Guus Bosman

The Saturday evening screening of the Full Frame Festival last week was The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, a 1987 movie by Japanese director Kazuo Hara. Sasha and I saw it in the Fletcher Hall in the Carolina theater.

This was truly an amazing documentary, about the search for answers in a war-crime case by Kenzo Okuzaki. As the New York Times put it in a great review (written in 1988):

"From everything the audience sees, Kenzo Okuzaki is a certifiable psychotic, though The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On never addresses this suspicion. He's the sort of fellow who writes long, crazily incoherent letters to editors, confronts people on street corners and harangues them with a loudspeaker from his van. It could be that Mr. Hara thinks the psychotic state is the only sane response to the contradictions in contemporary Japanese society."

Kenzo Okuzaki frequently uses violence and threats of violence to get the truth out the people he interviews, and at times it's easy to forget that this is an actual real-life documentary.

The movie was screened at the Full Festival in the "The Power Of Ten" series, a recommendation by film maker Michael Moore. The Q&A session with director Kazuo Hara after the movie was very interesting.

Michael Moore said he saw the movie when he was making his first major documentary, Roger and Me. While filming that he was somewhat concerned he was too harsh in his methods, but he joked that after seeing The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On he felt he was well within limits.

Mr. Hara said that after Kenzo Okuzaki came out of jail there was some talk about a follow up documentary but that Mr. Hara decided against it, because he feared that it would push Mr. Okuzaki over the border of sanity, an honorable choice.