A study of Fires on the Plain (1959) — Director Kon Ichikawa

I consider Fires on the Plain (1959) a brilliant example of poetic narrative. Here are 2 scenes:

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Long stretches of the movie contain no dialogue, only the sounds of nature and some music. The in-between stretches are dreamlike and indeed somewhat remind me of Chaplin at times, though not comedic. In fact the main character moves and walks in subtly Chaplin-esque fashion, but this is sort of ghost-Chaplin or zombie-Chaplin.

It begins with a hard slap in the face. Tamura, the main character, is standing before his commanding officer in the Imperial Army being savagely shouted down in an intense series of alternating close-ups with each actor staring directly into camera. Very unnerving. The CO is angry but Tamura has a tranquil calmness that he'll exhibit through the entire film—the result of starvation and tuberculosis. This scene explains the setup—the company of soldiers has been abandoned or forgotten on some forsaken tropical island and most of the food and water are used up. The army—being an army—needs something for the soldiers to do, so it's got them digging air raid shelters one after another—busywork to keep them occupied, but it also weakens them.

Well, already you've got meaningless activity in a surreal and desolate situation filled with misery and suffering. Ticks off several boxes from the Theatre of the Absurd list. But this isn't purely meaningless, there's a definite story. It takes its time unfolding, and not much actually happens, but it does have a narrative. Mostly though it's the slow dissolution of the identities and lives of the remaining men—devolving from soldiers into something like forlorn zombies shuffling across desolate but often beautiful landscapes as hope and meaning slowly evaporate.

Spoilers follow if you're concerned about that. Go watch it online and come back if you want—I'll wait. There's a full version on YouTube with English subs, not sure on the legality. Watch it before it's gone.

After the slap that sets the film in motion (it's really a slap in the face of the viewer—this is not going to be your average popcorn movie) Tamura is told to return to the hospital that already turned him away—he's of no use to his unit due to the TB. If the hospital still won't take him, he's to wait outside for three days and if they still won't take him then he's to walk some ways off into the jungle and detonate his grenade.

So right at the beginning he's already consigned to the grey zone at the outskirts of life. Only the most forlorn hope that the hospital will take him in, and beyond that only self-inflicted death to look forward to. And if he refuses his final mission, then the shame and ignominy of a traitor is his lot.

So begins his odyssey across increasingly corpse-strewn landscapes where it's impossible at times to tell the living from the dead. Frequently soldiers lie unmoving, but then after a while one might get up groggily or roll over. Even the ones still on their feet seem already dead. This is an honest-to-god zombie movie—the real thing, not another Hollywood spectacle. This is what the walking dead truly are—people who shuffle listlessly through a meaningless life with no motivation and no hope, no reason to go on. It's not a trope or a special effect—just look around. They walk among us every day. Of course it's a lot easier to contemplate when there's some weird disease or chemical that wakes the dead from their graves—that way you don't have to consider the reality of it, you can see it from a safe distance.

But for all the thematic brutality and bleakness, it's a surprisingly pleasant film. Nothing about it is really graphic or realistic. There's no horrific disease or wound makeup, the closest it gets is some theatrical blood which isn't really even applied realistically. Much about the film in fact feels theatrical to me. That's one of its great strengths. And in addition, the dazed and weakened nature of all the men lends them a slow, meditative almost trancelike quality that makes it feel like some kind of inexorable dream, removing it one level from immediacy.

In one of the most riveting scenes about 20 men are shuffling along a road and suddenly for no apparent reason they all drop to the ground as if dead. A moment later you hear the droning of a plane and the strafing begins. Puffs of dust rise along the road and some of the bodies twitch and jerk momentarily. Then the plane is past and about 15 of the men just tiredly stand back up and keep right on walking as if this is daily routine and death holds no surprise or shock anymore. In fact you get the feeling many of them believe the fortunate are the ones who didn't have to get up and keep moving ahead in this endless nightmare.

That's one of the focal points—the tendency of life to hang on, to keep reducing its focus as the horizons shrink around it. One day a person might be horrified that he won't be able to pay the cable bill—oh god, what will happen? And several months later maybe he's living on the street beside some trash cans happily chewing on something he just pulled from one, as if life is perfectly fine. It's weird how we can adjust to even the most shocking deprivations. There's some kind of weird tenacity at work that can reframe any situation.

And for that reason this film is filled with a certain wistful—I hesitate to call it joy. Maybe a melancholy wistfulness found in even the worst of situations. The little things give these men pleasure—meeting an old buddy on the road after some months apart, though you've both grown gaunt and your uniforms are tattered rags now. Finding a discarded pair of boots in a ditch that are in better condition than yours are. Discovering a hidden trove of salt. Tamura fills a pocket with it and several of the characters he runs across are desperate for it. One cries openly as he drops a bit in his mouth—they've been living on boiled or raw yams for months.

I consider this film a masterpiece of perfectly balanced narrative and poetry. Sometimes one is dominant, sometimes the other, but it's always compelling and hauntingly beautiful. And on top of that it hits so many of the points inherent to Absurdism, without being meaningless or bleak itself the way the original Absurdist plays are.