On Kon Ichikawa

There is a very beautiful image in cinema of a Buddhist monk weaving across a field among the war dead. He had been a Japanese soldier, in Burma, and as Japan surrenders in 1945, he becomes a monk with a purpose of burying the dead, a kind of Antigone for humanity.

The image is in The Burmese Harp, recently minted by The Criterion Collection.

I saw The Burmese Harp in the mid-1960s, during the Vietnam war, and the image stayed with me, so much so that I have used it several times in poems.

In "The Song of the Earth," nine poems written over three decades, about ancient China (Tu Fu traditionally being one of the two greatest Chinese poets; the other is Li Po):

"Tu Fu
weaves across
a field
among the
thousands of
war dead."

In "The Coming of Fascism to America," written in 2005, after four more decades of life under the military-industrial complex:

"We weave across a field
amid the millions of war dead
who breed millions of poems."

When someone dies, like Kon Ichikawa, the director of The Burmese Harp, it's good to note the passing with some celerity. He died February 13, 2008, at age 92, but I was busy, and 92 is not a shock, and I wanted to do some justice to an appreciation of a film artist who might be compared with the Americans King Vidor and Howard Hawks in his versatility and mastery.

In 1968/69, National Educational Television, as it was then called, presented Ichikawa's very long television adaptation of the first novel, The Tale of Genji. It was in ten or twelve parts, perhaps ten or twelve hours, or longer.

Murasaki Shikibu finished The Tale of Genji in about 1021. It is a very long novel, and by a woman. Arthur Waley translated it in the 1920s and 1930s, and because Proust's Remembrance of Things Past was coming out in English around the same years, the two were rightly compared.

The NET version was neither dubbed into English nor presented with English subtitles. There is a third option, the voiceover: thus, you hear the Japanese of Murasaki, and the English translation. It works if the voiceover direction and actors are good, as they were here. NET treated Roberto Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV with similar results. Anglophones never forget lines like "Genji was gone and no one could take his place" or Louis reading aloud from Montaigne's essays: "Neither the sun nor death can be faced steadily."

A copy of the NET version of Ichikawa's Genji is perhaps somewhere in some vaults of Public Television. If it can be found, it should be brought back.

Another Ichikawa film, The Makioka Sisters, has such a sublime first ten minutes, which includes the credits, that I have never been able to watch the rest of the film.

I saw yet another, An Actor's Revenge, with the film critic Elliott Stein, who considers it the best use of the wide screen of any film.

I hope that Criterion will bring out both of these, which are not available on DVD. And perhaps that Genji, too.

I will try to find time to write more about the very strange and very great Burmese Harp, but for now this must be my hasty appreciation of an artist of world stature, upon his passing.

Comments

[strifeknot]

He was a great filmmaker.

[mamacat]

HuffPost's Pick

I too saw The Burmese Harp back in the 1960s. Like Mr. Macafee, I found it a haunting, and wonderful, movie.

No movie can cover every topic involved in World War II, or every topic involved in the Pacific Theatre, or every topic involved with the war in Burma. And yet, this black and white movie does things with the camera that are so amazing, and so unforgettable, that it can be forgiven for not doing more to expose the atrocities that the Japanese committed. Just by showing the suffering of those in the defeated Japanese army, this film does humanity a great service. I know of no films that show the angst in any defeated army so well.

The scenes burned in my memory are of the soldier-turned-monk walking on a dusty road, with his head turned down, of Japanese soldiers killing themselves, and of soldiers sailing on a ship back to Japan, staring out over the ocean as the sun sets. My descriptions of course do not do justice to the scenes in the movie.

To anyone who has the intestinal fortitude and intellectual curiosity to try to imagine things from a defeated Japanese point of view, this movie may be remembered as one of the best movies of all time. Today, as the United States once again suffers from the lack of wisdom to use its military power prudently, comparisons to Imperial Japanese suffering may be timely.