Kon Ichikawa
L'arpa birmana

The long film depicts the capture of a Japanese garrison in Burma, after the war has ended, led by a sensitive officer who taught the soldiers singing and music. One of them, Mitsushima, has a particular talent for variations played on the Burmese harp. In the prisoner camp where they await repatriation, he decides to accept the task of trying to convince another group of Japanese soldiers, besieged on a mountain by Allied troops, to surrender. The attempt is futile, and patriotic fanaticism results in a great slaughter. Mitsushima survives but is severely wounded. Meanwhile, his companions change camps and never stop thinking of him, as he is saved by some Buddhist monks. The memory of death and the oblivion that will swallow the victims of senseless violence, beyond the war itself, and participation in a religious commemoration for some British soldiers, stir in him the desire not to forget and to find one by one the dead Japanese abandoned in the vast Burmese forest. Thus, having become a Buddhist monk, he roams the endless Burmese forests alone to bury his forgotten dead comrades. He also reaches his companions in the new prisoner camp, but to avoid succumbing to emotion, he does not reveal himself to them and communicates through harp variations, the only means capable of conveying what he has now understood. And the survivors, for whom the memory of Mitsushima had become an obsession, return to Japan without having spoken to him, except with the help of a trained parrot, because the physical presence, having someone in front of you, is the ultimate presence, but also the ultimate absence.
Back home, the living would slowly forget, and life would resume with its comedies and banalities. The true presence was that of memory, the true life was that of the dead, good or bad, aware or unaware, who, caught in the madness of war, the metaphysical, insane scattering of every living individual, in the oblivion of all, but in the memory of one, testify with their silence to the persistence of what does not change. The Burmese Harp is dedicated to them and to a man who, in the solitary mission of gathering what might be unnoticed remnants of a higher (and false) reason, guards the silence, once drowned out by gunfire, then by individual impulses for survival, inevitable but not without a latent lack of compassion.
The scenes of the immense Burmese forest are memorable, as is the humble strength of the protagonist and the naive humanity of his comrades. Some oratory elements, in the style of the time, but an immense and authentic emotion.