Hara Kazuo in Beijing

[Mark Nornes]

Wu Wenguang and I are bringing Hara Kazuo to Beijing's CCD Workstation and Iberia for their May festival. The schedule is out (changes are still possible). Those planning on a trip to Songzhuang for their documentary film festival should consider an early arrival to check out what's brewing at Caochangdi and 798. 

Markus




Filmmaker in Focus: Hara Kazuo

 

 

Date：27 April to 1 May

Vanue:  Caochangdi Workstation, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art

 

Organizer: Caochangdi Workstation

Co-organizer: Iberia Center for Contemporary Art

 

Co-programmers: Wu Wenguang, Abé Mark Nornes

Work partner: Zhang Yaxuan

Producers: Zuo Jin, Mao Ran

Conductors: Abé Mark Nornes & Feng Yan (CCD Workstation), Abé Mark Nornes & Zhang Yaxuan (Iberia)

Coordinators: Zou Xueping, Xie Lina

Text translation: Zhang Yaxuan, Feng Yan, Wu Wenguang, Tang Zhi, Jian Yi

Subtitle translation: Feng Yan, Ji Dan

Subtitle producers: Xie Lina, Zhang Mengqi, Tang Zhi, Zou Xueping

 

Support：China Independent Documentary Archive, DOEN FOUNDATION (The Netherlands),

 

Other Supporters：

Beijing Storm, BORNEOCO/ CultureXpress(The Netherlands）

the Contemporary Art & Investment Magazine

 

Schedule of the event (there’s discuss between the director and public after each screen)

 

time & date

content

conductor

venue

27 April

 

 

 

19:30

Sayonara CP 

Mark & Feng Yan

CCD Workstation

28 April

 

 

 

14:00

Sayonara CP 

Mark & Yaxuan

Iberia

19:30

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

Mark & Feng Yan

CCD Workstation

29 April

 

 

 

14:00

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

Mark & Yaxuan

Iberia

19:30

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On

Mark & Feng Yan

CCD Workstation

30 April

 

 

 

15:00

Hara’s Lecture

Mark & Yaxuan

Iberia

19:00

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On

Mark & Yaxuan

CCD Workstation

1 May

 

 

 

13:00

A Dedicated Life

Mark & Feng Yan

CCD Workstation

16:00

Seminar: Focus on Hara’s film

Mark, Feng Yan, Ji Dan, Yaxuan, Wu

CCD Workstation

19:00

A Dedicated Life

Mark & Yaxuan

Iberia

 

Getting to Know Hara Kazuo

by Wu Wenguang (translated by Leslie Tai)

My course of getting to know the work of Hara Kazuo began long ago. 1991, Tokyo, before the start of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Besides my regular visits to the studio of Shinsuke Ogawa, I spent my idle hours in the Yamagata IFF Tokyo office perusing films. In those days, I was a hungry man. Any type of documentary film I encountered, I devoured as foodstuff, that which was necessary to my survival. Mr Yano, of the Tokyo office, was responsible for rationing my daily bread. That is how I happened upon The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On by Hara Kazuo. He handed it to me without so much as a warning, only a cursory: “Have you seen this one before?”

What I saw was a film about a former Japanese Imperial Army soldier, a madman. Many years after the war, he traveled the world in search of his former comrades-in-arms, demanding that they divulge their war crimes, seeking specifically to uncover acts of cannibalism committed against their own compatriots. Okuzaki’s  attempts met certain denial. Yet he latched onto his prey, and resorted even to physical violence. These former comrades were white-haired and liver-spotted old men. To see them pinned down and beaten furiously on their own tatamis was quite farcical, and quite demented. I handed the film back to Yano, who took it back without a word, much less further warning that there were other films of Hara Kazuo that were even more maddening, even more unthinkable.

At that time, I had recently become acquainted with the work of Shinsuke Ogawa. In his studio, I watched his films, and learned from him his understanding of documentary film. Shinsuke, his person, and his films became my beacon. I was Shinsuke’s crazed follower; I thought, this is what documentary film ought to be:  a dagger thrust into the heart of society, pried open, revealing the darkness that lay in its depths. When I returned to Beijing, my mind was brimming with Shinsuke’s words, with Shinsuke’s peasants, writhing on the ground, face-to-face in confrontation with the police authorities. I anxiously set myself to the task of making 1966, My Time in the Red Guards, a film about the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution. 

Besides Yano giving me the film to watch, no other Japanese person I met in those days made a single mention of Hara Kazuo or his films. If someone had handed me one of his films, like Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, I would have thought the violence and pornographic content could only be the work of a madman. And so I was destined to brush shoulders with Hara Kazuo. In 1993, at some Yamagata IFF discussion panel, I was seated next to Hara Kazuo. After the introductions, I thought to myself, Ah, this is the man who made the film about the psychotic Imperial Army man.

A shoulder’s brush. The next time I looked back, it was 17, 18 years later.

By this time, I had undergone a metamorphosis. Shinsuke Ogawa and Frederick Wiseman, directors whose works I had once followed with a religious fanaticism, no longer represented the standard, the way. New possibilities, new ways were opening up as I made attempts to make personal film,  personal documentary.  To put it bluntly, I no longer adhered to the role of documentary as gunpowder in the gun barrel or the sharp and glistening bayonet,  positioned a hair’s distance away from entering straight into the heart of society. The weight and the subtlety of social reality were asking for different ways of representation. Moreover, I had become alert of a present danger: The main spokespeople for documentary film, the filmmakers and the researchers who propounded its use for social justice, were in their turn, enjoying the spoils that documentary film brought to them.

In those days, anyone who brought up Hara Kazuo and his films, I would have greeted with embrace. This is when Mark Nornes appeared. Mark was a high hand of Japanese cinema research, having been immersed in the Japanese culture and film circles for many years. I first got to know him at Yamagata. Afterwards, he returned to the U.S. to teach at the University of Michigan. In 2007, I was at Michigan giving a lecture screening, and a few of us headed out for a drink afterwards. Over the bar house din, Mark and I picked up a conversation about Hara Kazuo. His eyes danced behind his spectacles; unable to contain himself in the least, he offered his roaring admiration of Hara Kazuo. Two meetings later: once at Caochangdi and the other at last year’s Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival, we continued talking about Hara Kazuo and how we would organize a retrospective screening. Last October before heading off to Yamagata, Mark sent an e-mail saying he had made an appointment with Hara Kazuo. Alas, the three of us would discuss making his retrospective into a reality. After a lot of meeting, greeting, and coordinating on the part of Mark, the water receded to reveal the rocks beneath.

After years of dialogue revolving around Shinsuke Ogawa, alas, we can begin a new dialogue about the work of Hara Kazuo. The moment has arrived twenty years behind schedule; the work of Hara Kazuo should have entered our consciousness along with the work of Shinsuke Ogawa in the 90’s. If that had been the case, documentary filmmaking today would have had more than one light at the end of the tunnel, more than one hutong to race to the finish.

Last October, I met Hara Kazuo on a street with a bustling night scene. He had a head of jet black hair. I knew he must have been sixty-some years old by then. I suspected his hair color had something to do with a special dose of hair dye. I asked: How do you keep your hair so black? Hara Kazuo chuckled: It’s natural. We ducked into a Japanese bar and over his highly recommended Hokkaido sake and smoked fish, we talked about Shinsuke Ogawa. He loudly proclaimed: “I respect Mr. Ogawa as a person, but I against Ogawa’s film.” I jumped out of my skin at his rare display of forthrightness. I glanced at Mark, who smiled knowingly.

To respect Ogawa, and yet to be against him. I agreed with the former, and my interest was aroused by the latter. If Ogawa’s films are meant to stab through society’s womb, Hara Kazuo’s films stab through the womb of the individual. To observe humanity through society’s uterus, or to observe society through the individual’s uterus, what is the difference after all?

 

_________________________________
A. M. Nornes
Chair
Department of Screen Arts and Cultures
University of Michigan
6525 Haven Hall; 505 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
Phone: 734-763-4087
FAX: 734-936-1846

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