Extreme Private Ethos: Love Song 1974

You might think you have seen some extreme behavior on reality television, but it is nothing compared to the Japanese counter-culture of the early 1970’s. Everyone has had awkward and demoralizing moments with their ex. Radical filmmaker Kazuo Hara edited his into a documentary. At one time he may have had a happy relationship with Miyuki Takeda, but happiness did not satisfy her. However, she allows Hara to film her most intimate moments. Ultimately, the collaboration between her contempt and his self-loathing became Hara’s 16mm Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, which concludes Extreme Private Ethos, the Asia Society’s recent retrospective film series of uncomfortably personal Japanese documentaries, this Saturday.

Hara and Takeda had a young son together and viewers will feel for him quite acutely throughout the film. Wanting to maintain their connection, Hara and his camera invade her new life without him, but she allows it, apparently as a means of inflicting passive aggressive humiliations. Indeed, Hara willingly watches as she launches into an unstable lesbian relationship, moves to Okinawa to become a bargirl, becomes the submissive lover of an African American GI, and has someone’s baby (we not told whose). Hara’s spares the audience nothing, including a front-and-center, but slightly out of focus shot of her delivery.

Eventually moving into an urban commune for former bargirls and their children, Takeda tries to give her choices the patina of radical activism, but what happens on screen is really just a mess. When she forthrightly proclaims her preference for her biracial baby girl over her good natured toddler son, knowingly on-camera, it is rather quietly shocking. You have to feel for the young guy. To get back at his mother, he is probably now a conservative member of the LDP and a staid family man.

Frankly, the alternative lifestyles depicted in Eros make it pretty clear why the traditional ones have endured so long. The distinctly unprofessional midwifery practiced at the commune is particularly disturbing, but none of the choices made in the film appear to turn out well.

Eros is the sort of work that will leave viewers shaking their heads in disbelief. Again, one cannot help feeling sorry for the children born into this chaos. On the other hand, by the end of the documentary, most audience members will conclude Hara and Takeda deserve each other. A scalding antidote to early 1970’s counter-culture romanticism, but not exactly a barrel of laughs, Extreme Private Eros memorably concludes Extreme Private Ethos, the film series clearly titled after it, this Saturday (3/31) at the Asia Society on New York’s famous Park Avenue.

Extreme Private Ethos: The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

Kenzo Okuzaki conducted one of the most reckless murder investigations ever. He suspected two privates in his old regiment were executed to cover up something nefarious. He ought to have a nose for such things. He served ten hard years for murdering a real estate agent. The combination of his moral outrage and erratic behavior is fascinating to behold in Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, which screens this Sunday as part of Extreme Private Ethos, the Asia Society’s film retrospective surveying uncompromisingly intimate Japanese documentaries.

Getting an exact bead on Okuzaki’s ideology is tricky, but there is no question he despises the then Emperor. In addition to his murder wrap, he also did time for shooting a slingshot at the palace and distributing pornographic leaflets with the Emperor’s likeness. He is not subtle, nor particularly restrained, but he is not necessarily wrong about the suspicious executions in the 36th Regiment.

As he questions the surviving players, first with the sister and brother of the presumed victims in tow, later to be replaced by his wife and an anarchist colleague “playing the parts,” a number of disturbing facts are established. He conclusively establishes the men were shot after the war ended. He also kicks lose a lot of speculation about cannibalism within the ranks. While he never uncovers the precise source of the fire, he certainly finds a lot of smoke.

When talking fails, Okuzaki often lashes out physically. Yet, at times when he actually gets his interview subjects to open up, he interrupts them to assert his moral superiority. In short, he is sort of a nut, yet he appears to be on the right track.

An inspiration to Michael Moore (but don’t hold that against him), Hara’s approach throughout Army is deceptively straight forward. Filmed over a five year span, the documentary largely consists of Okuzaki’s slow building interrogations that frequently seem to erupt into mayhem out of nowhere. It definitely seems the filmmaker tries to keep Okuzaki’s volatile nature somewhat under wraps, even with Army’s shocking but rather offhanded conclusion.

Clearly, Hara is not “playing it straight” in Army, preferring to side with a marginalized outsider of Dostoyevskian dimensions. It is rare that such a talky movie can be so unsettling. Indeed, Army is a bizarre viewing experience every serious doc watch should partake of. It screens this Sunday (3/25) as Extreme Private Ethos continues at the Asia Society.

Extreme Private Ethos: Embracing & Tarachime

Film has clearly been a form of therapy for Naomi Kawase. Though experimental in nature, her documentaries have addressed some highly personal and painful family issues. While her themes are universal, the treatment and wincing pain of the search for her birth father and her complicated relationship with her adopted “mother” make the double bill of Kawase’s Embracing and Tarachime (roughly translated as “Birth Mother,” trailer here) arguably the least accessible program of Extreme Private Ethos, the Asia Society current series of acutely intimate Japanese documentaries.

Kawase has also made several acclaimed narrative features, including the quiet but deeply moving Cannes award winning Mourning Forest, but her reputation was forged with her documentary work. Essentially abandoned by both her long missing father and the birth mother who relinquished Kawase to her great aunt Uno (whom she calls Grandma), the filmmaker struggles with a sense of rootlessness in Embracing. Having traced her father’s whereabouts, she would like to re-establish contact, but her great aunt-grandmother-mother is against it. Somewhat conflicted, Kawase reconstructs her early childhood, but all she really has are a few old photographs and official census registrations. Ultimately, such evidence makes notions of family seem rather arbitrary, especially through Kawase’s warped lens.

Following the birth of her own child, Kawase examines her relationship with her adopted mother, directly rebuking the elderly woman’s emotional distance on-camera at critical juncture in Tarachime. Indeed, Kawase turns her focus away from nothing, including her son’s delivery, scenes of her great aunt in the ambulance and emergency room during a health scare, as well as brutally up-close shots of the ninety year old woman’s naked body.

Whereas Embracing exhibits some intriguing avant-garde stylistic devices, Tarachime is more visceral and discomfiting. It is a hard film to watch on several levels. In contrast to her later narrative work, which might be deliberately paced but have a stately beauty deserving a considerably wider audience, these short docs should probably be reserved for cineastes whose tastes run towards non-narrative experimentalism. Brutally honest, they are still quite appropriate selections for Extreme Private Ethos. About forty minutes each, Embracing and Tarachime screen together this Sunday (3/18) at the Asia Society on New York’s fashionable Upper Eastside.

Extreme Private Ethos: Dear Pyongyang

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Japan’s Korean population sharply divided into camps aligned with the North or the South. At the time, the DPRK supporting Chongryun ran circles around their counterparts, convincing many Koreans in Japan to “return” to the North. As a co-founder of Chongryun, Yang Yonghi’s father encouraged many such “returnees,” including her three older brothers. In retrospect, this was a mistake. Yang examines the disconnect between the ideology she was born into and the reality of life for her North Korean family in Dear Pyongyang (trailer here), which screens this Sunday as part of Extreme Private Ethos, the Asia Society’s latest film series surveying provocatively intimate Japanese documentaries.

Yang was truly a red diaper baby, raised by her ardently Marxist father to revere the “fatherland” and the “Great Leader.” Although she attended one of the DPRK funded “Korean” schools in Japan, she was also a young person coming of age in an open society. As a result, she had some context to help her question the propaganda she was steadily fed in class. However, her first class trip to Pyongyang and her brief reunion with her brothers clearly began her ideologically questioning in earnest. As the years passed, her parents would ship more and more provisions to their sons, simply to keep them alive. Yet, they never backed down from their allegiance to the rogue state.

Without question, Yang is profoundly disturbed by her parents’ apparent self deception, but she is rather circumspect in pressing the issue on-camera, for obvious reasons. Indeed, it is fascinating to read between the lines in Dear Pyongyang. She implies quite a bit about the miserable conditions there, but leaves much unspoken. After all, she has family in the North. On a more personal level, she also worries her father will consider any criticism of the DPRK as a rebuke of his life’s work. Just the same, she cannot ignore what she sees with her own eyes on each trip to Pyongyang.

Evidently, Yang successfully walked her tightrope, since she was able to make a follow-up film focusing on her niece Sona, whom she identifies with for living the life she might very well have led, had her parents also “returned.” She also was able to get her father to seriously take stock of many fateful decisions he made, on camera, before his health issues put an end to such discussions late in the documentary.

Understandably, an atmosphere of regret hangs heavily over the entire film. While Korea remains divided by circumstances beyond their control, Yang’s family is divided by choices they made. To her credit, she examines their implications as forthrightly as was prudent, given the nature of the Communist regime. Deeply personal but also highly relevant, it is an intriguing, frustrating, and forgiving film. Definitely a highlight of Extreme Private Ethos, the respectfully recommended Dear Pyongyang screens this Sunday afternoon (3/11) at the Asia Society in New York.

Extreme Private Ethos: Death of a Japanese Salesman

They were not Mad Men, they were Salarymen. Tomoaki Sunada was part of the postwar generation of professionals who rebuilt Japan into a leading world economic power. Unfortunately, just as Sunada begins to enjoy his sunset years, he is diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer. True to methodical form, Sunada develops an action plan for his impending demise, as his youngest daughter, director-cinematographer-editor Mami Sunada documents in Death of a Japanese Salesman (a.k.a. Ending Note, trailer here), which opens Extreme Private Ethos, the Asia Society’s new film series surveying provocatively intimate Japanese documentaries, this Saturday in New York.

While the current title sounds like an echo of the Miller play that is purely accidental (or inappropriate). When Sunada retires from his chemical company, he is a well respected member of the board. He has good relations with his son and two daughters, while absolutely doting on his granddaughters when he visits America. Though the Sunadas’ marriage had been increasingly strained, they had reconciled mere months before his diagnosis. Sunada’s end will be a happier tragedy than Willie Loman’s, dying before his aged mother, but leaving with few regrets.

Intimate hardly begins to describe Sunada’s documentary. She filmed some of the most private moments a family can have, frequently exasperating her father. Yet, somehow it does not feel voyeuristic or exploitative. Through her narration, in her voice but her father’s words, she seems to come to terms with his passing in a way that is quite touching.

DOAJS will interest cineastes beyond its up close and personal drama. It was produced by Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda, on whose recent films Mami Sunada worked as a production assistant, including the thematically related Still Walking. Yet for many, the bittersweet relationship between the salaryman and his vexing single daughter will more readily bring to mind the Ozu canon.

For obvious reasons, DOAJS is often hard to watch, but much like GONTITI’s soundtrack for Still Walking, alt-folker Hanaregumi’s music helps keep the tone more wistful than maudlin. Nowhere near as manipulative as one might expect, it still packs a tremendous emotional punch. As a result, it is rather earnestly recommended to those currently in a good mental place. Indeed, all but the most jaded viewers are certain to get choked up when it kicks off Extreme Private Ethos this Saturday afternoon (3/10) at the Asia Society.