Goodbye CP
Director: Kazuo Hara
Year Released: 1972
Rating: 3.0
Japanese avant-garde documentarian Kazuo Hara follows several men afflicted with cerebral palsy around and asks them questions about sex, their feelings about parents forcing their children to give donations to them and their feelings about their horrible condition. It wouldn't be fair to accuse Hara of sensationalism or exploitation since he's clearly sympathetic but powerless to really 'help' the afflicted: the only thing he's capable of doing - as a filmmaker - is standing back and recording them as they struggle to do any task they choose to (in a way, that's the point of the film: donations don't take the disease away or make basic chores easier to handle). Like all of Hara's work that I've seen, it's deeply troubling, oddly constructed and unforgettable, and I never want to see it again. One major flaw: the out-of-sync audio is extremely annoying.
