Représentations de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le cinéma japonais (de Kon Ichikawa)

“If psychiatry had not existed, the movies would have had to invent it. And in a sense they did”, wrote Irving Schneider in the foreword to the excellent book by Krin and Glen Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema. For this session of the Société Médico-Psychologique focusing on Cinema and Psychiatry, opportunistically “delocalized” at the misfit theatre called Le Brady, we wanted to present two masterpieces of the Japanese director Kon Ichikawa. These two powerful war stories, The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain illustrate the fascinating dialogue between movies and psychiatry, specifically in this case around war trauma and its consequences. “While Ozu depicted the consequences of war on contemporary 1950 Japan, Ichikawa remained stuck on the last weeks of agony of 1945… Ozu's films begin where those of Ichikawa end”, wrote Serge Kaganski in the Inrocks in 1994, when the Parisian public was able to discover Kon Ichikawa's movies. Of course, we could have chosen to rather “psycho”-analyze Godzilla, this terrible monster awaken from his deep prehistoric sleep by the Bikini atomic explosions and appearing for the first time on Japanese screens in 1954 as a metaphor of the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as a subtle criticism of the US presence in Japan, nine years after the end of the war. We should not forget that King Kong against Godzilla (1962) directed by Inoshiro Honda was part of the Brady unconventional program. Kon Ichikawa was discovered by the majority of the Occidental public in 1960, when he received in Cannes the Jury's Prize for his film Kagi (The strange obsession) together with Antonioni for L'Avventura while the Palme d'Or was awarded to Fellini for La Dolce Vita. Kon Ichikawa, Japanese filmmaker (1915-2008) began his career as a cartoonist. Considered as the tenant of a rather commercial school, Ichikawa directed numerous films, more than fifty, not all always well received by the critics. However, we concur with Max Tessier who in his book Images of the Japanese cinema, states “to see several of his films, you realize that there is in some of his movies a true Ichikawa's 'eye', mix of black humor and cinematographic entomology” (indeed Ichikawa depicts some of his main characters as helpless insects), and a very recognizable aesthetic, especially in his films in cinemascope. His first films were satirical comedies, scratching the moral conventions of the Japanese cinema. Then came more drama and deep movies, especially three masterpieces, two great war films, The Burmese Harp in 1956, Fires on the Plain in 1959 and Kagi (The strange obsession) presented and awarded at the Cannes festival in 1960. The characters painted by Ichikawa are not the typical “heros” but individuals lost in a quest of an absurd goal, often isolated, like the two soldiers of his two war films, The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain. In Les Carabiniers, Jean-Luc Godard reminds us the true nature of war: (in war…) “there is no victory, there are only flags and men falling”. In these two war films, Ichikawa is far from lecturing us, and far from an alleged exaltation of the values of feudal Japan like what was reproached to his first film by the US censorship. Kon Ichikawa personal aesthetic develops on screen an almost clinical vision of the traumatic destinies of two Japanese soldiers, caught in chaos, lost in the middle a disorganized mass of soldiers. Interestingly, we would suggest to watch these two movies in a row, as they are at the same time so similar and so different, like a kind of construct in mirror, the second prolonging the first in a vertiginous horror. They are quite similar in the sense that they are both depicting the destiny of an anti-hero, a Japanese soldier defeated at the end of the Second World War. But they differ totally aesthetically, to the classical academic format of Buddhist meditation of The Burmese Harp, responds the crude cinemascope format of the Fires on the Plain, using the black and white to emphasize the horror, the unspeakable, the unbearable, making in my opinion Fires on the Plain one of the greatest war movies. This cinematographic artwork reflects the true creative qualities of Kon Ichikawa i.e. the Ichikawa's eye… The Burmese Harp is his last work before switching to cinemascope, which was introduced relatively late in Japan, only in 1957. The classic cinematographic format throughout the film instils a slow pace that drives Mizushima the musician soldier in his journey towards Buddhism. Taken prisoner with what remains of his company, Mizushima is sent by his commanding officer, at the request of the British allied forces, to convince a few soldiers isolated in a cave of the futility of their resistance in front of the British guns. Mizushima manages to reach these survivors but they consider him a traitor, honor ordering them to die in battle but not surrender. Mizushima will only be saved from their violence by the British bombs. Only survivor to rise, he finally collapsed under the Burmese sun. This is his first step of his initiatory journey to Buddhism, that has somewhat been announced by Ichikawa portraying the soldier Mizushima with unusual artistic qualities. The second step is the encounter with a monk who will help him to survive and heal. Finally, Mizushima, considered dead by his comrades, becomes a monk to save the souls of his fellow soldiers, and decides to stay in Burma to give burial to all the dead Japanese soldiers whose bodies cover the beaches and woodland of Burma, and thus to cleanse the shame of the war. In contrast to this Buddhist fable, Fires on the Plain also shows defeated Japanese soldiers exiled this time in the Philippines, and again, through an anti-hero, the soldier Tamura, expelled from his unit because of his tuberculosis, but not sick enough to be admitted to the military hospital, and finally isolated in a mass of wandering soldiers with no goal. By adapting one of the masterpieces of the literature of war, the Fires (Nobi) of Shôhei Ooka, Ichikawa subtly uses the cinemascope to depict with absolute darkness the horror, the deprivation, the degradation, and the unspeakable. In Fires on the Plain, rain and mud, light and shadow exhibit an incredible cinematographic beauty, even when the horror is such that it could become gore, especially when Tamura discovers the true nature of monkey meat that his comrades pretend eating, or when the same Tamura witnesses the murder of a tyrannical sergeant by the young soldier forced to kill “monkeys”, murder followed by strange cannibalistic ritual by this young soldier on the body of his commanding officer. We will not make any psychopathological analysis of the two soldiers depicted by Ichikawa, but we recommend you to see The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, to let you choose to be either a psychiatrist or an entomologist to analyze the destinies of Mizushima, the soldier/bonze and Tamura, cannibal against his will. Let's conclude with Samuel Fuller, who served in the First US Infantry Division during World War II, the famous Big Red One (and who actually directed the eponymous film): “War is barbarous, cannibalistic, barbaric as The Burmese Harp and cannibalistic as Fires on the Plain…”