Japan
1959
104 minutes
Black and White
1.33:1
Japanese
378
An agonizing portrait of desperate Japanese soldiers stranded in a strange land during World War II, Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain is a compelling descent into psychological and physical oblivion. Denied hospital treatment for tuberculosis and cast off into the unknown, Private Tamura treks across an unfamiliar Philippine landscape, encountering an increasingly debased cross section of Imperial Army soldiers, who eventually give in to the most terrifying craving of all. Grisly yet poetic, Fires on the Plain is one of the most powerful works from one of Japanese cinema’s most versatile filmmakers.
| Tamura | Eiji Funakoshi |
| Yasuda | Osamu Takizawa |
| Nagamatsu | Mickey Curtis |
| Director | Kon Ichikawa |
| Producer | Masaichi Nagata |
| Original story | Shohei Ooka |
| Screenplay | Natto Wada |
| Cinematography | Setsuo Kobayashi |
| Editing | Tatsuji Nakashizu |
| Production Design | Tokuji Shibata |
| Music | Yasushi Akutagawa |
Across an eighty-plus-film career as marred by indifferently rendered studio assignments as it is marked with peerless visual innovations and boldly imagined literary adaptations, director Kon Ichikawa—the unlikeliest of auteurs—has nevertheless long since been acknowledged, alongside Akira . . .
Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), the hero of Kon Ichikawa’s overwhelming Fires on the Plain, may be the loneliest man in the history of the movies—lonelier than the spiritual pilgrims of Bergman, Bresson, and Dreyer. He is a soldier in an army that, in defeat, has turned its back on him.
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