FIRES on the PLAIN by Shinya Tsukamoto “Smell the Earth
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FIRES ON THE PLAIN By Shinya Tsukamoto “Smell the earth. Smell the water and air. Smell the sap. Smell the peeling skin. Smell the scattered organs and your own rotting flesh.” Shinya Tsukamoto Cast Shinya Tsukamoto (Tamura), Lily Franky (Yasuda), Tatsuya Nakamura (Corporal), Yusaku Mori (Nagamatsu), Yuko Nakamura (Tamura’s wife) Crew Production Director and Scriptwriter: Shinya Tsukamoto Producer: Shinya Tsukamoto Cinematographers: Shinya Tsukamoto, Satoshi Hayashi Production Company: Kaijyu Theater Original Story: Shohei Ooka International Sales: Coproduction Office Assistant Director: Satoshi Hayashi Music: Chu Ishikawa Production Manager: Kaori Saito, Ayako Yamanaka Costume: Hitomi Okabe FIRES ON THE PLAIN SFX molding: Masako SFX sculpting: Chiharu Rikuta, Natsuko Kado Weapon modeling: Tatsuya Mine, Yoshiyuki Siroiwa, Aya Yumiba Special effect: Satoru Narumi, Taku Nakano Sound: Masaya Kitada Editing: Shinya Tsukamoto By Shinya Tsukamoto Japan, 2014, 87 min., colour Synopsis Long Synopsis In the final stages of WWII, the occupying Japanese army in In the final stages of WWII, the occupying Japanese army in the Philippines is rapidly losing ground, facing local resistance the Philippines is rapidly losing ground, facing local resistance combined with an American offensive. The final few Japanese combined with an American offensive. It is only a matter of time survivors, having almost been wiped out, have crossed the before the few survivors are wiped out. threshold into a realm where there are no friends, no enemies and no God. Private Tamura, suffering from tuberculosis, is abandoned by his platoon. At the field hospital, a group of soldiers with untreatable diseases and injuries are left outside to die. Private Tamura joins them and becomes acquainted with a young soldier named As they near the rendezvous point, the soldiers must cross a Nagamatsu. That night, the hospital is destroyed by enemy fire, clearing strewn with the corpses of Japanese soldiers, where but Tamura escapes uninjured and flees into the jungle, throwing Americans wait in ambush. Tamura and the soldiers decide to move himself at the mercy of nature’s overwhelming forces. Unable to at night, but the Americans attack mercilessly with their superior go on and assuming that his end is near, he takes out his grenade, firepower, until all that remains are corpses, body parts and chunks intending to kill himself, when he notices some wild yams growing of flesh. nearby. Since yams are inedible unless cooked, Tamura heads to a nearby village in search of matches. He discovers that the village Tamura survives the assault and decides to surrender, but then has been deserted after a ransacking by Japanese soldiers. Tamura sees another soldier do the same, only to be shot dead by a is taking a nap in the village church when a young couple arrives. Filipino guerrilla. Tamura then roams the jungle, which has been The woman screams in horror when she sees Tamura. Tamura yells transformed into a hell on earth, piles of bodies everywhere. to try to calm her down, but panics and pulls the trigger of his rifle Extreme fatigue numbs his mind, and he and the handful of other to silence her. She is the first person he has ever killed. Tamura survivors are transformed by hunger. Nagamatsu offers him meat heads back to the hill where he discovered the yams and finds from a «monkey» he has caught. When Tamura realises that there three soldiers, busy harvesting his food supply. From them Nagamatsu is actually hunting the surviving Japanese soldiers, not Tamura learns of the desperate situation of Japanese soldiers, and monkeys, to feed himself, he crosses into a realm where there are of the order to assemble at Palompon a port town at the other end no friends, no enemies and no God. of the island, from where they are to be evacuated. Tamura and the soldiers start walking across the island to the rendezvous point. Along the way Tamura is reacquainted with Nagamatsu, who had also fled when the hospital was attacked. Nagamatsu has survived by running errands for Yasuda, a middle-aged bully of a soldier. Tamura empathises with the fragile Nagamatsu. Director’s Comment It has been 70 years since Japan took part in an armed conflict, and awareness of what it is to be alive. in that time there has not been a single Japanese casualty of war. Now there is a concern that the idiocy of war will be forgotten, with In a trance-like state, we have tried to brush death under the carpet so few left who have witnessed its horrors. The price of those 70 rather than acknowledge it as an uncompromising reality of nature. years of peace is a tendency to look away from death. As a result Removing ourselves from death brings us precariously close to it we have become collectively fearful of anything “dirty.” Within our without an appropriate sense of respect or awe. sanitized urban jungle, our brains have overdeveloped while our bodies have lost touch with physical sensation. We have lost the Since the 1990s I have made movies about the anxieties of those Director’s Comment who confuse reality with fantasy in the city’s virtual-reality I do not believe in propaganda movies, so what you take away mindscape. I have depicted the foolishness and violence of people from my film is up to you. I can still sense the horror and screams as they attempt to escape this environment. of those who decayed in the jungle during WWII. I receive it by radar, which is directly connected to my spine, and I have injected This violence should not lead us to the ultimate foolishness of war. those sensations into every frame. If you sense any of this, I have succeeded. The tragedy of war is often shown in movies from the viewpoint of the victim. I chose to show the terror of war through the depiction of a regular man who is turned into a murderer. He must kill others whether he wishes to or not. This is the reality of war. People quickly become accustomed to the absurdity of killing, and stop questioning it. Instead they roam aimlessly, in a similar manner to the one we use in the modern world. For this reason, it was important for me to record the madness of killing under an expansive blue sky, against lush green and vivid red vegetation, surrounded by all-consuming natural beauty. I wanted to depict the human condition alongside the vastness of nature. Previously I made movies about humans trapped within the city. With this film I want to show modern city dwellers that the city is not the world. That it is just a rudderless boat floating in the sea of nature. I wanted to ask why we opt to go to war, by showing people engaged in the foolishness of it. If fighting is a primal instinct, I wanted to investigate whether intelligence had a role to play in it. Interview with Shinya Tsukamoto Can you explain how you view the relationship in your films between life in contemporary Japanese cities, which is very peaceful, and life on the battlefield? Shinya Tsukamoto: My earlier films such as TOKYO FIST and BULLET BALLET describe the relationship between the city (solid and hard, like concrete) and human (soft, like flesh). The city has Interview developed so much, to the extent that we forget about the natural teenager, I read a lot of books. Among these was Black Rain by S.T.: When I was at high school I watched a lot of Japanese Your scenes contain a lot of darkness. Why did you choose to shoot in world around us. The city is non-organic, clean and safe. Living Masuji Ibuse. The first time I read Fires on the Plain was at that films, and I saw it in the Namiki-za Theater in Ginza. It was very this way? inside such an environment, we can hardly imagine the possibility time, and it stayed in my mind. I remember that it gave me a really impressive. However, when I read the novel, the image I had was that some day we are going to die, death seems phantasmal and we vivid sense of what war is like - how terrifying it is. It felt very real to very different from what I got from Ichikawa’s film. His film looks at S.T.: This was in the original novel, which had a lot of darkness in never fully grasp what it means to be alive. The protagonists of my me. I felt the war was portrayed as something very immediate. The the dark part of human nature, rather than nature and landscapes. its descriptive scenes, especially on the front line. We can hear previous films are those who scream loudly, even violently: “Yes, we novel Fires on the Plain has this very original sense of realism to it, The sense of nature is to some extent limited. Conversely, in my the scratching of metal items from the surrounding soldiers, and are living now”. It is similar to trying to wake up from a dream by which made me feel as if I were in the shoes of the main character film I wanted to capture the greatness of nature. In the novel, in we never know if they are friend or foe… Then a tank shows up. I pinching ourselves. We might find proof of our existence in a boxing while I was reading it. the midst of the battles there are very visual descriptions of the wanted to convey this without showing it. Soon flesh explodes and ring, for example, by beating each other up.