Symbolism Donald Richie has written that
Fires on the Plain is in contrast to Ichikawa's earlier
The Burmese Harp as it "could be considered conciliatory" whereas
Fires on the Plain is "deliberately confrontational". Alexander Jacoby has written: "
The Burmese Harp and
Fires on the Plain differ in approach – the one sentimental, the other visceral, rather in the manner of the American
Vietnam movie of later years. The comparison is telling: just as
Hollywood has largely failed to deal with the politics of US involvement in Vietnam, preferring to focus on the individual sufferings on American soldiers, so Ichikawa's war films make only a token acknowledgement of wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, and largely buy into assumptions of Japanese victimhood in World War II – assumptions which to this day remain too widespread in the country." He has further written that, like Tamura, many of Ichikawa's characters are loners. Max Tessier has called Ichikawa a cinematic entomologist because he "studies, dissects and manipulates" his human characters. Tessier calls
Fires on the Plain the summit of this tendency in Ichikawa's work, and "one of the blackest films ever made." Tessier continues that by criticizing the loss of humanity which war causes, the film remains humanist.
James Quandt calls Ichikawa a materialist, noting that he represents abstract concepts in simple objects. In
Fires on the Plain, life and death are carried by Tamura in the objects of salt and a grenade respectively.
Christianity Audie Bock points out that in the novel the narrator is in Japan with a Christian view of life, while the film ends with Tamura walking, hands up into gunfire. When first shown in London, critics complained about this changed ending. By ending with the hero in a hospital meditating on the past, the novel implied a faith in man and the possibility of progress. However Ichikawa's film rejects faith. Tamura puts his faith in man by walking towards the villagers, and he is shot. The individual Tamura may be purified at the end of the film, but the world and mankind are not. Asked about the controversial change in ending, in which the narrator apparently dies rather than survive, Ichikawa replied, "I let him die... I thought he should rest peacefully in the world of death. The death was my salvation for him." Further, the main character in the film does not have the Christian outlook that narrator of the novel has. Ichikawa explained, "...it somehow didn't seem plausible to show a Japanese soldier saying 'Amen'."
Degradation Some critics have seen in
Fires on the Plain themes of degradation and brutality. Ichikawa has said that things the characters do, such as cannibalism, are such low acts, that if the protagonist, Tamura did them, he would've crossed such a low that he'd be unredeemable and Ichikawa commented that
Fires on the Plain is his attempt to show ""the limits in which moral existence is possible." Others, such as Chuck Stephens, note that Ichikawa occasionally mixes black humour and degradation, like in a scene where soldiers exchange boots, each getting a better pair, until when Tamura looks down at the boots, they are completely soleless. Film critic Chuck Stephens, in his essay
Both Ends Burning for the Criterion Collection release of
Fires on the Plain, said the following about Ichikawa : "At once a consummate professional and commercially successful studio team player and an idiosyncratic artist whose bravest films-often displaying a thoroughly odd obsession (to borrow the title of one of his most brilliantly sardonic black comedies) with fusing the brightest and bleakest aspects of human nature-were passionately personal (if not political or polemical) prefigurations of the Japanese new wave, has always had a gift for crystallizing contradiction." The black humor employed by Ichikawa has also often been the subject of comment by others. It has been claimed that Eiji Funakoshi was fundamentally a comic actor. The noted Japanese film critic
Tadao Sato points out that Funakoshi does not play his role in
Fires on the Plain in the usual style of post-World War II anti-war Japanese films. He does not put on the pained facial expression and the strained walk typical of the genre, but instead staggers confused through the film more like a drunk man. Sato says that this gives the film its black-comic style which results from watching a man trying to maintain his human dignity in a situation which makes this impossible. Quandt notes that Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, wrote the script to the film and contributed this sardonic wit.
Audie Bock says that this black humor, rather than relieving the bleakness of the film, has the effect of actually heightening the darkness. ==See also==