The great Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, died today of pneumonia. He was the man behind such films as The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, and Tokyo Olympiad.

The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain both dealt with the Japanese perspective on World War II and provided different senses of the nature of war, often combining beauty with death and destruction.

If you’ve never seen an Ichikawa film, now might be the time : and learn more about the Japanese master by watching his films.

Also, there is a great essay on the making of The Burmese Harp on Criterion’s web site, I recommend giving it a read, for a taste of the article, go below the fold:

The film, in other words, is closer to Buddhism than the book is. Ichikawa anchors Mizushima’s gradual discovery of his own spirituality in that initial act of theft, a selfish crime that contains the seeds of the thief’s selfless future. For Ichikawa, Burma is, indeed, Buddha’s own land; he films mostly landscapes and temples, generally in wide-angle shots, always stressing the weight of the land and the places in the lives of the humans who pass through them. (When he shows the faces of Burmese in close-up, they are always silent: observing, judging . . .) It’s Burma that turns Mizushima from a fake monk into a real one, and it’s the corpse-strewn Burmese landscape (stained bloodred, as the opening and closing caption reminds us) that guides this young monk to his vocation. Mizushima is deeply conflicted: part of him longs to rejoin his comrades and return to Japan, but the need to right spiritual wrongs overwhelms him, and he elects to stay. Notionally serving Japan, he behaves in a way that most Japanese find baffling. In his way, Mizushima is as “unknown” “and unknowable”as the dead soldiers he cremates and buries. [Criterion]