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Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Yukiyukite shingun). Trowbridge: Flicks Books,1998, 58 pp.
This slim but admirable book focuses on Hara Kazuo's 1986 feature-length documentary. The film focuses on the efforts of Okuzaki Kenzo, a Japanese veteran of the Pacific War, to compel fellow soldiers to confess to atrocities committed in New Guinea in the final days of the war when the Imperial Army abandoned them to their fate and they were forced to resort to cannibalism.
Based on extensive archival research and interviews with director Hara, the Ruoff brothers-- Japanese Studies scholar Kenneth and film historian Jeffrey, whose thorough study on the landmark television series An American Family is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press-analyze the film's style, characters, narrative structure and unusual production methods, and place the work in a tradition of radical nonfiction filmmaking that includes such practitioners as Jean Rouch and Marcel Ophuls.
The Ruoffs also address the moral issues documentary filmmakers inevitably confront when they commit themselves...