The Burmese Harp 4K 1956

War. A disturbing word that echoes in the ears with moans of pain and death rattles, bitter cries and inspired prayers, passionate whispers of farewells and desperate cries of hope. Thousands of bodies were crippled by war, but it crippled even more souls. Kon Itikawa closely follows one such Japanese man with a broken soul for almost two hours.

And, as usual, the director's hero is an outcast: a Japanese soldier who could not find the strength to return home after his army surrendered. Broken by the senseless death of his comrades, miraculously surviving and, by chance, trying on the modest clothes of a monk, Mizushima decides to follow the path of a hermit. It is not known whether his family will ever see him again, for the blood-red soil of Burma is littered with bodies in need of a final tribute.

The maestro of directing, here, as in each of his films, does not express his judgments aloud. There is little dialogue in the film, but there is a lot of singing. The saung, which the main character learned to play at the beginning of the film, helped the soldiers keep their hearts alive, and in the finale, it became the voice of the silent Mizushima. The songs that are constantly heard in all the languages of the warring parties become the anti-militarist leitmotif of this poetic and philosophical film, suggesting that people from different countries have much more in common than divides them.

The Burmese Harp is the fruit of the director's serious reflections. One day, “he realized that he simply had to make this film!” Despite this, the film should not be understood, but felt. The viewer is required not to analyze, but to empathize. Only then will it be possible to perceive the feeling of absolute hopelessness of a soldier looking at the disorderly scattering of corpses that fill the wide frame. And only then will it be possible to feel the hopeless grief of a man sitting in a boat departing from the shore, who has lost the meaning of life. This is the horror of war—the tragedy of each individual who, as a victim, is forced to piece together his broken life, while still bearing part of the blame for what happened.

Itakawa is often criticized for not showing the daily life of soldiers clearly enough and for not denouncing the politicians who started the war. He was called soft-hearted, and his films were compared to American cinema, which for a long time did not dare to speak openly about the Vietnam War. But this is not weakness, but a chosen position. Feeling like a small person himself, Kon filmed stories about small people, seeing no point in looking for the right and the wrong. Even if he had found those to point the finger at, it would not have diminished the sum of all the personal misfortunes of the inhabitants of the warring countries. He considered it more important to draw attention to the consequences than to shake his fist from the big screen. And I agree with him on that.