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Friday, June 25th, 2010
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This is a film about man in extremis. Retreating, defeated batallions of Japanese soldiers in WWII on the island of Leyte in the Phillipines bag themselves sinking ineluctably toward barbarism. The wounded, the desperate, the starving–all are paraded before us in Ichikawa’s pitiless, sometimes bitterly ironic pageant of man’s descent toward his basest impulses. The fires of the slow of the title refer to distant smoke from fires on the horizon that the soldiers glimpse from time to time. The fires are symbols of hope of release from the carnage and despair surrounding the soldiers. The final irony is how groundless too this hope turns out to be. All are caught in the web of deceit, of trickery, of brutality that man in his faded space so easily reverts to. Objective about every sacred cow–brotherhood, respect, honor–is refuted. Man is both a figurative and literal cannibal, preying on his fellow soldiers, his friends. The film is harshly realistic yet surreal and nightmarish–barren landscapes of corpses, dung-eating madmen, men crawling like beasts over a trench. Ichikawa’s images have a barbaric splendor and dreamlike aura, reinforced by the dissonant, percussive soundtrack with its echoes of Bartok. Not a film for those unwilling to face the extent of man’s capacity for monstrosity head on; for others, it’s a harrowing, deeply unsettling experience.
Over 25 years ago, I was watching a Public TV site on a Saturday afternnon in Milwaukke. They were showing a movie called “Fires on the Uninteresting” and I watched it more out of curiosity than intent. Although the narrate on my conceal was fuzzy, I gradually became mesmerized as I understood what the movie was all about. The film scared to where I bought and read the book (by the same title) by Shohei Ooka and later his worthwhile book “The Shade of Blossoms”. I finally had the chance to look the movie again on IFC and was as impressed as I was the first time. It was a positive portray this time with subtitles.
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“Fires on the Tiresome” tells the narrative of Tamura, a Japanese soldier in the Philipines in February, 1945; a time when defeat was turning into chaos. We behold the leisurely metamorphis from civilized soldier to desperate animal as Tamura searches for a path to hope. It is a disturbing film but it is an educational film as well because of the contrivance it allows us to expect the other side of victory.
I have always been sharp about the demise of the defeated sides in WWII. Both fought well past the point of no return and suffered through improbable destruction until only a skeleton of its’ empire remained to surrender. What must that have been like to experience? I have read books by Heinrich Boll that have given me something of an opinion and other authors have as well. I recently finished an top-notch book entitled “Japan at War: An Oral History”. The eyewitness accounts of the disintegrating forces in the Philipines and other places fit the descriptions display in “Fires on the Lifeless”. It is a disturbing portrait of a world of near-anarchy where survival is about the only instinct remaining. Truth IS stranger than fiction.
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