The Burmese Harp

The Burmese Harp (1956) (ビルマの竪琴) is a Japanese anti-war film directed by Kon Ichikawa and based on a novel for children (same name) by Michio Takeyama. It starts off at the end of WWII with a group of weary Japanese soldiers traversing the Burmese landscape. One plays a harp (saung), to which the others sing. They come to a village where the locals welcome them with food and a roof to rest under. After the meal, the locals quietly slip away, and the Japanese realize that British and Indian soldiers in the forest have surrounded them. The Japanese sing a song, to make the Brits believe they're not on to them, but then the Brits join in and for a while sing along with them, and the Japanese soon learn the war has ended.

Private Mizushima (the harpist) is sent on a mission to convince another Japanese battalion to put down their weapons and peacefully leave the hillside cave where they've been holed up. He fails when the commander decides Mizushima must be lying or it's some trick of the enemy; after all, the Japanese would never surrender. The Brits resume their bombardment, and Mizushima is left for dead on the gravelly hill.

Captain Inouye and the rest of Mizushima's battalion have been taken to a camp in Mudon for prisoners, and before long come to believe that their dear Mizushima perished on his mission. But then while crossing a bridge over a river they pass a man who, although dressed like a Burmese monk, looks very much like their lost comrade. Could this be Mizushima?

The film is very good storytelling and beautifully shot. Ichikawa remade the film in color in the 80s, and apparently he wanted to shoot the original in color too but ultimately decided against it due to concerns about lugging the camera equipment in and out of certain shooting locations in Burma. Much of the film was shot in Japan, but the scenes in Burma stand out for their magnitude and cultural significance and must be among the earliest filmed there. It was nominated for an Academy Award in the "Best Foreign Language Film" category for 1957. It was also one of the first Japanese post-war films with a pacifist theme. Although the film doesn't touch on Japanese war atrocities in the region (it's been argued that Ichikawa wouldn't have been aware of those events at the time of filming), it does depict Japan's new post-war spirit, with the Buddhist ideal of altruism the main substance underlying the narrative.

Yojimbo

Yojimbo (用心棒, 1961) is an Akira Kurosawa classic starring Toshiro Mifune, this time as a rōnin who happens upon a forsaken backwater village in the turbulent time before the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, in the 1860s. The film starts off with our hero wandering aimlessly on dusty country roads and, like a coin toss, he chucks a stick into the air to let chance determine which direction he'll take when it drops.

Two rival gangs are at war for control of the village when the rōnin arrives. He befriends the saké brewer, who runs a little tavern next to the coffin maker. The coffin maker has been doing good business, what with all the gang killings (but points out later that while truces are bad for business so is full-on bloodshed, as no one bothers to pay for a coffin when chaos reigns).

The rōnin resolves to take advantage of the conflict, at first for money, we assume, but then out of a sense of honor, or at the very least to bring some peace and quiet back to the place. Kuwabatake Sanjuro (meaning: 30-year-old mulberry field) is what the rōnin names himself upon glancing at the field out the back door. He joins one gang and then switches sides, part of his scheme to get these thugs to destroy themselves. After all, he alone can't take out that many, and so he plays this game with them, although we're never really sure how in control of the game he actually is. Is he a master of deception? Or just a reckless rōnin whose wits are as aimless as his countryside meanderings?

Kurosawa put together a great cast; whenever the two gangs face off at the center of town, each actor/thug has his very own villainous mien, not to mention unique weapon, including a gargantuan wooden mallet lugged about by the giant actor and wrestler Namigoro Rashomon. Surely Martin Scorsese pulled some ideas out of those scenes for the opening battle in Gangs of New York. (Yojimbo was also remade as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with Clint Eastwood and gangster movie Last Man Standing (1996) with Bruce Willis.) In Yojimbo even the geisha each have their own unsettling countenance and demeanor. Tatsuya Nakadai plays a creepy, gun-toting baddie (well enough). And we're treated to a performance by Isuzu Yamada (as a villain), who played Ayako Murai in Kenji Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy and was in dozens of other films during her long career.

Yojimbo's atmosphere is an entity unto itself, the product of Kurosawa's inventive imagination and meticulous eye for detail. Dirt's sucked up by the wind, and blasts the eyes. Smoke billows through cracks in the woodwork. Light is vanquished by layers of grey. The village is secluded and also feels enclosed somehow, as if the outside world could never find it for all the towering weeds and dull trees penning it in. And the desperation. When someone mentions silk merchants, we think how can that be so? Silk? In such a place this just can't be—only violence and greed and grit. A soft, gentle village, though, is what our hero hopes to ultimately leave behind.

I very much enjoyed Seven Samurai (1954), but Yojimbo is great too. Fewer stand-out scenes but all in all a solid, memorable action film and a cleverly unraveled, amusing story, with Kurosawa's magic cinematic touch. Definitely a must-see-again.

The Inland Sea

The Inland Sea is a 1991 documentary-style film by Lucille Carra and an adaptation of Donald Richie's 1971 travelogue of the same name. Only fifty-six minutes long, it is premised on Richie's notion that, “One is meant to wander, turning at random along these straight and open corridors filled with the rustling of the forest, the whispering of the sea.” We're thus taken on a journey, mirroring Richie's travels, rich observations, and roaming contemplation, a version that is faithful while also on its own narrative and visual quest—"a bit of shooting around” as Richie noted. We can expect this, of course, as Richie's book was published twenty years prior, in 1971, pieced together from journal entries penned in the years before that, on his various trips to the sea and its countless islands. Much of what he had experienced there and seen, and those he encountered, would've been difficult to find; Richie back then was well aware things were changing rapidly and that much would soon be gone or lost, or transformed by a modern Japan and world.

What I particularly like is the film's dream-like atmosphere and tone. Several of the book's most memorable parts are narrated by Richie, infusing a loosely-connected, poetic context into the imagery and its textures. Richie's gentle, nasal voice, often plaintive as he reads, lends to the film's romantically languid essence and the feeling that everything within is flowing and passing, the water, sky, landscapes, people, animals, architecture and culture. The past into the present into the inevitable but unknown future—a future which, Richie might have lamented, would be wholly unsympathetic to what once was. It is a film one can be absorbed into—its steady, mild current—to drift through a time decades ago, harkening back to a time decades before that, when Richie wandered on a journey of self-discovery.