Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Burmese Harp
1956 · Kon Ichikawa · The Burmese Harp on Sightlines
The company is singing. A ragged column of Japanese soldiers, worn out and far from home in the last days of the war in Burma, sings in parts, and Private Mizushima plays along on a small arched Burmese harp. Their captain, a lover of music, leads them like a choir. In this unit, singing keeps morale up, and it is also a way of signaling to one another and of getting out of danger. Kon Ichikawa begins his war film with a war that has almost ended, and with men who are better at harmony than at fighting.
Keep that sound in mind, because the film is built on what happens when one voice drops out of it.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us a good way to see why this matters. He argued that classical film runs on what he called the action-image. A character takes in a situation and acts to change it, the situation answers, and the story moves forward on that loop of seeing and doing. The war film is its purest form: the enemy is there, so you attack, retreat or hold. After the Second World War, Deleuze says, the loop broke. Filmmakers began showing people stuck in situations they could no longer answer with action. He called this the crisis of the action-image, and he traced it mostly through Italian neorealism, the films André Bazin praised for staying with the ruins and with ordinary people who simply endured. The Burmese Harp is Japanese, it was made in a studio, and its register is openly sentimental, yet it belongs to the same moment. Its soldiers have lost the war. The situation in front of them has no right action left in it.
You can see this in the mission that sets Mizushima's story going. After the surrender he is sent to talk a holdout garrison into putting down their arms. This is a war film where the key task is to persuade. The soldier's job has turned into speech, and the speech is not enough. Then Mizushima is separated from his unit and has to make his way back alone. For safety he puts on the saffron robes of a Theravada monk and shaves his head. The disguise starts out practical. What it lets him do is walk through Burma as someone who looks and does not fight.
Deleuze has a name for this kind of figure: the seer. The seer is a character who is no longer an agent and has turned into a witness, someone who can only take in what lies in front of them. On the road, Mizushima comes across fields of Japanese dead who were never buried. Minoru Yokoyama photographs them in hard black-and-white contrast, and Ichikawa holds on them with great gravity. Nothing in the frame calls for a response from the sensory-motor loop: there is no enemy to fight and no path to run along. Deleuze calls these pure optical situations, moments when seeing no longer leads to doing, so it has to change the person who sees. Shōji Yasui plays this almost entirely through bearing. Mizushima says less and less. His transformation shows in his posture, in the way he walks, in a face that has started to hold something back.
This is the film's real invention. Ichikawa sets two tempos against each other, and his famously precise cutting gives each its own pulse. The company moves to the brisk, nearly percussive rhythm of men marching and singing, a cutting style that descends from Eisenstein's graphic montage. Mizushima's journey is slow: a small figure against open sky and bare hillside, alone and exposed. That way of filming a lone traveler crossing terrain owes a lot to Mizoguchi's Ugetsu.
The company works almost as one character. Deleuze borrowed an odd word for a group filmed as a single feeling body: the dividual. It is not a crowd of separate people and not one person either. When the men sing "Hanyū no Yado," the Japanese version of "Home Sweet Home," their longing has one voice. Their grief at losing Mizushima is a hole in the chord. Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion had already used shared song to join men across wire and nationality, and Ichikawa takes that idea and gives it a wound.
The second half turns on a problem of looking. Again and again the company glimpses a monk who might be their lost comrade. Here Deleuze's terms for how films make us read signs are useful. A mark is a sign that follows habit: you see a monk, you think "monk." A demark is a sign that breaks the habit and makes you interpret. The shaven head and the robes ought to close the question, yet something in how the figure moves keeps it open. Yokoyama stages these encounters as looking and mis-seeing, and Ichikawa's editing stretches the suspense. We know more than the soldiers do, so we watch them try to recognize what we have already seen, and the film becomes partly about the gap between a body and the name we give it.
The ancestors are clear. All Quiet on the Western Front showed the war from the eye level of the defeated private. Ikiru showed how a man's inner change could come through restraint and a single song instead of a speech. Rashomon won at Venice, opened the festival road that The Burmese Harp followed to its own prize there, and showed what high-contrast monochrome could do with figures in wild land. Looking forward, the most important heir is Ichikawa himself. Three years later he made Fires on the Plain, which reverses this film's mercy completely. The two are usually discussed together, and each makes the other hard to watch in the same way twice.
What did this film do for cinema? It took the most action-driven genre there is and asked what a soldier does once fighting has no meaning. Its answer is that he looks, and that what he sees changes him. That question leaves a lot open. Can one man's private act answer for a collective disaster? The film is honest enough not to make that easy.
When you watch it, listen for the harp, and notice when the singing has a voice missing. Watch how a man changes clothes and, without one line of explanation, becomes harder for his friends to see.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — A war film set after the surrender: Mizushima's mission is to persuade a holdout garrison, so action has shrunk to speech, and speech is not enough
- the seer (voyant) — Disguised as a monk, Mizushima crosses Burma as a witness rather than a combatant; a performance carried by bearing and growing silence
- pure optical situations — The fields of unburied Japanese dead, shot in high contrast and held with gravity: nothing in the situation can be answered by action, so the sight changes the one who sees it
- dividual — The company works as a single choral character, singing 'Hanyū no Yado' as one voice of longing, and Mizushima's individuation is measured against it
- demark — The company keeps glimpsing a monk who might be Mizushima; the robes and shaven head should settle his identity, but staged looking and mis-seeing keep the question open
- montage — Ichikawa's rhythmic cutting moves between two tempos, the brisk Eisenstein-descended marching and singing of the company and Mizushima's slow solitary pilgrimage