While still in secondary school, Hara Masato (1950) won several prizes with his 16mm film A Sad Yet Funny Ballad. In 1970, he wrote the script for Oshima Nagasi's film The Man Who Left His Will on Film. In 1973, he completed The First Emperor, a film on which he worked for three years. The film was selected by the magazine Kinema Jumpo as one of the most important films in Japanese film history. From the 1980s on, Hara focused increasingly on television documentaries. In his work, he makes use of various media, mainly animation and laser disk images and he often combines the screening of his films with live performances.

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