints at light, at redemption.

As the Psalms often express both the sorrows and the joys of the Psalmist, so popular music can serve that function. Thomas Dorsey, who wrote “Precious Lord,” saw “a profound connection between the blues and church, rooted as they both are in what it means to be human, to cry out in the depths of our being in response to the circumstances of life.”

At the root of all good art, including music, is honesty. Scharen quotes Bono of U2: “The most important element in painting a picture, writing a song, making a movie, whatever, is that it is truthful, a version of the truth as you see it.”

Unfortunately, many Christians use what Scharen calls “checklist Christianity,” a constricted imagination that simply counts the number of “bad words” in a song or tries to measure it against Christian doctrine.

Scharen calls us to first give ourselves to the song and let it speak to us. He quotes C.S. Lewis, who wrote that we “are so busy doing things with the work [of art] that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.”

Two other recent books follow similar themes while exploring other artists. In Hip-Hop Redemption: Finding God in the Rhythm and the Rhyme (BakerAcademic, 2011, $17.99), Ralph Basui Watkins explores the history and influence of hip-hop and asks how God is present in this music.

Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination by Brian J. Walsh (Brazos Press, 2011, $18.99) engage the work of the popular Canadian (and Christian) singer-songwriter and how entering the world of his songs “is so helpful in the shaping of … a Christian imagination.”

Both authors also sound the theme of truthtelling in art. Walsh quotes Cockburn: “If you’re an artist, you’re immediately put in a position of opposition to mainstream society, because you are trying to tell the truth.”

This idea is behind the line of a Cockburn song that gives Walsh’s book its title: “nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”

This also puts the artist in the role of a prophet. Watkins asks, “What if God is actually using hip-hop and its young artists to speak prophetically to the church and call her to task?”

“Prophets are visionaries who discern the times,” writes Walsh. They, like many artists, describe what is happening and may speak judgment. As one Cockburn song says, “The trouble with normal / is it always gets worse.”

But art can also be redemptive. Watkins writes, “The redemptive principle in hip-hop is rooted in the truth in the stories that artists tell as they resonate with both their own lived experience and that of their listeners.”

All three authors emphasize listening to the music and let it speak before judging it. As we listen, it may reward us to also listen to the cries of people and for God’s healing voice.

My experience of the artists mentioned in these books varies. I’ve long been a Cockburn fan, though not to the extent of Walsh, and I’ve listened to some of Cohen’s music (“Hallelujah” is a great song) and to some blues. But hip-hop is out of my ken, though Watkins makes me want to listen to it.

While these authors point to lessons we can learn about God’s presence in popular music, all three of them encourage us to engage the music, surrender to it, as Scharen says. Music is more than some message, more than the words. It is an experience. And like all experiences, we weigh its effect on us in the light of God’s love and mercy. Through it we can find ways to engage our world and God’s Spirit.