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The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse
The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

The Burmese Harp (1956)
DVD9 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 4:3 | Cover+Booklet | 01:56:24 | 7,25 Gb
Audio: Japanese AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama, War | The Criterion Collection #379

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Stars: Rentarô Mikuni, Shôji Yasui, Tatsuya Mihashi

An Imperial Japanese Army regiment surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of World War II and finds harmony through song. A private, thought to be dead, disguises himself as a Buddhist monk and stumbles upon spiritual enlightenment. Magnificently shot in hushed black and white, Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp is an eloquent meditation on beauty coexisting with death and remains one of Japanese cinema’s most overwhelming antiwar statements, both tender and brutal in its grappling with Japan’s wartime legacy.


During the final days of the Second World War, a weary Japanese regiment is sent on a military campaign to Burma. Far from zealous, determined career soldiers, the troop consists of ordinary, dutiful civilians led by a thoughtful music teacher named Captain Inouye (Rentaro Mikune). In order to improve morale and build camaraderie, Captain Inouye has taught the soldiers to sing as they make their way through the arduous Burmese jungle. One soldier, Corporal Mizushima (Shoji Yasui), has naturally taken to playing his handcrafted harp and provides the haunting melody. Arriving at a peasant village, the soldiers welcome the tranquility and hospitality of the community, only to realize that British soldiers have been surreptitiously observing them. In order to disguise their combat preparations, the soldiers sing "Home Sweet Home" while donning their military equipment. But during a brief pause, they realize that the British soldiers have joined in their melancholic, universal harmony. The war is over. The Japanese have surrendered. The British soldiers have come to escort the troop to a Prisoner of War camp in Mudon. However, Mizushima is asked to perform a final mission: to persuade a group of Japanese soldiers hiding in the mountains to surrender. The task proves to be impossible, and the fortress is attacked. Mizushima is critically wounded, but is nursed back to health by a Buddhist priest. Now clad in a monastic robe instead of a military uniform, Mizushima sets out to reunite with his regiment, only to find a solemn, urgent personal calling that leads him further away from his friends and beloved homeland.

The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

The Burmese Harp is a haunting, poignant and serenely indelible examination of the aftermath of war. The film opens with the spare, enigmatic words: In Burma, soil is red, so are rocks. Using landscape as a metaphor for the isolation and suffering of the soul, Kon Ichikawa contrasts the chaotic, harsh realities of war with the tranquil expanse of nature: the mountain fortress attack; the discovery of a body leaning against a tree in the jungle; the mass burial of soldiers along the shoreline. Symbolically, Mizushima's spiritual transformation is reflected in a scene where the troop assembles for choral practice at a religious site, as Mizushima rests inside the hull (the figurative soul) of a Buddha statue. It is a reflection of his own enlightenment and sense of purpose after witnessing a great and senseless tragedy - a transcendence beyond his spiritual captivity - towards a lonely, indefinite journey, guided solely by humanity and personal conscience.
The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1956) is a visually sumptuous, dramatically uneven but generally impressive film about a Japanese soldier's religious odyssey in Burma (now Myanmar), where he's compelled to abandoned his unit at the end of the war so that he may remain and bury its war dead. The film was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film and won the San Giorgio Prize at the Venice Film Festival, reportedly after tying with Rene Clement's Gervaise. In any case it was among the first in the tiny handful of Japanese movies shown in the west in the 1950s following Kurosawa's Rashomon a few years before. Nearly all of the earliest Japanese movies exhibited in the United States were period dramas crammed with "Asian exoticism"; American audiences, it was perceived, wouldn't be interested in contemporary Japanese stories, so at the time they got pictures like Sword for Hire (Sengoku burai, 1952) instead of movies by directors Ozu and Naruse.

The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

The international success of The Burmese Harp (released at the time as Harp of Burma) established an inaccurate portrait of its director. This and Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 1959) seemed to peg director Kon Ichikawa as a filmmaker specializing in antiwar dramas. In fact up to this time Ichikawa was best known in Japan for his biting contemporary satires, which remain among his very best pictures even though they're almost never shown in America and, up to now, haven't been released to home video in the west.

The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

Based on the novel by Michio Takeyama and adapted for the screen by Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, The Burmese Harp follows a platoon starving and on the run in July 1945. Gentle Captain Inoue (Rentaro Mikuni), with a civilian background in music education, keeps his men's spirits up by teaching them choral music, with Private Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) accompanying them on a Burmese harp he's taught himself to play.

The war ends and Inoue and his men surrender, but Mizushima volunteers to try and convince another platoon, holed up in a remote cave in the mountains, to surrender to the British. However, the unit's commander (Tatsuya Mihashi) vehemently refuses to surrender: he and his men would rather die honorably than acquiesce. The cave is shelled and dozens die meaninglessly.

The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

Making his way back to the relocation center/prison camp in Mudon, Mizushima gradually fades into the landscape, adopting the robes of a Buddhist monk and, en route, is overwhelmed by the endless piles of rotting Japanese corpses, shown in very honest and graphic terms by mid-1950s movie standards. "The soil of Burma is red," reads the text that opens and closes the film, "and so are the rocks."

The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

The Burmese Harp has variously been described as an antiwar film, an adult fairy tale, a religious odyssey of enlightenment, a sentimental war drama, a kind of penance for the senseless loss of human life at the hands of Japan's militarists. In fact it's all these things, and Ichikawa and Wada for the most part manage to juggle all these balls in the air at once with nary a misstep. Seen today, the film is more impressive for its visual design and its unusualness - there's nothing quite like it in early postwar Japanese cinema - than its emotional impact, though like the men in Inoue's charge most Japanese audiences can't watch it without crying their eyes out.

The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

As Ichikawa points out in the 2005 interview about the film, included as an extra feature, only a few scenes with actor Yasui were actually shot abroad; most of the film was made in Japan, near Hakone and Izu, though unless the viewer has actually been to Myanmar the effect is completely convincing. Ichikawa and longtime Shintoho/Nikkatsu cinematographer Minoru Yokoyama's compositions are vivid and evocative with painterly framing and lighting. The black and white photography, with its high-contrast compositions, creates a movie-real grittiness for the battle-type scenes that simultaneously allow for poetic, ethereal vignettes that at appropriate times convey a dream-like quality. The screenplay deftly splinters off into two directions, telling its story from two perspectives: the men wondering about Mizushima's fate, and Mizushima's odyssey, with a chance encounter on a bridge as the fulcrum in which these points of view intertwine.

The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

That the film plays at times like filmed novel lends it both its uniqueness and a certain weakness. Some images, like the transformed Mizushima standing in a field in his newly adopted monk's robes with two parrots on his shoulders, as Inoue's fenced-in men watch him from a distance, are beautifully realized and work wonderfully well. But the film's barrage of sentimental songs (and composer Akira Ifukube's mournful underscoring, at times nearly identical to cues he wrote for 1954's Gojira) is extravagantly overdone, hammering away at its core message on the universality of music and its use, as write Tony Rayns describes it, as "salve for the soul." At times the film threatens to become insufferably noble while ignoring the realities of Japan's militarism in Asia, but the filmmaking is at such a high level it's easy to ignore this and lose oneself in its hypnotic telling.
The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]
The Burmese Harp (1956) [The Criterion Collection #379] [Re-UP]

Disc Features:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- New video interviews with director Kon Ichikawa (16:22) and actor Rentaro Mikuni (11:46)
- Original theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A new essay by renowned critic and historian Tony Rayns

All Credits goes to Original uploader.

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