Kazuo Hara

I've been trying to catch up on the few films I missed from the PFA's tribute to the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival earlier this year. This is where I first saw Shirley Clarke's The Cool World, Wexler's Medium Cool, Ning Ying's On the Beat and other great programs. One that I tried so hard to attend but sadly missed was Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On. Unlike many of the films in the program, Hara's film recently became available on DVD and I was able to watch it this week. It is a heart wrenching, touching, and sometimes comedic film, one of the best documentaries I've seen. It is the story of a Japanese World War II veteran trying to piece together conflicting accounts of why two Japanese soldiers were murdered by their own commanding officers 40 years ago. His methods alternate between reasonable discussions to violent demands. It is both a detective story and a revenge story. The accounts he is able to locate are astonishing. These old war veterans reluctantly share stories they thought they had buried, accounts of survival in the most desperate conditions.

Watching the film made me think of other documentary films that really touched me and I decided to record their titles and see if they change over time. Below is a list of those films. Determining what is a documentary film and what isn't would be the subject of an entire thesis, so I devised my own sub categories of non-fiction films that I don't expect anyone to agree with and no one really should. But films like Sans Soliel or Koyaanisqatsi cannot be overlooked. Here are some titles, in no particular order, and I expect to add more when they come to me. I'd like to hear some suggestions as well.

Documentaries
1. Gimme Shelter (dir. Maysles Bros, 1970)
2. Workingman's Death (dir. Michael Glawogger, 2005)
3. Chung Kuo China (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972)
4. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (dir. Kazuo Hara, 1987)
5. Gates of Heaven (dir. Errol Morris, 1980)
6. The Thin Blue Line (dir. Errol Morris, 1988)
7. The Films of Frederick Wiseman
8. Harlan County USA (dir. Barbara Kopple, 1976)
9. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (dir. Adam Curtis, 2004)
10. Cocksucker Blues (dir. Robert Frank, 1972)
11. Tokyo Olympiad (dir. Kon Ichikawa, 1965)

Profile Films:
1. No Direction Home (dir. Martin Scorcese, 2005)
2. The Devil and Daniel Johnston (dir. Jeff Feuerzeig, 2005)

Performance Films:
1. Jazz on a Summer's Day (dir. Bert Stern, 1960)
2. Monterey Pop Festival (dir. D.A Pennebaker, 1968)
3. Festival! (dir. Murray Lerner, 1967)

Non-Fiction Films
1. Sans Soleil (dir. Chris Marker, 1983)
2. Koyaanisqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio, 1982)
3. People on a Sunday (dir. Robert Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann, Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder, 1930)

Notable Omissions:
Hearts and Minds (dir. Peter Davis, 1974)
The Sorrow and the Pity (dir. Marcel Ophuls, 1969)
Shoah (dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
The Films of Ken Burns
Up Series (dir. Michael Apted)

The above films are not listed for the sole reason that I have not seen them yet. Any of them.