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"Fires on the Plain:" the most searing depiction of war ever filmed.

Posted by tinear on July 7, 2008 at 15:37:25:
I've seen many similar-theme Russian films, as well as classic American ones, but Kon Ichikawa's 1959 classic surpasses them in its unrelenting, unflinching view of war.
No heroics here, nor brave self-sacrifice, nor valiant effort for glory.
Rather, Ichigawa shows three Japanese soldiers reduced to animals, clawing and scratching for food, huddling in mud and rain to avoid detection by American soldiers, and marching like zombies towards what they increasingly sense is an unattainable escape.
Why, then, watch this utterly black film?
Because it isn't.
Almost magically, the viewer senses a power in the men's futility, a humanity in the most inhuman of their actions.
The lead actor, Eiji Funakoshi, speaks but a few words the entire film but, in the history of film, surely there is no more powerful a performance almost completely communicated by body language and eyes.
In the wonderful accompanying information, the director relates how he asked the young actor to appear thin since privation had to be believable. The first day of filming, the young man collapsed and had to be taken to hospital: his wife related that he had starved himself for two weeks immediately prior. The film, Ichikawa continues, had to be delayed for two months while Eiji fully recovered.
See this immediately.
No citizen of a nation involved in the armed occupation of another should fail to see this.