the burmese harp

this was my second viewing of kon ichikawa's timeless antiwar statement and it was interesting to contrast it with resnais' hiroshima, mon amour which i also watched again after this. the burmese harp is about a soldier, mizushima, in the imperial japanese army during the final days of the war in burma. he and his regiment, led my a sensitive, musician-captain who is forever making his company practise choral music, have surrendered to the anglo-aussie forces and are sent to a camp in mudon. meanwhile mizushima, who we are told has become adept at playing the burmese harp and is never seen without it and even uses it to signal to his regiment on scouting missions, volunteers to go on another mission to convince a small band of renegade, never-say-die japanese soldiers holed in a nearby mountain hideout to give up their arms and turn in. they inevitably refuse to and get killed in the ensuing battle. mizushima himself is wounded and nursed to health to by a buddhist monk whose robe, we are shown in a flashback, he steals and proceeds to go to mudon dressed as a monk in hopes of reuniting with his regiment. en route, he sees hundreds of japanese soldiers dead, their bodies decomposing and being eaten by vultures and decides to stay back to give them a decent burial. in the meantime, the regiment in mudon get their release orders and are preparing to go back to japan, still concerned about mizushima's whereabouts. they hear his harp, they even see him carrying the funeral ashes in a box (a Japanese custom, says the sergeant) but are still not sure if it is a burmese monk who happens to look like mizushima. if mizushima can look like a burmese, then there could be burmese who can look like him, reasons one of the soldiers. in a moving final scene on the ship back to japan, the emotional captain reads out mizushima's letter to his brothers-in-arms where he states his reasons for not returning with them and that he has been accepted into priesthood. the narrator, who we have, until then, only heard, is revealed to be a nondescript solider in the regiment.

the horror and uselessness of war is almost in-your-face throughout the movie- the decaying corpses, the morale of the soldiers themselves and their insecurities of going back to a post-war japan whose horrors they cannot or do not want to comprehend, contrasting with the massive, reclining buddha statues, the elegant pagodas, the impassive burmese who just seem to watch everything around them with a calm detachment, the serene monks, in short burma itself. the black and white photography is stunning especially when exploiting these contrasts (of attitudes and light). the sometimes stark sometimes lush landscape of burma is always creeping in.

if at all there are any flaws, it is the clumsy portrayal of supposedly sikh soldiers who are basically english guys with blackened faces, white turbans and fake accents. one could easily accuse ichikawa of not portraying the brutality of the japanese army. in this case, they are shown to be sensitive and feeling human beings but i think that is the point. in bringing out the humanity and buddha nature even during war and in the victors and the losers, the essential universality of buddha nature is brought out. i also feel that for ichikawa, war is inherently a destructive and pointless act, whether it is a righteous one or not and the horrors of war need to be discussed and kept alive so that collective amnesia does not permit the repetition of mistakes, each one exceeding the previous in enormity.

resnais also uses horrifying images from the hiroshima aftermath but only in the overture. the tragedy is viewed at a closer, personal level- nevers and hiroshima merge and he brilliantly uses imagery to bring about this transference- the survivors in bed with riva in bed, the survivors whose hair falls out with riva who is shorn, and finally the german lover with the japanese lover. but there is a certain mysterious almost ominous note when she says it will all happen again. it is far more subtle than his wry comment that they might perhaps meet if there is another war. there is also a tension between memory and forgetting, a tightrope walked by all the characters including the cities of hiroshima and nevers.

the monk who tends to mizushima says burma is buddha's country. i can see why monks are the frontline in opposing the burmese junta and also bear/bore the brunt of the recent brutal crackdowns. i cannot help go back to the opening and closing lines of the film- "the soil of burma is red, so are its rocks". red-with the blood of the soldiers who died and now red with the blood of the monks who were shot. there is still hope- hope like the red rubies that red soils produce, hope that the junta will pass and peace will return.