Clara Spilliaert – Extreme Private Eros: Love Song
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song © Shisso Productions
Clara Spilliaert presents Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros (1974) in the context of her solo exhibition My Sister is Pregnant, currently showing at Kunsthal Gent until December 29.
When his ex-wife called Kazuo Hara to film the birth of their child, the filmmaker set out for Okinawa and filmed her for two years with a 16mm hand-held camera. “The only way to keep the relationship was to make a film,” Hara reflects in a voiceover at the film’s opening. Still in love, obsessive and jealous, he portrayed his ex, Miyuki Takeda, while she was in a relationship first with a woman and then with an African-American soldier, with whom she was to have a child. “I never understood why she left me and. Somehow, my way of finding out was to film her. We managed to communicate through the camera, and that helped me understand what had happened.”
Kazuo Hara (1945) is widely recognized as one of Japan’s most important and influential documentary filmmakers. Notorious for his confrontational method, he was a student of Shinsuke Ogawa’s budding style of hypersubjective filmmaking. The radical intimacy of Hara’s cinema reached a bold climax with the impossibly personal documentary Extreme Private Eros – a diaristic portrait of his ex-lover and mother to his child, after she left him in search of a new sexual and political identity. Holding his own raw emotions and investments up for scrutiny, Extreme Private Eros is a milestone in self-critical documentary filmmaking.
Introduction by Lisa and Clara Spilliaert
Kazuo Hara
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
“Well, I think it’s a great movie, and that you’re a documentarian attached to your subject; you’re personally attached to a woman, Miyuki Takeda, who cannot be kept or contained. She’s independent, heedless, doesn’t listen or obey. She goes her own way. To take your own feelings and attach them to her – is it masochism or just fascination? In any society, she would be a human bomb. To me, she’s just amazing. There’s nothing for her to grab onto, so she’s out in the world, rejecting aspects of what’s there. She’s having a baby totally by herself, gives birth unassisted. And then that final scene has such tension: she’s working as an erotic dancer, up onstage in front of an audience, which is very servile but also a mode of individual expression. She’s very good, but it’s such a bizarre situation – to be looked at, desired, recorded, but fiercely independent and apart. I’m impressed by her, maybe even afraid of her. I felt for you, seeing through your lens, as you were in love with her.”
— Avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs in conversation with Kazuo Hara
“Even in this era of reality television and docu-fiction, only rarely has a filmmaker turned the camera upon their own private life with such candor and intimacy as Kazuo Hara in the aptly named Extreme Private Eros. While ostensibly focused upon his former love Miyuki Takeda as she comes to terms with her own bisexuality and intense distrust of traditional family structures, Extreme Private Eros also offers a portrait of Hara as a jealous and resentful ex for whom filming serves as a kind of harsh self-therapy. The film was, in fact, made in close collaboration with Takeda, who invited Hara to follow her to Okinawa where she had gone with their child to live with her girlfriend. Takeda also asked Hara to document her giving birth unassisted to another child, the result of her relationship with a black American GI. Adding further emotional complexity to the project, Hara invited his new girlfriend and producer Sachiko Kobayashi to assist in the production – resulting in one of the film’s most indelible scenes, a stinging conversation between the two women about Hara as artist, lover and human being.”
— Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song © Shisso Productions
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song © Shisso Productions
Clara Spilliaert, My Sister is Pregant © Michiel De Cleene
Clara Spilliaert, My Sister is Pregant © Michiel De Cleene