Film essay -- Kazuo Hara's Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974

Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974



　

　
Kazuo Hara is a Japanese documentary film maker. (He has made one narrative feature film about which I know nothing.)

Kazuo Hara was born in 1945 in Yamaguchi Prefecture. He never saw his father.

Kazuo Hara attended the Tokyo Technical School of Photography. After that vocational training, Kazuo Hara worked as an assistant cameraman on some films directed by Shohei Imamura.

Kazuo Hara did not attend film school. Kazuo Hara did not attend college. There were violent college protests about the Vietnam war. Kazuo Hara watched those from the side-lines and did not take part.

With his girlfriend, Sachiko Kobayashi, Kazuo Hara founded Shisso Productions in 1971.

In 1972, Kazuo Hara produced Sayonara CP. The film is a documentary about a group of severely disabled men with cerebral palsy.

In 1974, Kazuo Hara produced Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974, a documentary about a triangle between Kazuo Hara, Miyuki Takeda, a Japanese feminist and sex-worker, and Hara’s girlfriend (and production partner at Shissho), Sachiko Kobayashi.

Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 was so excessive that Hara was unable to raise money to complete any productions for a decade.

Kazuo Hara produced The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on in 1987. This documentary about a crazed World War II veteran investigating war crimes committed in New Guinea in Kazuo Hara’s most well-known film. It is also exceptionally controversial and has never been shown on Japanese TV.

Kazuo Hara produced A Dedicated Life in 1995. A Dedicated Life is a documentary about a radical left wing writer Mitsuharu Inoue.

Kazuo Hara has made two other films since that time, one of them a narrative dramatic picture, but I can not find any information about those movies.

　

B.

Kazuo Hara calls the films that he makes "action documentaries."

He says:

Life is acting. There are two sides to people. The person one wants to be and the person one is. I want the people in my movies to act the way they want to be. ...Movies must have good and evil, bad men and heroes. It is like Batman and Superman. It is the same (in my documentaries). ... I Like to make dramatic movies. I fell strongly about this, more than other directors. I love Hollywood action films, and I wanted Okuzaki (the protagonist in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on) to act like an action star. I want to make action documentary films...

In each of his documentary films, there is are "action" sequences, scenes in which the protagonists engage in behavior that is objectively dangerous. In Sayonara CP, the extremely handicapped hero moves around Tokyo on his knees, walking through heavy traffic and climbing on and off subways, in a way that the man’s wife (also disabled by cerebral palsy) finds dangerous and degrading. She demands that her husband use a wheelchair. He refuses and there is a savage quarrel resulting in the two disabled people physically exchanging blows while the woman shrieks to Hara to stop filming – he refuses.

In The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, the protagonist has served time for both murder and for using a slingshot to fling pachinko balls at the Emperor. He gains access to the homes of elderly world war veterans and demands that they answer his questions about atrocities committed in New Guinea. When the old men refuse to answer his questions, the protagonists attacks them and literally beats the truth of his witnesses – in some cases, also beating the wives of his unfortunate interview subjects who intervene to protect their elderly husbands. Outraged that some of the old men obstinately refuse to admit that they are war criminals, the film’s protagonist offers to commit a murder while Hara is filming. Hara declines the proposal but, only, because, as he says, "I was really sick of Okuzaki and was tired of him."

In A Dedicated Life, Hara begins the film by prying into the sexual life of his subject, the radical Leftist writer, Inoue. Hara hunts down women with whom Inoue had affairs while he was married and interviews them. Then, Inoue develops liver cancer. Hara films his surgery in graphic detail. Inoue’s cancer has metastasized and Hara laters films his decline and death.

In Extreme Private Eros 1974 Love Song, Hara’s ex-girlfriend, pregnant with a half-Black child, decides to demonstrate her feminist principles by having the baby in her apartment without any medical personnel present. Hara films the ordeal.

　

C.

My second film, Extreme Private Eros 1974, was all about my "privacy." It was about a triangle between myself, my former wife, and my present wife. You know, I make documentaries, and as for reality and fiction, well, we call them documentaries, but they are really made up...From my viewpoint, a documentary should explore things that people don’t want explored, bring things out of the closet, to examine why people want to hide certain things. When people are talking about themselves, they put limits and taboos on what they are willing to talk about, their privacy...

The sound is not synchronized with the image in Extreme Private Eros 1974. Hara says: I was very poor at the time. I could not afford a camera that would do the sound with the pictures...

On the subject of the film, Hara says:


In the sixties and seventies, there as feeling that if the individual did not cause change, nothing would change. At the time, I wanted to make a movie, and I was wondering how I could make a statement for change. At the time, there was much talk of familial imperialism ("kazoku teikokishugi"). 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 proviacy, I wondered if I might break taboos about the family...
Interviewer: You were called a masochist about you made Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974.

Hara: When the subject of my film is perceived to be stronger than I, as Miyuki Takeda (the main character in the film) was, I was called a masochist: when the subject was perceived to be weaker, I was called a sadist. Instead of being a masochist or sadist, I would say that the nature of documentary filmmaking is that the director puts himself in various situations.

Interviewer: How was the movie received?

Hara: Very well. One funny thing was that the birthing scene, well it seemed to be the women who felt uneasy about the scene, they sometimes got up and left. The men, however, had no chance at that time to see a baby born, so they came to see the film, and watched the birthing scene spellbound...


　
D.

In Europe, particularly England, we date the punk movement from 1972 to about 1976. Greil Marcus in books like Lipstick Traces relates punk esthetics of the Situationist movement. Although it is probable, that Kazuo Hara never heard of the Situationists, I think his Extreme Private Eros can be productively considered as a punk documentary, punk film making ultimately, if remotely, influenced by European situationism. Certainly, the ravaged quality of the soundtrack and images, the intentional display of squalor, and the outrageousness of the emotions on display all accumulate to an experience that is not unlike listening to the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK. Accordingly, I think it helpful to import some ideas about Situationist esthetics into analysis of Hara’s film making.

The International Situationists were radical thinkers comprised of Marxist and post-Marxist activists, initially philosophers a generation younger that the Existentialists and on the fringes of that movement. Their influence is important, particularly in Paris, where Situationist ideas led in part to the failed revolution in May 1968 – disgust and nihilism arising from the collapse of the Paris uprising sent shock waves throughout European capitols and created the environment from which the Punks arose. The Situationists became international in 1957 when the London Psychogeographical Society (a proto-punk movement) combined with the Parisian Lettrists, an offshoot of the doctrinaire Communist party. The leader of the situationists was Guy Debord. His most famous book is The Society of the Spectacle published in 1967 – this book is an underground classic and has been immensely, if covertly, influential: it was a kind of Bible for the punk movement and remains important in various countercultural contexts to this day. (Debord committed suicide in 1994).

Debord argued that Capitalist society is divided into two phases: production and spectacle. People either work to produce capital or they create spectacles intended to endorse the ruling capitalist paradigm. When workers are not working to produce wealth for the bosses, they are narcotized by spectacles designed to keep them from understanding the economic system in which they labor. Debord thought that production of spectacles was equally important to actual economic production in late Capitalist societies because it was only by "spectacle" that the bosses ruled. Debord declared that "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation...images supplant human relationships." In "spectacle," we live by proxy, remotely, through surrogates on TV or the big screen. "Spectacle" is the principle means of social control by which the masses are held in check.

Debord thought that spectacle could be overcome by artists creating counter-spectacles that he called detournement – this was appropriating the spectacle and its seductive imagery to a purpose counter to that for which the spectacle had been engineered. The spectacle engineered to suppress subversive ideas can be "turned topsy-turvy" or upside-down by detournement to yield meanings opposing those espoused by the State. (Debord demonstrated how this might be done by making a film called Society of Spectacle in 1973 using Hollywood film-clips re-cut to yield subversive or counter-cultural meanings.) Counter-spectacles, called "constructed situations", could be staged to subvert ideology advanced by the societally sanctioned "spectacles."

Several elements relating to this praxis can be observed in Hara’s films: first, the director constructs situations that are volatile and that yield violent confrontations from opposing perspectives – these are counter-spectacles "concretely and deliberately"organized to undercut the dominant ideology. In Japan, people who are crippled are deemed esthetically problematic – they are made to disappear. Hara subverts this dominant ideology in　Sayonara CP by having his hero strip naked and squat in the middle of a public square so that the camera can record his deformities and, further, show the reaction of outraged citizens. In Extreme Private Eros, the heroine publicly opposes Japanese ideology relating to the role of women in that society – she seems to think that conceiving a half-Black child is a kind of political gesture that will force a confrontation with the dominant culture. The heroine’s appearance and bisexuality is in stark contrast to Kobayashi, a woman who seems conventionally Japanese in her subordination to the film maker Hara. Furthermore, the entire film project is Debordian spectacle – the film maker Hara prosecutes his intimate relationship with Miyuki by means of a spectacle – he films a relationship that should otherwise be enacted, demonstrating that his relationship with Miyuki is mediated by his camera and sound-systems: the film presents a classic example of an interpersonal relationship colonized, as it were, by media and turned into a spectacle – although, certainly, a counter-spectacle. (Thus, this despairing propositions: all is spectacle – there is no outside to spectacle. Our relationship to reality is now either inevitably through the spectacles staged by the dominant capitalist culture or through a counter-spectacles: fundamentally, we have no authentic relationship with the real.) Psychogeographical concerns are, also, central to Hara’s practice in Extreme Private Eros – the film maker insists upon distinctions between Tokyo and Okinawa. The people on Okinawa have a different geography and, therefore, psyches that differ from the people in Tokyo. To an ideology privileging the relationship of the serene, long-suffering Japanese mother to her children, Hara opposes images of Miyuki Takeda giving birth in a brightly lit room with her first son (Hara’s boy) squatting near her thighs and howling in terror at the spectacle. Hara doesn’t eschew the idea of the spectacle – it’s just that he presents a spectacle that can’t be turned into commerce: no one is going to make a perfume commercial or ad for automobiles out of the imagery that comprises the film. (This is very different from Hollywood films lavish with product placement and that feature tie-ins with car companies – for instance, the Bond films have a symbiotic relationship with Jaguar.) The texture of the film is punk – its all home-made, a product manufactured outside the distribution networks of conventional capitalism: do-it-yourself like a screed printed on poor paper, mimeographed, and handed-out to random strangers, a sort of nightmare ‘zine. Hara’s out-of-focus images and non-synched sound are the equivalent of the punk garage bands blasting out anthems constructed on the basis of one mis-tuned chord.

Another influence on Hara’s film making is cinema verite. Hara’s picture, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on is generally cited as an outstanding example of cinema verite. And, of course, a number of documentary films made in the seventies broke new ground with respect to depicting on-screen subjects that were previously taboo – the classic example of a ground-breaking cinema verite film on this order is PBS’s An American Family, a series of films that showed intimate details in the life of the Louds, a dysfunctional family living in Santa Barbara. Other pictures of this sort are the Mayles’ brothers, Grey Gardens, (1975) about members of Jackie Kennedy’s extended family living in squalor in the East Hamptons and Shirley Clark’s Portrait of Jason (1967), a film about a homosexual African-American hustler and alcholic. Hara’s film is infinitely more "home-made" and aggressively ugly than these films but shares some of the same sensibility. We should remember that these kinds of movies were exceptionally controversial when they were made: the question posed by these films was whether the film maker was cynically exploiting the mental illness of the subjects of his or her film.

And this question, I think, hovers in a noteworthy way over all of Hara’s productions, most particularly Extreme Private Eros.