Japanese Cinema Eclectics日本映画撰集

A Multipart Series Devoted to Unexplored Tangents of the Japanese Film
Introduction and Q&A by Donald Richie in English (Film in Japanese with English subtitles), Curator: Donald Richie
Film: Fires on the Plain (Nobi), Directed by Kon Ichikawa, Scenario by Natsuto Wada after the novel by Shohei Ooka (1959, 104 min.)



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Fires on the Plain (Nobi)

One of the most powerful works from one of Japan’s most versatile filmmakers, Kon Ichikawa (1915-2008), Fires on the Plain is also share the brutalities and horrors of the last days of the Imperial upon himself. Private Tamura, the protagonist, keeps on living to the end, if only (as one critic has phrased it) “to set himself apart from the solders around him who, in their desperation, have begun to regard the mortal remains of their fallen comrades with hungry eyes.”
Directed by Kon Ichikawa, scenario by Natsuto Wada after the novel by Shohei Ooka. Photographed by Setsuo Kobayashi, Music by Yasushi Akutagawa. With Eiji Funakoshi, Osamu Takizawa, Mickey Curtis. 1959. 104 mins.
This single showing (the original Japanese with English subtitles) is made possible through the gracious permission of the Criterion Collection (New York) and Kadokawa Herald Pictures, Inc. (Japan)

About Donald Richie

This monthly series will feature relatively unknown but important Japanese avant garde films selected by Donald Richie, the former Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art in New York (1969-1973), and a renowned authority on Japanese film. Donald Richie came to Japan in 1947 as feature writer for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. After the end of the Occupation, he became film critic for The Japan Times and still continues with that paper as Arts Critic. During the following years he wrote a number of books, including The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965); Ozu (1974), and One Hundred Years of Japanese Film (2002). In addition, he has written over forty books about the country in which he has been resident for nearly sixty years. These include: The Inland Sea (1971), Japanese Portraits (1991), and his latest work, The Japan Journals: 1947-2004.


Presented by the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies
Temple University, Japan Campus
in Association with SuperDeluxe