Port Arthur

The film is about the siege of the fortress of Port Arthur during the Russo Japanese War between 1904 and 1905. The fortress was one of the most heavily fortified positions in the world and the siege went on with great losses. At the centre of the account is a schoolteacher who came up as a reserve officer and became first a platoon and then a company commander, a man who learns what war is from outside the military profession. At the same time the decisions of the general commanding the army charged with taking the fortress are followed. The film shows the front not as a scene of heroism but as the distance between an order and a death. Tatsuya Nakadai and Teruhiko Aoi appear in Toshio Masuda’s hundred and eighty five minute Japanese film, completed in 1980.