Some directors are primarily famous for one scene, and in the case of Kazuo Hara it’s easy to pinpoint which one it is. Hara’s 1987 documentary The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is notorious for a moment in which the film’s subject Kenzo Okuzaki, a Japanese World War II veteran on a personal crusade to get his fellow soldiers to admit to committing war crimes, becomes so enraged by one veteran’s stonewalling that he leaps on the man and tries to strangle him. Hara, meanwhile, refocuses his camera. In his defence, Okuzaki says “Violence is my forte”. Emotional violence is Kazuo Hara’s forte, and his earlier film Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 shows he’s not afraid to inflict it on himself. Now released on Blu-Ray by Second Run – as, indeed, was The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On – it’s the sort of thing a university course on documentary ethics could spend months on.
It begins in a place of excruciating self-disclosure. Over a montage of candid family photos, Hara says that his girlfriend has left him and decided to move to the island of Okinawa. He is making this film, he says, because he still loves her and can’t think of any other way to keep her in his life. As opening gambits go, it’s already pretty uncomfortable, and you ain’t seen nothing yet. The film opens with said ex-girlfriend, Miyuki Takeda, living on Okinawa in a relationship with a woman called Sugako. There’s already trouble in paradise. We’re dropped without preparation straight into the middle of an argument about Sugako’s new relationship with an American GI called Tommy. Miyuki accuses Sugako of seeing their same-sex relationship as less valid than one with a man, and complains about having to hear them have sex in the house. At which point you think, isn’t that what Hara is doing here watching Miyuki in her new relationship? There is no right way to get over losing someone you’re still in love with, but following them around with a camera and sound recordist to document their subsequent relationships is pretty high on the list of wrong ways to do it.
One of the great things about Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 – and I do think it’s a great film, with the caveat that it really isn’t for everyone – is that it’s about the most fundamental question of documentary-making, namely when do you stop filming? Hara’s later documenting of Kenzo Okuzaki’s attempted murder shows he’s comfortable leaving the camera running much longer than most people would dare. But that scene can be defended as a piece of reportage, a shocking but necessary contribution to a national debate on the legacy of the war. The question of what Hara wants us to take from his documenting of his own failed relationship is harder to answer, even with the opening narration explaining his ambitions. It’s the film’s capturing of a shifting ground, both in Hara and Miyuki’s lives and in Japanese society, that keeps it gripping and unsettling.
At first, when Miyuki is screaming at Sugako, you wonder if Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 is going to be an exercise in sadism, a feature-length attempt by Hara to argue that Miyuki was better off with him. But the presence of Tommy – in the narrative at least, he remains off-camera – is the first hint at how the film will proceed. Okinawa was a disputed territory after World War II, with Japan and China both making claims to it, as well as a later independence movement demanding the island be granted self-determination. The American bases were ostensibly there to keep the peace between these factions, but their effect on Okinawan society was less benign. The military presence made Okinawa into a major hub for the sex industry, and one of the most chilling parts of Hara’s film tells the story of Chichi, a fourteen-year-old girl whose relationship with another GI leads her into prostitution.
It’s the film’s capturing of a shifting ground, both in Hara and Miyuki’s lives and in Japanese society, that keeps it gripping and unsettling.
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Hara’s later films were often extremely political – Naked Army, obviously, but also later documentaries about pollution scandals including a 2021 film about the notorious Minamata chemical spill. You could read Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 as an earlier, more roundabout contribution to political discourse, yet the fact remains that if Hara wanted to make a film about sexual exploitation and the American presence on Okinawa he could have just made that, without risking so much of himself. (Shohei Imamura, whose own Okinawa-set film Profound Desires of the Gods had been an unjustly huge flop, was doing exactly this with his documentaries about bar hostesses, lost soldiers and sex workers at the same time that Hara was filming) It is the fact that Hara is operating the camera trained on his ex-girlfriend, showing her and hiding himself, that makes Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 such a disturbing film.
If you’re sensing the word “male gaze” is about to enter this review, you’re not wrong, although it’s not as simple as mere voyeurism. Tony Rayns’s booklet essay says there’s no sex in the film, but Chris Fujiwara’s video introduction contradicts this: Fujiwara notes the scene in which Hara’s camera hovers over a naked, orgasmic Miyuki, and says the lack of explanation about how this scene was negotiated (apparently Miyuki was curious about what she looked like during sex) troubles him. Hara’s point, I think, is that you could say that about any scene in the film, or indeed any documentary. Documentary film-making involves a whole lot of off-camera flattery and persuasion, and it also requires you to not ask too many questions about how the presence of the camera changes people’s behaviour. Is the discord in Miyuki and Sugako’s relationship purely down to Tommy, for instance, or is the other male interloper – Hara and his camera – also contributing to the tense atmosphere? If Hara wanted you to ignore this question, he wouldn’t have begun with an autobiographical statement read out by the director himself. You are actively asked to engage with the question of the director, what he wants, how he might be shaping the scenes in front of him even if it’s unintentional. The fact that Hara is off-camera for nearly the whole film only makes his presence more glaring.
In the end, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 is about what’s not seen. Its title might sound like a porn film, and its emotional and physical exposure might be relentless, but at the end of it you are very aware of what’s not in the picture. This is the case with the film’s most notorious scene, an unflinching one-take recording of Miyuki giving birth to another GI’s baby. The camera is out of focus at this point, and the rest of the cinematography is crisp and exact enough (especially in this restoration) to make it clear that this is not a technical fault. The booklet essays and extras speculate on why this is; I was surprised that none of them considered that it might be a way of getting around Japan’s famous laws against depicting genitalia. Either way, it reinforces the film’s overarching themes: there are some things that even an unflinching documentary like this can’t show, not because of prudery but because they transcend explanation. Equally, there are some elements of womanhood that men will never see clearly.
The film’s other technical limitation is a lack of sync sound, presumably because the equipment was too unwieldy to get into the cramped apartments where the characters spend a lot of their time. It gives the film a slightly dissociative quality, with the voices on the soundtrack hovering uncertainly above the actual on-screen events: not inappropriate for the subject matter. The extras include an excellent booklet with a new essay by Rayns delving into the history of Hara, Okinawa and more, plus a reprinted essay by Ela Bittencourt which offers an essential female perspective on the film and on Miyuki’s feminist activism, which becomes more present as the film continues and eventually offers her an escape from the men around her.
The disc contains the aforementioned introduction by Fujiwara, which is laudable in its refusal to tell you how to feel about some of the film’s more uncomfortable elements, and a short but fact-filled interview with Hara. He talks about the challenges of maintaining a high standard of cinematography while you’re shooting something as personal and volatile as this, and reveals that the sound recordist – who hovers around the edges of the synced scenes with a microphone poking into frame – is Sachiko Kobayashi, Hara’s long-time producer and now wife. It’s hard to think of many people who would look at a man embarking on a two-year documentary shoot about his ex and think yes, that’s the man for me. But then it’s hard to think of many men like Kazuo Hara. He is a genuinely unique, fearless talent, and the proof is right here.
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 is out now on Second Run Blu-Ray
