Fires on the Plain

Fires on the Plain
Directed by	Kon Ichikawa
Produced by	Masaichi Nagata
Written by	Natto Wada Shohei Ooka (novel)
Narrated by	Eiji Funakoshi
Starring	Eiji Funakoshi Osamu Takizawa Mickey Curtis
Music by	Yasushi Akutagawa
Cinematography	Setsuo Kobayashi
Editing by	Tatsuji Nakashizu
Distributed by	Daiei
Release date(s)	November 3, 1959
Running time	104 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

Fires on the Plain (野火, Nobi^?) is a 1959 Japanese war film directed by Kon Ichikawa, starring Eiji Funakoshi. The screenplay, written by, Natto Wada, is based on the novel Nobi (Tokyo 1951) by Shohei Ooka, translated as Fires on the Plain.^[1] It initially received mixed reviews from both Japanese and international critics concerning its violence and bleak theme.^[2][3] It is now generally well regarded.^[4]

Fires on the Plain follows a tuberculotic Japanese Private named Tamura and his attempt to stay alive on Leyte during the latter part of World War II. Kon Ichikawa has noted its thematic struggle between staying alive, and crossing the ultimate low.^[5]

Plot

Set on the island of Leyte in the Philippines, in the winter of 1945, as Allied Forces cut the Imperial Japanese Army off from support and supplies. The Imperial Japanese army, with barely any weapons or ammunition, has been told to fight to the death.

Private Tamura, who is sick with tuberculosis has been told to commit suicide if unable to get help from a field hospital, and is given several yams. Tamura gets lost in a forest, and runs into a villager, who offers him food. When the villager tells Tamura that he will look for some food, Tamura follows him, only to see him yelling for people to help. Tamura then runs. On his way to the hospital, he notices a mysterious fire on the ground. Fearful that it might be a signal fire for allied planes, he runs away from it. When he arrives he is told they only take in people who are about to die. Outside the hospital, he finds a group of wandering Japanese soldiers who have met similar fates. He sticks with this group until an artillery barrage destroys the hospital, and forces the group to scatter.

Traveling alone, Tamura discovers a deserted village on the coast, where he finds a pile of dead Japanese soldiers. As he searches for food, a young Filipino couple arrive by canoe and run to a hut where they open a concealed cache of salt hidden under a floorboard. When Tamura enters the hut, the girl begins to scream. Tamura tries to placate them by laying down his rifle, but the girl continues to scream and he shoots her. When his rifle jams, the boy flees to his canoe and escapes. Tamura takes the salt and leaves the village. Soon, on the horizon, he sees three Japanese soldiers, and Tamura runs up to them. After introducing himself, they sight another fire. Tamura says they are signal fires, and that they should leave. The leader of the group says that farmers are just burning rice stalks to re-fertilize fields. The leader then comments to his group that they need to move or they will never get to Palompon, where they will supposedly be evacuated. Tamura asks if he can come along with them to Palampon. The leader of the group says that if he can keep up, he can come along, and comments that his group is tough, and that they'd even eaten human flesh in New Guinea. One member of the group notices that Tamura's bag is overflowing with salt, and Tamura agrees to let them have some as long as they take him to Palompon.

The group soon comes across a larger group of desperate soldiers headed to Palampon, where it is rumored they will be evacuated. Among this group is Nagamatsu and Yasuda who are doing their best to sell tobacco for food or money. Tamura befriends Nagamatsu. The soldiers then prepare for nightfall, when they will travel to Palampon. Attempting to cross a heavily traveled road at night, American tanks ambush them and the survivors of the attack are forced to hide. In the morning, the U.S. medical jeep arrives and Tamura plans to surrender, but then watches as a female Filipino guerilla guns down a fellow survivor attempting to surrender.

Tamura again begins wandering again. Delirious with hunger, he comes across his comrades Nagamatsu and Yasuda, who claim to have survived on "monkey meat" and are living in a small shelter in the forest. Later, Nagamatsu goes out to hunt "monkeys", and Tamura asks Yasuda if there is any place he can find food. Yasuda says he can use his grenade on a pond to get fish out. When Tamura brings out his grenade, Yasuda steals it, and Tamura leaves, to find Nagamatsu. When Nagamatsu almost shoots Tamura, he knows what monkey meat really is. Nagamatsu pleads with Tamura, saying that they would be dead if they didn't eat it. Tamura then leaves with Nagamatsu to go back to Yasuda. When Nagamatsu hears that Tamura's grenade got stolen, Nagamatsu says they need to kill Yasuda, or he will kill them with the grenade. Nagamatsu pretends to search for Yasuda, then when he hears Yasuda coming. He hides near a hill and shoots Yasuda. Nagamatsu begins cutting Yasuda up, Tamura becomes disgusted and shoots Nagamatsu.

Tamura then deliriously heads towards the "fires on the plains," which are frequently commented on by characters throughout the film, trying to find someone "who is leading a normal life." He slowly walks towards the fires, while the Filipinos shoot at him several times and miss. The film ends with Tamura collapsing out of exhaustion, making his fate ambiguous, and the date of February 1946.

Cast

Eiji Funakoshi as Tamura

Production

Kon Ichikawa stated in a Criterion Collection interview that he had witnessed the destruction of the atom bomb first hand, and had felt since then that he had to speak out against the horrors of war, despite the many comedies that made up most of his early career.^[6] Fires on the Plain got greenlighted by the studio Daiei, because they thought it would be an action movie. Ichikawa decided that it was a film that needed to be made in black and white, specifically requesting Eastman's black and white. The studio initially refused this, but after a month of arguing, the studio agreed to Ichikawa's request.^[7] Ichikawa also said that he had wanted actor Eiji Funakoshi to be in the film from the beginning.^[8] Kon Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, penned the script which got the approval of Shohei Ooka (author of the novel, Fires on the Plain).^[6]

The film was shot completely in Japan in Gotenba, Izu and Hakone. The actors were fed little and couldn't go to brush their teeth or cut their nails to make it look more realistic, but doctors were on set constantly. It was delayed for two months when actor Eiji Funakoshi fainted on set.^[6] Ichikawa asked Eiji Funakoshi's wife what had happened and she responded that he had barely eaten in the two months that he was given to prepare.^[6]

Mickey Curtis said, also in a Criterion Collection interview that he did not think he was a good actor (himself), but Kon Ichikawa said he just needed to act naturally.^[9] Ichikawa had heard that Curtis was very thin, so he decided to use him, as the characters in the story have eaten very little.^[10] Ichikawa specifically told each actor how he wanted them to react, and wouldn't rehearse.^[10] Ichikawa expressed that the narrator (Tamura) couldn't be a cannibal because then he would have crossed the ultimate low. Ichikawa consulted with his wife (Natto Wada, also the screenwriter for Fires on the Plain), and they decided against having him eat human flesh. As a result, Tamura never eats any of the human meat in the film because his teeth were falling out.^[5]

Distribution

Fires on the Plain was released November 3, 1959 in Japan. It was later released on June 6, 2000 by Homevision.^[11] Then it was released as part of the Criterion Collection in March 13,^[12] 2007.^[13] The disc includes a video interview with Kon Ichikawa and Mickey Curtis. Also included is a video introduction with Japanese film scholar Donald Richie and a booklet with an essay on Fires on the Plain by Chuck Stephens. The film was digitally restored from a Spirit Datacine 35 mm composite fine-grain master positive print.^[13] The sound was restored from a 35 mm optical soundtrack.^[13] It was co-released by the Criterion Collection with another Ichikawa film, The Burmese Harp.^[14]

Reception

In its early release in the United States, many American critics dismissed Fires on the Plain as a gratuitously bleak anti-war film.^[2] In 1963, The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther gave the film a quite harsh description, writing "Never have I seen a more grisly and physically repulsive film than 'Fires on the Plain.'" He continued, "So purposefully putrid is it, so full of degradation and death... that I doubt if anyone can sit through it without becoming a little bit ill... That's how horrible it is." He notes however, "this is a tribute to its maker, for it is perfectly obvious to me that Kon Ichikawa, the director, intended it to be a brutally realistic contemplation of one aspect of war." He points out, "...with all the horror in it, there are snatches of poetry, too..." He ends the review commenting that the only audience who would enjoy the film were those with bitter memories towards the Japanese held over from World War Two.^[15]

A 1961 Variety review also cautioned that the films bleakness made it a difficult film to promote to audiences, commenting that it "goes much farther than the accepted war masterpieces in detailing for humanity in crisis." Variety's review is more positive than the New York Times, calling it, "one of the most searing pacifistic comments on war yet made... it is a bone hard, forthright film. It is thus a difficult vehicle but one that should find its place."^[16]

Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader said: "No other film on the horrors of war has gone anywhere near as far as Kon Ichikawa's 1959 Japanese feature."^[17] John Monogahn of the Detroit Free Press compared it to Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima.^[18] The film is not without criticism however, and many Japanese critics dislike Ichikawa's work. ^[3]

In response to the recent Criterion collection release, Jamie S. Rich of DVD Talk review, had the following to say about it: "I wouldn't call Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain – Criterion Collection an anti-war film so much as I'd call it a realist's war film. Rather than build his story around big explosions and the thrill of battle, Ichikawa instead brings the human drama front and center, directing his spotlight on a soldier who is left to his own devices when the guns stop blazing. He poses the question, 'When stranded on the bombed-out landscape after the fighting has calmed, what will those left behind do to survive?' It's bleak and it's chilling, and yet Fires on the Plain is also completely engrossing. It's the post-action picture as morality play, the journey of the individual recast with Dante-esque overtones. Ichikawa doesn't have to hit you over the head with a message because the story is so truthfully crafted, to state the message outright would be redundant. Once you've seen Fires on the Plain, the movie will get under your skin, and you'll find it impossible to forget."^[19]

Awards

In 1960, the film won the Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director and Best Cinematography, the Kinema Junpo Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Actor (Eiji Funakoshi) and the Mainichi Film Concours for Best Actor (Eiji Funakoshi), all three in Tokyo.

In 1961 it also won the Golden Sail at the Locarno International Film Festival.^[20]

Themes

Symbolism

Donald Richie has wrote that Fires on the Plain is in contrast to Ichikawa's earlier The Burmese Harp as it "could be considered concilatory" where as Fires on the Plain is "deliberately confrontational."^[21] Alexander Jacoby has wrote: "The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain differ in approach – the one sentimental, the other visceral, rather in the manner of the American Vietnam movie of later years. The comparison is telling: just as Hollywood has largely failed to deal with the politics of US involvement in Vietnam, preferring to focus on the individual sufferings on American soldiers, so Ichikawa's war films make only a token acknowledgement of wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, and largely buy into assumptions of Japanese victimhood in World War II – assumptions which to this day remain too widespread in the country." He has further wrote that, like Tamura, many of Ichikawa's characters are loners.^[22]

Ichikawa has been called a cinematic entomologist because he "studies, dissects and manipulates" his human characters. Max Tessier calls Fires on the Plain the summit of this tendency in Ichikawa's work, and "one of the blackest films ever made." Tessier continues that by criticizing the loss of humanity which war causes, the film remains humanist.^[23] James Quandt calls Ichikawa a materialist, noting that he represents abstract concepts in simple objects. In Fires on the Plain, life and death are carried by Tamura in the objects of salt and a grenade respectively.^[24]

Christianity

Audie Bock points out that in the novel the narrator is in Japan with a Christian view of life, while the film ends with Tamura walking, hands up into gunfire.^[25] When first shown in London, critics complained about this changed ending. By ending with the hero in a hospital meditating on the past, the novel implied a faith in man and the possibility of progress. However Ichikawa's film rejects faith. Tamura puts his faith in man by walking towards the villagers, and he is shot. The individual Tamura may be purified at the end of the film, but the world and mankind are not.^[26]

Asked about the controversial change in ending, in which the narrator apparently dies rather than survive, Ichikawa replied, "I let him die... I thought he should rest peacefully in the world of death. The death was my salvation for him."^[27] Further, the main character in the film does not have the Christian outlook that narrator of the novel has. Ichikawa explained, "...it somehow didn't seem plausible to show a Japanese soldier saying 'Amen'."^[28]

Degradation

Some critics have seen in Fires on the Plain themes of degradation and brutality. Ichikawa has said that things the characters do, such as cannabalism, are such low acts, that if the protagonist, Tamura did them, he would've crossed such a low that he'd be unredeemable and Ichikawa commented that Fires on the Plain is his attempt to show ""the limits in which moral existence is possible."^[29] Others, such as Chuck Stephens, note that Ichikawa occasionally mixes black humour and degradation, like in a scene where Soldiers exchange boots, each getting a better pair, until when Tamura looks down at the boots, they are completely soleless.^[30]

Film critic Chuck Stephens, in his essay Both Ends Burning for the Criterion Collection release of Fires on the Plain, said the following about Ichikawa : "At once a consummate professional and commercially successful studio team player and an idiosyncratic artist whose bravest films-often displaying a thoroughly odd obsession (to borrow the title of one of his most brilliantly sardonic black comedies) with fusing the brightest and bleakest aspects of human nature-were passionately personal (if not political or polemical) prefigurations of the Japanese new wave, has always had a gift for crystallizing contradition."^[31]

The black humor employed by Ichikawa has also often been the subject of comment by others. It has been claimed that Eiji Funakoshi was fundamentally a comic actor.^[32] The noted Japanese film critic Tadao Sato points out that Funakoshi does not play his role in Fires on the Plain in the usual style of post-WWII anti-war Japanese films. He does not put on the pained facial expression and the strained walk typical of the genre, but instead staggers confused through the film more like a drunk man. Sato says that this gives the film its black-comic style which results from watching a man trying to maintain his human dignity in a situation which makes this impossible.^[33] Quandt notes that Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, wrote the script to the film and contributed this sardonic wit.^[34] Audie Bock says that this black humor, rather than relieving the bleakness of the film, has the effect of actually heightening the darkness.^[25]

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Hauser, William B. (2001). "Fires on the Plain: The Human Cost of the Pacific War". in Quandt, James (ed.). Kon Ichikawa. Cinematheque Ontario Monographs. Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario. pp. 205–216. ISBN 0-9682969-3-9. 

External links

• Fires on the Plain at the Internet Movie Database
• Fires on the Plain at Allmovie
• Fires on the Plain at Rotten Tomatoes
• (Japanese) Fires on the Plainat the Japanese Movie Database

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