Burmese Harp - Criterion Collection (1967)

"Whatever You Do is Useless....Burma is Buddha's Country"

Quite simply, this is one of the most emotionally beautiful movies I have ever seen. I can't entirely explain why I find it so touching. Amid the most horrific of experiences, a kind, simple young man tries to make sense of his participation in this horror.

The movie is filled with singing and harp playing. In the abject misery of defeat and desolation, the soldiers cheer and comfort themselves with song. They sing in unison to strengthen their unity and patriotism but one, the harpist, is separated. He is wounded and nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk. After he recovers, he experiences a spiritual epiphany not unlike Saul on the road to Demascus.

He wanders alone and seperate across the blasted landscape littered with piles of war dead. In his confusion and sorrow, he assigns himself the impossible task of burying all the dead. Atonement? Guilt? Survivor's guilt? Penance? Trauma? Sacrifice? Whatever the exact definition, he acts out of a desperate need to understand the horrors he has endured and participated in. A profound change has swept over his soul and he cannot go back among his regiment, either physically or spiritually. He has cast himself out of his known world.

The movie is hauntingly beautiful as director Kon Ichikawa refuses to let the soldier fully explain himself. His fellow soldiers and, in particular, his compassionate and thoughtful captain, strain beyond themselves to understand why he avoids them and will not return home with them. They are hurt and confused. To walk alone is the antithesis of Japanese soldierly conformity. Perhaps there is no why, there simply is. The parrots speak words they do not understand. The changed man does not even try. He just plays his harp. The final letter reading aboard the boat home is more for the audience's sake and is mildly jarring because, while the letter is beautiful in itself, the monk's willingness to express himself so outwardly incongruent with his character.

In his deliberate exile, he is the war's last casualty, a sacrifice to allow the other soldiers to heal and continue their lives. Simultaneously a Christlike figure and a profound example of Buddhism, the harpist has managed to both assign and relieve himself of the awful burden of life. June 29, 2008

Poignant neo-propaganda

The Burmese Harp is beautifully produced and acted. That earns any film, even Leni Reifenstahl's work for the NAZIs some admiration. This is in the same genre, that of a nation that committed unspeakable acts of brutality passing off what happened in the war as a tragedy - to them.

Both German and Japanese films of this genre, Look What Happened To Us!, allow these two fascist nations to look away from what they did, and instead reflect with sorrow on the travails of small units of their forces with whom they can identify.

Hollywood does that for Americans who think, as do the Germans and the Japanese, that our only fault in Vietnam was to lose the war. American forces did unspeakable things in Southeast Asia, as did the Japanese before them. Who was it said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

The children of nations great and small are taught to obey, not to think for themselves. That is the function of national school systems. The nationalistic bureaucrats who imprison the children of the world in schools for six hours or more daily seem genuinely surprised when a small percentage of kids show the courage to rebel because they intuit the score, inchoate as they may be otherwise.

Most of the nation's children become, thus, pre-positioned culturally for their nation's use in The Next War. No one likes to hear this. This review will garner negatives from both liberal and fascist ends of the political spectrum. We are not trained to do the hard work of thinking for ourselves, of doing the very hard work of freeing ourselves of the numerous deceptions foisted on us by those with political, religious, social, and intellectual agendas.

Every work of art, such as The Burmese Harp, is a lie. We don't know Truth. We only know Maya, illusion. Some illusions tug at our hearts. This did for me. So did the German film, Stalingrad. These are films produced by the nations that were responsible for the estimated sixty million deaths of World War Two.

Whenever you feel an emotional pull from works like these, put some perspective on it - think. May 10, 2008

A "must see" movie, thoughtful and affecting, but with a BIG blind spot

It is August 1945. Bands of Japanese troops are retreating before the advance of the British Fourteenth Army. One company of soldiers led by Captain Inouye (Rentaro Mikuni), resting in a Burmese village, realizes it is surrounded. As the troops scramble to meet the expected attack, they sing folk songs to hide their fear and conceal their preparations from the British and Indian troops. They are singing "Home, Sweet Home" in Japanese, and the enemy sings back in English! The war has been over for three days, and the unit surrenders with no further loss of life. This perfect, moving scene begins "The Burmese Harp."

One Japanese soldier, Mizushima (Shoji Yasui), is sent by the British to encourage a unit of holdouts to also surrender. That unit, however, is still in the grip of the bushido code. They refuse to surrender and are killed by British artillery. Mizushima survives and wanders through the countryside alone and disoriented. He encounters Japanese dead at every turn. Becoming an itinerant Buddhist monk, he takes on a personal mission to find and bury the dead. Though his former comrades are eager that he rejoin them so that they can return to Japan together, in a moving final scene he refuses so that he may purify his own soul by confronting the horror and suffering of the war.

The choral singing (Captain Inouye had been a music teacher before the war) is moving. The cast is uniformly strong. The scenes of Burma and its people are fascinating. A few now-passe photographic techniques do not diminish the high artistic standard of "The Burmese Harp." Although it is an anti-war movie, it is not heavy-handed.

The film's plot and viewpoint, however, have a glaring weakness, a blind spot that must be noted. Mizushima grieves for the Japanese dead, but there's no sign that he also regrets what the Japanese Army did in Asia in the years before the plot opens in 1945. There's no aggression. No brutality. No death marches. No beheading of allied POW's. No comfort women. And we never see Mizushima grieve for the allied or Burmese dead.

In this regard, the movie prefigures Japan's postwar failure to face its aggression and war crimes during World War II. That failure still troubles Japan's relations with China, Korea, and the other nations that experienced Japanese brutality at first hand. A cultural historian might judge that the omissions in "The Burmese Harp" helped shape the dominant postwar narrative, portraying Japan as the victim in the war. Director Kon Ichikawa sidestepped a true look at the war.

This is indeed a fine movie, well worth seeing for both its artistic and moral content. The viewer must, however, enlarge its message about war and peace, tragedy and suffering, and atonement.

-30- March 11, 2008

Deeply moving!

There are many good reviews here so I won't go into the plot. I just want to add my vote of 5 stars (wish I could give it more)to this beautiful film. This is a movie that isn't just well made, but the sentiments are important. In an interview that is included on the disk, the director says that he felt it was a mission, like a divine imperative, that he make this film. He answered the "call" magnificently and has produced a work of art that will touch hearts for a long time.

The two main actors are wonderful to watch. They are both physically beautiful and have a simplicity and sincerity that is precious (and rare).

Despite the fact that the story takes place in the midst of human misery, there is the saving grace of beauty, in the splendid devotional art of the Buddhist culture and the music! The singing of the men, in their deep Japanese voices and the gentle sound of the Burmese harp, are incredible. (I'm running out of words to express my reactions to this film.)

The plight of the isolated soldier who undergoes a different kind of suffering than his "brothers" do is almost exquisitely painful...the decision he faces, to return to everything and everyone he has loved, vs. his perceived duty to bury the dead is really agonizing. I was voting with the parrot, "Let's all go home together."

My only wish is that it could have been made in color.

I found the interviews with the director and one of the stars to be a wonderful extra treat. They are both in advanced years and show a sweetbess and gentleness that is an extention of the spirit of the film.

I was reminded of another heart felt film, Les Choristes, in which the dismal, painful setting of a French boarding school for delinquents, is transformed by one man who teaches them to sing. If you like this, check that out! September 14, 2007

A dishonest portrayal of war's brutality

Despite its Buddhist trappings, The Burmese Harp is not a film about Buddhism or religion, but a film about responsibility and atonement to the _Japanese_ war dead. Director Kon Ichikawa may have wanted to make a film with universal themes, but the message that comes through is for a much narrower audience.

The film tells the story of a Japanese soldier cut off from his unit who has a transformative encounter with death. Stealing the robes of a monk to disguise himself, Mizushima struggles through a broken landscape to return to his unit, along the way encountering one grisly corpse after another, sometimes piles of them, some being picked apart by carrion eaters. He tries to bury or cremate those he finds but there are so many he quickly exhausts himself. Stumbling into town, his life is changed after witnessing a British medical team bury an unknown Japanese soldier, a scene which crystallizes for him his duty to stay in Burma to inter the corpses of Japanese soldiers.

In its broad themes, the film is humanistic and universal. Love of music and home is shared by all humans. We all shy from death and suffering. But look closer and you find that Mizushima sees only Japanese corpses. His primary motivation for remaining in Burma is to bury _Japanese_ soldiers whose remains might otherwise be thrown into unmarked graves by the British or Burmese. But what of Burmese corpses? British corpses? Not a one to be seen, nor commented on. To what degree can one atone for participating in war without realizing that all sides suffer, not just your own?

This Criterion release features an interview with Rentaro Mikuni, who plays the unit captain, in which he mentions that he was himself stationed overseas during the war and was made to take bayonet practice on live animals as well as prisoners of war. Yet nothing like this kind of behavior is ever suggested in the film. There is no whiff of the brutality visited on the Burmese by Japan's Imperial Army. On the contrary, the Japanese soldiers are portrayed as rather happy go lucky lads caught in a bad situation, which pretty much continues to be the national attitude of Japan toward its war time experience.

The Burmese Harp is a hollow piece of work that depicts suffering without addressing the causes of suffering. For more forthcoming accounts of Japanese experiences of WWII, see Minoru Matsui's "Japanese Devils."

# August 26, 2007

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