Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi - A Retrospective
Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi - A Retrospective
Japan
In this famous film, Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi, who would later become his wife and produce - with one exception - his subsequent documentaries, visit Miyuki, the director’s former girlfriend on Okinawa Island. The result is madness. Social taboo after social taboo is dismantled and the concept of “private” shaken until it looses its meaning. Scenes rarely before seen in cinema – like the filming of a birth, the filming of a sex scene in the first person, feminine homosexuality – are abundantly present, erupting with the violence specific to intense intimacy and creating an aura of “scandal film”. “Extreme Private Eros” is certainly one of the most precious documents of the “sexual liberation” period which didn’t by-pass the highly Americanized Japan of the beginning of the 1970s.