Speaker:
Chika Kinoshita, Professor of Film Studies, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University
Moderator:
Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Time: 4:45 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: CBC, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU
Hara Kazuo’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974) has been justly singled out as one of the ground-breaking works in the history of Japanese documentary cinema. In Japanese language film criticism, this film that captured the male director’s former and current partners’ respective childbirths has been widely considered a precursor to a paradigm shift in documentary filmmaking, a shift from oppositional political movements in the public sphere to reflections on the self and family in the private sphere that started in earnest in the 1990s.
This talk presents a feminist corrective to this established assessment of the film, demonstrating how those private affairs – sex, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, and childrearing – were thoroughly political and therefore public by augmenting the threads of existing scholarship that have highlighted the film’s radical performativity and the strong agency and creative contribution of the two female “partners,” Takeda Miyuki and Kobayashi Sachiko.
Based on research on Ribu zines and contemporary media discourse, this talk contextualizes Extreme Private Eros within two specific historical contexts. First, I discuss the film’s main character and driving force Takeda’s feminist activism within the history of the Women’s Liberation “Ribu” movement in the early 1970s. As Nakane Wakae has shown, even though Takeda was a central actor in the Ribu movement, a majority of the previous studies on the film focused on Hara’s authorship and thereby underestimated her historical significance. I demonstrate how strongly Takeda’s onscreen actions were linked to Ribu’s activism, particularly their 1971–1973 battle against the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s attempts to revise the Eugenic Protection Law for tighter restrictions on abortion. Second, I trace Extreme Private Eros’ exhibition history at a variety of Ribu organizations and their meetings where the film was screened, hotly debated, and written about with general sympathy and strong interest and thereby argue that considering its exhibition and reception, the film, with a man’s directorial signature, can be called a Ribu film.
In conclusion, I shed new light on Extreme Private Eros as a media event in which Takeda produces a child with an African-American GI in Okinawa to have her giving birth filmed on 16mm and circulate it through a non-theatrical network of oppositional movements, drawing on Paul B. Preciado’s concept of the pharmacopornographic regime.
Chika Kinoshita is a professor of Film Studies at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. Her research interests are in Japanese film history, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is the author of the award-winning book, Mizoguchi Kenji: Aesthetics and Politics of the Film Medium (Hosei University Press, 2016). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections in both English and Japanese.
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