Fires on the Plain (1959)

Directed by Kon Ichikawa.
Starring Eiji Funakoshi and Osamu Takizawa.

In a Nutshell: A private in ailing health struggles to survive WWII combat.

1959 yielded two humanistic war films intent on tarnishing the legacy of military nationalism in WWII-era Japan. Masaki Kobayashi's sprawling The Human Condition witnessed the slow, grinding demise of idealism and the human spirit. Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain depicts quick, ugly cruelty. It tests the will of man’s survival when reduced to the barest of resources. When Private Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi) becomes stricken with tuberculosis early on, he is ordered to consider two choices: find medical care (to continue fighting) or suicide. The battlefield offers far worse. Ichikawa tracks Tamura through the hell of combat with each repugnant side inflicting different brands of hostility. But there is purity to Ichikawa’s study of the human will at odds with the bleakest of frontiers.

It is an unnerving film, with Tamura’s journey void of the rigor and civility that keeps society from folding in on itself. Ichikawa is not shy in revealing the haunting details, cut with occasional shots of scenic beauty too heartbreaking to smack of irony. But it is that compassion that reverberates with Tamura’s arc and his dogged refusal to submit to the elements. With his ambiguous ending (deviating from the novel) Ichikawa suggests little else is worth claiming. The cost is still great; even inner peace rewards no certainty. For Tamura, it becomes the only solace taken into abyss, moving towards the unseen salvation one prays will await on the horizon. In his pitiless rendering of war’s horrors, Ichikawa achieves the same revelation, and never looks back.