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October 14, 2004
Film: _The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On_
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Yuki Yikite Shingun, Hara Kazuo, Japan 1987)
(with the Thursday Screeners)(8 pm in Gifford)
Hara Kazuo is one of Japan's leading nonfiction filmmakers, a major artist whose work should be better known
in the West. This film is his profile of Okuzaki Kenzo, a veteran and radical activist who has spent the better part
of his life attempting to expose the evils of the late Emperor Hirohito. (He shot lead pellets at the emperor and
distributed pornographic images of him.) Several members of his WW2 platoon died under mysterious circumstances
at the hands of the Emperor's elite officers, and "Naked Army" is Hara's documentation of Okuzaki's quest for the truth.
The old man is given to fits of violence, irrational ranting, and (at least to viewers not steeped in Japanese history)
a rather bizarre political ideology. The truth, when Hara and Okuzaki discover it, is truly unbelievable.
Posted by mryonker at October 14, 2004 09:31 PM