The Kazuo Hara Cure
‘When you’re making a film about people on the margin, if you don’t make a film that changes the way people think, well it doesn’t have any meaning.’
Watching any of Kazuo Hara’s films is difficult. Not in the sense that they especially defy understanding, but in all of them there are points when it is almost unbearable to watch the events on the screen without wanting to jump into action; either stopping the film or somehow entering the screen and intervening. The scenes of septuagenarian fist-fights in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On and the unassisted home birth in Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 are certainly some of the most intense examples in Hara’s films. These scenes, reminiscent of similarly invasive and morally complex moments in Cassavetes, Noe and Brakhage, are important because watching is always ethical and political. By doing (or watching) one thing we are by default not doing something else. It is a very rare event when this desire occurs (except while suffering through very bad films) and it should be cherished for it is a moment that can create within us the impetus for action and change.
Hara began making films during the late Sixties, a tumultuous time when Japan, like most of the world, was going through a period of social unrest and reform. Although he didn’t participate in any of the widespread protests and sit-ins of the time, Hara felt sympathetic to many of the issues of the vigorous zeitgeist, and the need for action and change made a lasting impression on the director, playing a major role in all his films to date.
In Goodbye CP (1972), Hara’s first film, the camera is often placed at ground level and in the hands of the subjects of the film, all of whom have Cerebral Palsy. This conscientious style avoids the condescending perspective associated with most films and television which tends to portray handicapped people as powerless and fragile victims. Filmed in grainy black & white 16mm with asynchronous sound, the film has a very unsettling almost Brechtian quality which forces the viewer to understand the film on very different terms than the average slick spectacle-of-the-week. Even my Japanese friends had difficulty understanding the slurred speech of Yokoto Hiroshi, the poet-hero of the film, who spends most of the film struggling to walk on his knees, refusing to sit in his wheelchair which he equates with succumbing to charity and public decorum. The film, made in collaboration with the subjects, attempts to portray the bodies and minds of the cerebral palsied without compromise to taboo, even the very controversial subject of a CP couple having a child. In one heated scene, Yokoto’s wife, who also has CP, berates the filmmaker for failing to make a film that changes any preconceptions and ultimately exploiting the subjects of the film. By including this criticism Hara undermines his own authorial voice and the objectivity of the film. This move, typical of Hara, brings the viewer into the frame, questioning the ethics and exploitation involved in both making and watching the film.
In his next film, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, the director again filmed a subject on the margins of Japanese society, but this time one which was very close to him personally and emotionally, his estranged ex-wife Miyuki Takeda. In this very intimate film, Hara takes several trips down to Okinawa to visit and film his infant son and his ex-wife who he discovers making her living dancing topless to James Brown in American G.I. bars. When he first arrives she is in a relationship with a young woman, later she reveals that she is pregnant from a 3-week fling with an African American soldier. In Hara’s candid portrait, Miyuki appears articulate, incisive and intelligent, but like Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi, she is a modern woman heavily influenced by western feminist ideals who’s mercurial nature leads her endlessly from one thrill-seeking adventure to the next.
Hara’s portrayal of Miyuki’s radical lifestyle challenges Japanese taboos of sexuality, race, motherhood, nationalism, pornography and most of all family. Even today, the divorce rate in Japan is much less than here in North America, and the idea of an independent woman raising children on her own is still controversial, but at that time in Japan many young people and left-wing intellectuals were openly challenging the sacred idea of kazoku teikokushugi (family imperialism). Critics claim that this synecdochal concept, where loyalty to one’s family is the basic building block for loyalty to the Japanese Imperial Family and in turn national power, was one of the founding principles that sent Japan spiraling out of control, drunk on imperial power, into the Second World War.
‘One of the strong sentiments of the time was that familial imperialism should be destroyed. I thought that if I could put my own family under the camera, all our emotions, our privacy, I wondered if I might break taboos about the family.’
For Hara, a filmmaker who always explores the margins in order to question the pervasive structures of power that are often disguised as public values, an uncompromising look at his own dysfunctional family was intended as a shot right to the heart of Japanese society. This technique of dismantling these governing tenets using the very personal example of a single family shows how the subjectivity of individuals is at odds with the objectivity of the rules that govern us.
In opposition to the dominant mode of documentary filmmaking, Hara’s films always exude a deep subjectivity, undermining the omnipotent authorial voice, which is often taken for granted when watching a film. This idea of radical subjectivity, often exemplified by an unreliable narrator, has been increasingly common in modern literature, the later novels of Osamu Dazai are good examples of this technique, but it is extremely uncommon in documentary filmmaking, which is generally thought of as a factual medium, meant to provide conclusive facts on a particular topic. Watching Hara’s films with this expectation is frustrating, because ultimately they raise more questions than they answer.
One very common occurrence in Hara’s films is that the director himself becomes one of the subjects of the film, often heard speaking to people in the film, and at times even entering the frame of the film. As mentioned above, this happens during Goodbye CP when Yokoto’s wife accuses Hara of exploiting his subjects and failing to make a film that will change the way people think. In Extreme Private Eros, the subject matter is so personal that it would be deceiving if Hara didn’t reveal himself as the voice behind the film. From his deliberately unsure voiceover in the beginning of the film to the shots of him crying on camera, Hara demonstrates that his relationship with Miyuki is too personal for him to portray with the sort of detached clarity that is commonly expected in documentary films. Even during the most intense scene, the unassisted home-birth, Hara’s emotional attachment to the event distracts him from focusing the camera, an incredible moment, which reveals the emotional lens through which we perceive films, and ultimately the events in our own lives.
Another aspect of the film which fails to provide viewers with desired truths, resides in the films exploration of concepts of privacy. In putting his own relationships and desires as well as those of Miyuki and his second wife Sachiko Kobayashi under the filmic microscope, Hara invades his own privacy revealing that there is such a thickly layered complexity to our feelings and behavior that it is impossible for films to provide answers about the inner truths of individuals.
‘A documentary, you know, is not totally “real.” When one is in front of the camera, one cannot help being conscious of the camera. Even when people are not in front of the camera, in normal life, people act. This is normal.’
In the film, this behavioral tendency to act is especially evident because of Miyuki and Sachiko’s relationships with the man behind the camera. When the women are shown directly talking to the camera in the film there is always a sense that they are speaking with a certain composure, aware of a potential audience, but with an underlying emotional intensity due to the presence of the director himself. Hara, aware of the dangers of authorial presentations, reveals that even outside the confines of film, our behavior and perceptions of the world are ruled by a subjectivity that is at complete odds with the idea of objective truth and understanding.
Kazuo Hara’s inimitable style demands a unique interaction between the film and the viewer, one in which the viewer’s own opinions, memories and emotions are not only part of the viewing experience, but are also integral to the understanding and meaning of the film. This style perfectly compliments the content of Hara’s films, which always show brave marginalized individuals fighting against rigid power structures that are deaf to the voices of the people they oppress. Hara’s filmmaking process is even open-ended, allowing chance to intervene in the outcome of the film. The infamous attempted murder in the end of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) is certainly a negative outcome of this process, but still it poignantly exemplifies the unpredictable violence that can result from such inflexible and unforgiving systems. What makes Hara’s films so strong is that, in their rich complexity, they point towards a new political model, one that is based on flexibility and dialogue, drawing strength from a myriad of voices and perspectives, rather than creating oppressive order with blind ideological power.
- BH
