Observations on Style and Theme for Kazuo Hara

At the Film of the Month Club, the conversation about Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On is going apace. It is a rich and strange film, lending itself to a world of consideration - politics, history, Japanese society - the psychology of the protagonist, Kenzo Okuzaki - moral and ethical considerations, both for Okuzaki and the filmmakers - as well as being a fascinating piece of filmmaking. The conversation there so far has bent more toward the politcal, ethical, psychological elements of the film - I want to wrote about the formal elements of the film, and about Hara's style and themes as a filmmaker. I took a look at his earlier films as well, themselves quite extraordinary works: Sayonara CP is about a group of cerebral palsy sufferers; Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974about an Miyuki Takeda, Hara's ex-lover who has gone to Okinawa to try to help the bar girls there... These are some notes, some continuities among these films, and some of the devices used by Hara in The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On...

- Form and Style - the film follows a relatively common documentary form: Hara and crew follow their subject around, generally not interfering or overtly shaping the material. Hara doesn't add a lot of explanation - no voiceover, fairly minimal titles, and only a couple interviews of people other than Okuzaki to give context to the story. This is similar to his other films - even when there are more conventional interviews (as in Sayonara CP), they aren't presented as ways to fill in a broader kind of story - they are filmed and presented as monologues by the characters in the film. They don't provide context for the film's subject - they are the film's subject.

- Style - looking more closely at some of Hara's techniques: his preference for fly on the wall observation; his manipulation of sound and image (which is less radical in this film than the earlier ones - probably because he had enough budget to shoot real synch sound); his occasionally jarring use of text - these elements have thematic implications as well, that we will return to.

- Structure - in the interview cited by Girish, Hara mentions trying to show Okuzaki as an action hero. The film, in fact, is structured as a mystery - as a detective story. It is structured around a literal murder mystery - why were 2 private killed 23 days after the war ended in 1945? Who ordered them killed, who did the deed, and why? Okuzaki tracks down this mystery, interviewing all the surviving witnesses - but he does it like a detective - he doesn't just seek the truth about what happened 40 odd years before, he seeks to inflict justice in the present as well. (And yes, "inflict" seems to be the right word there.)

- Narration - while Hara does avoid conventional documentary construction - voiceover and explanations and background information and so on, he maintains a good deal of control over the narration of the film, the flow of information. The Emperor's Naked Army... begins with somewhat random seeming clips of Okuzaki - at a wedding, visiting the police, mounting a couple protests, visiting a man in the hospital - these scenes introduce him without explicitly stating who he is or what he is doing. But in fact, a good deal of information is revealed: we learn about his past, his records, from his own accounts (and eventually from Hara); we get some glimpses of his character, that might come clearer later (his remark that nations and families are walls between people - at a wedding! - should give us a hint as to his iconoclasm); we learn about his goals, his obsessions, and get some hints of his methods. Hara sets up later scenes: the first old comrade he meets is Yamada, in the hospital - who will also be the final, most significant encounter (shown) in the film.

- Themes - the dominant theme throughout Hara's work is one of revealing what is hidden - more than hidden, what is repressed. In the Iris interview, he mentions this, specifically about Sayonara CP - to show handicapped bodies because they are difficult to look at. "What I wanted to do with the film is show exactly what people did not want to see, to expose the hidden." Its a theme running throughout his films: in Extreme Private Eros, showing his private life and that of Takeda, as well as showing two explicit births; in The Emperor's Naked Army, he exposes the secrets - shameful, evil - from the war.

In fact, he goes beyond showing what is hidden. It's more that he explores the acts of revealing and hiding, and the mechanisms of repression. All three films contain moments that hide as well as show: obviously the things people don't want to tell, but also the people who resist being on film; acts of direct censorship and repression, and so on. So in Sayonara CP we see: the wife of the main character (Yokota, the poet) trying to stop the film, demanding that Hara stop filming in her home, which he ignores; police breaking up Yokota's poetry reading, calling it a freak show. In Extreme Private Eros: there is a similar scene - Takeda is distributing pamphlets to bar girls in Okinawa, with Hara filming - some men approach and the screen goes black and a title informs us that "Hara was assaulted by gangsters." It's similar to the end of Naked Army - where the trip to New Guinea yields nothing but a title saying the footage was confiscated by the Indonesian government. Even without elisions of this sort, the hiding/revealing dynamic appears: the quintessential example may be Takeda's birthing scene in Extreme Private Eros. Hara shoots the birth in one take - and presents the take in the film - even though the camera went out of focus early in the shot. He's showing something as intimate as it is possible to show - but showing it out of focus, blurred and ambiguous.

These scenes seem to me to come close to the core of Hara's ideas. They occur throughout his films - he emphasizes them, with titles explaining what's missing, or with a voiceover running over the out of focus shot of the birth of Tekeda's child - or just through their placement. They tend to come near the climax of the films, as when the police break up Yokota's poetry reading, at the end of the climax of the poem itself, for instance. They tend to come between moments of great power: in Sayonara CP, Hara draws out the moment hen Yokota reads his poem - the police arrive - and immediately after the scene, there is a shot of Yokota naked, in the middle of street, talking about his hopes for the film, and their let down. The end of Naked Army is similar - the emotional peak of the film is probably the long ocnfrontation between Okuzaki (and Oshima the anarchist) and Yamada - after this, comes the (invisible) trip to New Guinea and Okuzaki's attempted murder of Koshimizu's son. The latter especially, is the climax of the film - it's what the story has been building toward: the solution of the mystery (who killed the men and why? by that timem Koshimizu has emerged as the clear villain of the piece), and Okuzaki's imposition of justice (or vengeance.) And it happens offscreen, told in titles and an interview with Okuzaki's wife. Which is probably all the more appropriate given that Okuzaki's vengeance goes awry - he doesn't shoot the perpetrator of the old crimes - he shoots his son.