Kazuo Hara: Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974

With a title like that, you barely need a movie, but Kazuo Hara made one. Though it precedes The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On by over a decade, it’s equally a product of the documentarian’s compulsion to follow eccentrics around. This time, the eccentric is not a combative middle-aged veteran but a twentysomething woman — specifically, Hara’s ex-girlfriend Miyuki.

If this sounds banal, rest assured that Miyuki isn’t saner — and indeed, may be less sane — than Kenzo Okuzaki. Certainly she’s just as determined to live live on her own terms, her mind’s cloudy list of which apparently dictates that she run away from Hara with their baby, move in with another woman, take off to Okinawa, hook up with a hostile-seeming black G.I. for a few weeks; dance in strip clubs, hang out with prostitutes, and run an all-woman commune. Yet most inexplicable act might actually be her submission to starring in this very documentary, which demands exposure including but not limited to full-frontally giving birth on film.

To the extent that people still talk about Extreme Private Eros, etc., they talk about that childbirth scene. It’s shot out of focus, and Hara blames his lack of camera expertise in the narration, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. As if watching Miyuki laboriously — as it were — push out the G.I.’s baby weren’t enough for us, Hara also gets footage, in greater clarity, of his lover/producer Sachiko delivering his own kid. (And what do you know, they’re still together.) The second baby has a more harrowing emergence, appearing at first to be a dead alien, but it’s the first’s that’ll stick with me.

Focus issues constitute only one of the limitations absolute poverty of production imposes on this film, but by determination or by accident, most of these limitations become wonky strengths. Hara appears to have used exactly two pieces of equipment: a hand-wound camera and a tape recorder. Lacking any means to synchronize these forces him to craft the sound and the imagery as two independent entities that must nonetheless work together. If Miyuki’s lips happen to match the words she speaks on the soundtrack, for instance, it’s the only moment that will happen in a scene. But the experience hearing one set of words from someone and watching them speak another — or laugh, or pause, or listen, or change a diaper — has a way of separating their words from their manner. Countless were the moments that felt like glimpses of an unusually nuanced portrait simply because I could process what I heard the person say and what I saw them do simultaneously but separately.

I don’t want to oversell the power of the movie’s ramshackleness, prone as I am to get ridiculously jazzed by all things microbudget, but it’s hard to imagine it done any other way. To its core, this is a far-under-the-radar project. We’re talking about a documentary where the director’s current lady and former one lean against a wall and interview each other and tumble into a discussion of how weird it is that they’ve both contained semen of the man holding the camera. We’re talking about a documentary where the director, reduced to tears by his subject’s callousness, near-silently weeps on camera for a few minutes — while still holding up the microphone. We’re talking about a documentary which the director himself can’t bear to watch. That’s what I call a selling point.

Comments

[christian louboutin]

I really liked your blog article.There should be something you like：www.louboutinshoes.cc

[Devremülk]

i like to read your posts. thanks for this one.

[Devremülk]

i like to read your posts. thanks for this one.

[Polatlı]

Good post. I like to read your posts. well written. thank you.