Hara Kazuo Films in Los Angeles

[Jonathan M. Hall]

>> Sunday March 18, 2007, 7:00 pm
>>
>> Los Angeles Filmforum presents
>> THE DOCUMENTARIES OF KAZUO HARA
>> A FOUR-PART SERIES
>>
>> THE EMPEROR'S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON (Yuki Yukite shingun, 1987)
>>
>> Los Angeles Filmforum will be screening the documentaries directed by
>> Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara. This is a rare opportunity to see
>> these remarkable films, none of which are in regular theatrical
>> distribution in the United States. This set of four films has been
>> touring the United States, and this will be their only Los Angeles
>> appearance. One film, "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On," will be
>> coming out on DVD in March from Facets video. All of the films will
>> challenge the viewer's ideas of decorum, personal revelation, and the
>> possibilities of relentless cinema verit?.
>>
>> Screening Details:
>> All screenings at the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712
>> Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas. $9 general; $6 students/seniors; free
>> for Filmforum members. Cash and check only.
>>
>> Parking is available at the Hollywood & Highland complex, $2 for 4
>> hours with validation, available at the Egyptian Theatre. Street
>> parking is often available as well. Or take the Red Line to Hollywood
>> & Highland. Email us for a reservation at lafilmforum at yahoo.com. We
>> aren't able to presell tickets, but will hold reservations until  
>> 6:45 pm.
>>
>> Sunday March 18, 2007, 7:00 pm - THE EMPEROR'S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON
>> (Yuki Yukite shingun, 1987, 122 min.; 35mm, color)
>>
>> Sunday, March 25, 2007, 7:00 pm - EXTREME PRIVATE EROS: LOVE SONG  
>> 1974
>> (Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974; 98 min,16mm, b&w )
>>
>> Wednesday, March 28, 2007, 7:30 pm ? GOODBYE CP (Sayonara CP,  
>> 1972, 82
>> min., 16mm, b&w)
>>
>> Thursday, March 29, 2007, 7:30 pm - A DEDICATED LIFE (Zenshin
>> shosetsuka, 1994, 157 min., 35mm, color)
>>
>> "I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society." ?Kazuo Hara
>>
>> Born in 1945, Kazuo Hara made a debut with Goodbye CP (Sayonara CP,
>> 1972), and shocked audiences with its frank portrayal of handicapped
>> with cerebral palsy. Two years later, Hara again sent a shock wave in
>> the Japanese film industry with Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
>> (Kyokushiteki erosu koiuta 1974, 1974). The film chronicled a
>> love-triangle between Hara, and his ex-wife Takeda Miyuki (the main
>> subject of the film). Hara's third film The Emperor's Naked Army
>> Marches On (Yukiyukite shingun, 1987) won awards at Berlin Film
>> Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival and it was the most talked about
>> film of the year in Japan. Five years in the making, the film  
>> traces a
>> crusade for truth of Okuzaki Kenzo, a radical left wing activist and
>> also a survivor of the battlefields of New Guinea in World War II.
>> Hara also has directed various TV documentaries and worked as
>> assistant director in feature films such as Kei Kumai's Berlin Silver
>> Bear winner, The Sea and Poison (Umi to Dokuyaku, 1986). The Many
>> Faces of Chika (2005) is Hara's first fiction feature film.
>>
>> Kazuo Hara has been making scandalous films about scandalous people
>> since 1972. He made his debut with GOODBYE CP, which shocked Japanese
>> audiences with its frank portrayal of people with cerebral palsy. He
>> describes his work as "overstepping the boundaries set by society in
>> order to approach my subjects in close-up." Having left the Tokyo
>> Technical Institute of Photography because "photography only allowed
>> me to get to know people on a superficial level," he decided instead
>> to start an independent career which would bridge the gap between the
>> two great extremes of documentary filmmaking of the last thirty  
>> years:
>> the collective documentary of the 60s and the private films of the
>> 90s. Hara's work reveals how life stories are constructed across the
>> border between fiction and reality.
>>
>> Tonight:
>> The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On
>> (Yuki Yukite shingun)
>> 1987 / 122 min. / 16mm / Color
>> Director/Cinematographer: Kazuo Hara
>> Producer: Sachiko Kobayashi
>>
>> Berlin Film Festival 1987
>> New Directors / New Films 1988
>>
>> "THE EMPEROR'S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON is a brilliant exploration of
>> memory and war guilt, a subject often ignored in modern Japan. In  
>> this
>> controversial documentary, Kazuo Hara follows Kenzo Okuzaki in his
>> real-life struggle against Emperor Hirohito. He proudly declares that
>> he shot BBs at the Royal Palace, distributed pornographic images of
>> the Emperor, and once killed a man for the sake of his strange
>> crusade. As the film progresses, Okuzaki reveals a gruesome mystery:
>> why were some Japanese officers killing their own soldiers during
>> WWII? What happened to their bodies? Okuzaki begs, cajoles, and
>> occasionally beats the story out of elderly veterans. When these old
>> men do break down and talk, their testimonies are some of the most
>> chilling, riveting descriptions of wartime desperation ever committed
>> to film. In his desire to unearth these horrors, Okuzaki's behavior
>> grows increasingly extreme and bizarre. By the film's end, Hara seems
>> to ask whether the terrible nature of this buried incident is worth
>> the violence of Okuzaki's methods. ?Jonathan Crow, ALLMOVIE GUIDE
>>
>> "The most invigorating thing about `The Emperor's Naked Army Marches
>> On' is its consistent irreverence. It doesn't mean to be polite or
>> nice or soothing. It means to provoke and disturb - and let the devil
>> take the hindmost."
>> - Vincent Canby, The New York Times
>>
>> "SENSATIONAL IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD!...
>> one of the most astonishing documentaries I've ever seen?
>> Absolutely not to be missed."
>> - John Powers, LA Weekly
>>
>> "The Emperor's Naked Army makes you think the incredible power of
>> truth-seeking."
>> - Errol Morris
>>
>> REVIEWS:
>>
>> The New York Times Review - Excerpt
>> The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On
>> By VINCENT CANBY	Published: March 15, 1988, Tuesday
>>
>> The New Directors/New Films festival is presenting a number of
>> unconventional documentaries, but none as alarming and significantly
>> lunatic as ''The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On,'' conceived by
>> Shohei Imamura (''Vengeance Is Mine'') and directed by Kazuo Hara as
>> his first feature.
>>
>> Its central figure is Kenzo Okuzaki, 65 years old, a World War II
>> veteran who lives in Kobe with his pliant, uncomplaining wife,  
>> whom we
>> later learn is dying of cancer. At the start of the film, Kenzo has
>> already spent 13 years 9 months in jail. His crimes: plotting to
>> assassinate a former Prime Minister, attempting to hit the Emperor
>> with lead pellets fired with a sling shot and distributing
>> pornographic pictures of the Emperor to people outside a Tokyo
>> department store.
>>
>> Kenzo is a political activist. He's also a marriage broker. In an
>> astonishing and funny precredit sequence, we see him delivering a
>> wedding feast homily in which he recalls his years in jail and
>> suggests that all countries and, indeed, all families are barriers to
>> the true brotherhood of man. The bride and groom listen with eyes
>> lowered, as if this were the sort of thing every bride and groom
>> expected to hear on their wedding day.
>>
>> From everything the audience sees, Kenzo Okuzaki is a certifiable
>> psychotic, though ''The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On'' never
>> addresses this suspicion. He's the sort of fellow who writes long,
>> crazily incoherent letters to editors, confronts people on street
>> corners and harangues them with a loudspeaker from his van. It could
>> be that Mr. Hara thinks the psychotic state is the only sane response
>> to the contradictions in contemporary Japanese society.
>>
>> Whatever the film director thinks, he never says. Instead he follows
>> Kenzo around Japan as the former soldier tries to get at the truth of
>> something that happened more than 40 years ago - the execution of
>> three of his army comrades when they were serving in New Guinea at  
>> the
>> end of the war.
>>
>> The audience never understands just why, at this late date, Kenzo
>> decides to investigate these events, the details of which remain
>> fuzzy. With Mr. Hara and a camera crew in tow, Kenzo calls on former
>> officers and enlisted men he thinks were responsible for ordering the
>> executions. There are suggestions that the men were condemned for
>> desertion or for cannibalism. There's the further suggestion that  
>> they
>> were executed to provide meat for their starving comrades.
>>
>> TIME OUT LONDON REVIEW
>> The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On
>>
>> A documentary portrait of Kenzo Okuzaki, a 62-year-old WWII veteran
>> who acquired a prison record (for killing a man and for firing
>> pachinko balls at the Emperor) in the course of his fanatical  
>> campaign
>> to lay the blame for Japan's conduct of the war on the Emperor. Here
>> the self-proclaimed messenger of God seeks to uncover what truly
>> happened in New Guinea in 1945, 23 days after the war ended, when two
>> Japanese soldiers were killed by their colleagues in very mysterious
>> circumstances. The outcome of his investigations is gruesomely weird
>> (cannibalism figures heavily), but stranger still is his style of
>> interrogation, a volatile mix of apologetic politeness, deceit (his
>> wife and anarchist friend pose as victims' relatives), and sudden
>> violence, so relentless that one of his many ageing interviewees,
>> fresh from hospital, ends up in an ambulance. Kazuo Hara's
>> fly-on-the-wall documentary fascinates both for its bizarre
>> protagonist, and for its brutally frank portrait of a society
>> constrained by notions of shame rather than guilt. Jigsaw-like in
>> construction, alleviated by mad wit, the film is unlike any other:
>> rough, raw and sometimes surprisingly moving, it's absolutely
>> compelling. GA
>>

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