Kazuo Hara's 1972 documentary Goodbye CP is hard to watch, technically ragged, and depressing on all levels. A documentary film can expose some social injustice and justify itself, perhaps, by suggesting means to ameliorate that injustice -- indeed, many documentaries follow this norm. Or a documentary may simply arouse consciousness about some aspect of human existence (or scientific interest) as a matter of education. Finally, I suppose, a documentary can be a kind of freak show -- near the end of Hara's film, the protagonist, Yokota Hiroshi, a man severely disabled by cerebral palsy, is sprawled in the center of a public square, bawling out a poem that he has written. The man is afflicted by clonic-tonic spasms and writhes horribly, his face contorted into a series of grotesque grimaces. It's not clear that anyone can understand his distorted voice -- the film's subtitles benefit non-Japanese speakers unfairly, I think; my suspicion is that most of what Hiroshi bellows would be incomprehensible to those around him. Finally, someone cries out that this is a "freak show" and should be stopped and the camera, for the first time in a film resolutely focused on the grimy pavement, tilts up to survey the skyscrapers and the sun before the frame freezes. Although condemning both Hiroshi's poetry reading and the movie as a freak show is simplistic, there is some merit to the anonymous interlocutor's cry. How are we supposed to react to the imagery in this film? Cerebral palsy is a not a social injustice and, probably, isn't a legitimate subject for intense biological scrutiny (something the film doesn't provide in any event) unless you are a nurse or doctor or victim of this condition. Hara's film is designed to make us look, and look closely, at something to which we would normally avert our eyes -- but does this justify this harrowing and invasive film?
Yokota Hiroshi is a man who walks on his bent knees -- he looks a bit like a maimed frog as he creeps across the pavement in Tokyo. In the beginning, the film shows him hurtling himself across a cross-walk, trying to get off the road before the traffic hits him. Hiroshi moves with surprising speed but it is exceptionally painful to watch him repeatedly smashing his knees against the hard concrete, his glasses falling off his face, as he drags himself forward with the strength of his upper body. At first, Hiroshi seems to invite the viewers' admiration for the feat, but, of course, we wonder -- why isn't he using a wheelchair? Isn't the spectacle intended to appall us? Later, a group of five or six men with CP set up a donation box and solicit small contributions to something they call the "Green Lawn" -- the soundtrack consists of interviews explaining why the onlookers donated money, most of them sending their terrified toddlers up to the donation box to drop in paper money. The reasons people donate money are mostly banal and related to a mixture of fear and pity. A lengthy series of interviews, filmed in extreme close-up, consists of the badly disabled men telling the camera about their first sexual encounters -- of course, this is painful material, but it is hard to measure the men's reactions because their faces are continuously twisting into masklike grimaces. The camera is so close that we can sense the spittle oozing from their lips spraying onto the lens. At a meeting of the Green Lawn, Hiroshi's wife, Yoshiko, also terribly twisted and mutilated by CP, berates the protagonist for walking on his knees, something that she thinks is grotesque. Yoshiko accuses Hara, the film maker of encouraging undignified and freakish behavior. This leads to full-scale fight in which Hiroshi and Yoshiko flail away at one another -- one of them starts bleeding. Of course, their two children, both toddlers, are alternately horrified and delighted by their parent's violent antics. Hiroshi rides the subway -- how he gets on and off is terrifying to see. One of the men with CP is married and his wife, also afflicted, has a normal baby. The man and his wife carry the baby through heavy traffic, staggering so much that we are afraid that they will drop the baby on the road -- it seems astounding that they can even walk, let alone carry the child successfully. The man says that he is very happy that the baby seems normal, something that he admits is shameful because he has been taught to embrace his CP. A man carries Hiroshi on his shoulders to a poetry reading. Everyone ignores Hiroshi. They go to another public square where Hiroshi recites his poem to a large crowd of gawkers but someone, possibly a policeman, stops the performance. On a lonely bridge in an ugly industrial district, Hiroshi shows us his body, squatting naked on his battered knees in the middle of the road. Hiroshi, now clothed, says that he participated in the film to show what he could do, to demonstrate his prowess in getting around, but, now, he admits that he can do nothing on his own -- during the last three minutes of the film, he wriggles around on the pavement like a worm someone has cut in two. He seems to have lost the ability to walk on his knees, or, perhaps, because of his wife's objections, he will not move in that way. He cries out that he is completely helpless and on that note the film ends.
Goodbye CP is shot in grainy black-and-white, probably 8 millimeter blown up to a larger format. The soundtrack is not synchronized -- or, at least, mostly non-synchronized. The synchronized parts of the sound track are signaled by someone stabbing a battered-looking microphone into the faces of the people appearing in the screen. The picture is resolutely unpicturesque, ugly, grimy, poorly cut -- it's like punk rock film making. And the movie refuses to provide the viewer with any solace. Most films of this sort would celebrate the heroism of the victim of CP battling against terrible and painful affliction -- this film does the opposite: Hiroshi seems to become more frail and more disabled as the movie progresses and, at the end, proclaims that he is completely helpless. Hiroshi is an unlikely hero in any event -- a wife-beater and narcissist who seems obsessed with reciting poetry to people who aren't interested in hearing his work and who are probably unable to understand his speech in any event. The film revels in suffering with no indication that this suffering ennobles anyone -- the bystanders simply avert their eyes and the people suffering aren't magically cured, don't get better, and aren't reconciled to their plight. Furthermore, the Hiroshi's poems suggest a horrifying zero-sum view of the world, the same view that, I think, subconsciously appalls those who see him: he cries out that because the able-bodied have legs he has no legs. In other words, CP is an affliction that is visited on a sacrificial victim, Hiroshi, so that he others will not have to suffer from this curse. This notion is primitive and awful, but, I think, explains the sense of almost religious awe and obscenity that we experience in watching Hiroshi and the members of the Green Lawn. Is CP somehow contagious? Does he have the disease so that I won't have to suffer from it? Ultimately, Goodbye CP suggests a couple antecedents. The first is a film about lepers made in Iran in the early 1960's, The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad) -- although this film is famous in Europe and the Middle East and very harrowing, it is ultimately, perhaps, a surrealistic picture: the horrors shown are depicted in intense chiaroscuro and there is a certain grim poetry in the picture. The other antecedent to Goodbye CP are certain works by Beckett, prose and plays in which the characters are systematically stripped of everything and end as mutilated lumps of flesh. Beckett, of course, is making a metaphorical point about despair and the human condition. There is nothing metaphorical about Goodbye CP.
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