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SCREENING ROOM
In film, Spain is hot; American Cinematheque fest goes beyond 'Pan's
Labyrinth' and 'Volver.'
Los Angeles Times Review by Robert Abele March 15, 2007
The hard reality of war and its aftermath is the subject of Kazuo
Hara's coarse, disturbing 1987 film "The Emperor's Naked Army
Marches On," being shown Sunday by Los Angeles Filmforum as
part of a retrospective of this transgressive-minded Japanese documentarian's
work. Hara's subject -- an embittered, violent- minded World War
II veteran and radical activist named Kenzo Okuzaki -- is not going
quietly into the night as the 40-year anniversary of Japan's surrender
approaches. He's spent time in prison for killing a man, has shot
at Emperor Hirohito and drives around in a loudspeaker-outfitted
van. Thanks to Hara's camera crew, he also attempts to track down
the military officers who may have criminally executed some of their
own soldiers after the war ended.
There's a hypnotic confluence of introspection and aesthetic curiosity
in
avant-garde filmmaker Su Friedrich's work. Her exploration of her
roller-coaster relationship with her father, for example, from her
1990 work
"Sink or Swim," takes the form of a ghostly cinematic
storybook in which
text, a young girl's narration and black-and-white imagery move
between the
everyday and the artfully metaphoric. REDCAT and Outfest have collaborated
to bring two programs of Friedrich's work to Los Angeles, and she'll
attend
both.
The Outfest program highlights the more sexually themed "Damned
If You Don't" (1987) and "Hide and Seek"
(1996). The REDCAT evening features "Sink or Swim" and
two L.A. premieres. "Seeing Red" (2005) juxtaposes
captured images of the titular color in our world -- on clothes,
signs, hair -- with chest-level shots of red-clad Friedrich in full-tilt
self-narrated dudgeon about her own insecurities, personal failings
and concerns about the motivations of others. "The Head
of a Pin" (2004) uses a city-dweller's myopic view of weekend-
getaway sylvan serenity as the basis for an amusing reality check
about nature's not-so-hidden agendas: Half the running time is Friedrich's
video camera trained on a titanic struggle under the kitchen table
between a spider and a trapped insect. |
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