Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 - Film Screening
VIEW EVENT DETAILSPart of the film series
Extreme Private Ethos: Japanese Documentaries
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
HARA Kazuo. 1974. 98 min. BW. 16mm.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
In this impossibly private documentary, filmmaker Hara Kazuo follows his ex-wife Takeda Miyuki around with his 16mm camera claiming that it is "the only way to stay connected with her." A radical feminist of her time, Takeda is an independent spirit who ventures into the tough world of Okinawa's go-go bars, gets herself pregnant by sleeping with an American GI, resides in a commune for single women with children, and rants about the filmmaker's shortcomings. Shockingly provocative and at times masochistic, the film exposes the rawest of emotions as the filmmaker confronts his own love life and the world around him. (A Tidepoint Pictures film. Print courtesy of Japan Foundation.)
"At first portending a sadistic macho trip, Extreme Private Eros proves to be an unexpectedly humanist, even feminist film." — Ed Halter, The Village Voice
"A candid document of both unvarnished honesty and emotional self-flagellation." — Todd Konrad, Independent Film Quarterly
About the Director
HARA Kazuo, born in 1945 in Yamaguchi City, was strongly influenced by the cultural and social upheavals of 1970s Japan. Recognized as one of the most significant documentary filmmakers, Hara won Berlin International Film Festival's Caligari Prize and Japanese Film Directors’ Guild's New Director Award for The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987).
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The series Extreme Private Ethos: Japanese Documentaries is supported, in part, by the Japan Foundation. Support for film programs at the Asia Society is provided, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts.