“I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society,” the Japanese documentarian Kazuo Hara once cried as he charged into the Valley of Taboo armed with nothing more than a rickety movie camera and some loose change in his pocket instead of a budget. This would be empty posturing from the filmmakers who make HBO-friendly and film festival-safe documentaries, but Mr. Hara is merely naming his enemy so he can better destroy it.

In the four films on display at Anthology Film Archives as part of a series called “The Films of Kazuo Hara,” he leaves mainstream society a charred ruin.

These four movies — 1972’s “Goodbye CP,” 1974’s “Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974,” 1987’s “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” and 1994’s “A Dedicated Life” — comprise two-thirds of Mr. Hara’s entire career, which is fortunate because they’re filled with such concentrated aggression that any more of them would turn your eyes into two smoking craters. Taken in a single dose, you leave the theater with a Halloween history of postwar Japan dancing in your head: happy cannibals, jittering rapists with cerebral palsy, feminist thugs, livers cauterized by green lasers, and steaming babies unceremoniously dumped out of their mothers’ wombs onto piles of old newspaper.

Born into the postwar wreckage of 1945 Japan, Mr. Hara ditched photography for filmmaking because he was tired of surfaces, and his first movie, “Goodbye CP” is a black-and-white lever that pries the scab off the treatment of the handicapped that hit Japan like a lightning bolt. Even today it’s used as an initiation for college students, testing their capacity to treat the handicapped like real people. And in this movie they are real: real annoying, real vain, and real dangerous.

Crumpled into a ball by cerebral palsy, the poet Yokota Hiroshi and his five friends are a living rebuke to a world that treats the handicapped like inspirational Ken dolls — nothing but smooth plastic from below the belt to above the knees and mouths full of platitudes. These six have babies, get married, fight, and panhandle, and while the film’s running time outlasts the ability of Japanese agitprop to translate to America, scenes of Mr. Hiroshi’s enraged and handicapped wife trying to throw the camera crew out of her house linger in your skull like a bad smell. Far more toxic are the booze-fueled bonding sessions in which the six men discuss their sex lives, in which one of them cheerfully admits to rape.

But these guys are amateurs next to Kenzo Okuzaki, the subject of “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” Mr. Hara’s most famous documentary. Shohei Imamura was originally going to shoot this film, but passed the project to Mr. Hara when every distributor in Japan refused to fund it. Lest you think that Japanese distributors lack backbone, meet Mr. Okuzaki.

A World War II veteran obsessed with unraveling the mystery of a postwar execution in New Guinea, Mr. Okuzaki seems like a harmless crank if you forget about his murder conviction. Marching from interview to interview, he barks questions at his former commanding officers, now old men living in shabby rooms piled high with garbage. When they aren’t forthcoming he leaps across the table and attacks them.

These interviews pull viewers into a psychedelic wartime nightmare where men casually refer to eating “black pigs” (natives), officers shoot enlisted men for meat, and more conspiracy theories spin out of a single execution than emerged from the Kennedy assassination. Eventually, Mr. Okuzaki asks Mr. Hara to film him murdering his former commanding officer (Mr. Hara refused because, he says in a later interview, “I had become really sick of Okuzaki”) and the movie ends in a harrowing blast of death as Japan becomes clogged with restless ghosts.

A movie about feminist politics sounds like the dog of the bunch but “Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974” eats you alive. Shot for pennies, this is a rough-hewn portrait of Mr. Hara’s ex-girlfriend (and the mother of his child), the radical feminist Miyuki Takeda. To be brief: Ms. Takeda has Mr. Hara’s baby, leaves him, and moves to Okinawa with her girlfriend. She becomes a bar girl, has another baby, asks Mr. Hara to film the birth (with his pregnant girlfriend and collaborator, Sachiko Kobayashi, assisting), and establishes a commune, which Ms. Kobayashi joins. The personal and the political become the same snake, swallowing its own tail.

Mr. Hara’s compulsion to expose becomes revelatory in “A Dedicated Life,” a portrait of the final years of the novelist Mitsuharu Inoue. The mercurial Mr. Inoue seems like a Japanese Hemingway and he faces his cancer diagnosis with heroic stoicism. But as the reels unravel, so does his life. He rabidly attacks his students and compulsively cheats on his wife. The movie begins with a one-dimensional image — the macho novelist — and as he becomes a three-dimensional person, like Mr. Okuzaki or Ms. Takeda, he makes us itch. But if we can’t stand to look at people stripped of their lies then how can we stand to look at ourselves?

These are dark movies, but they’re also giddy, sexy, and unrepentantly alive. Mr. Hara’s camera is a ray gun, melting taboos with its intense gaze, and his movies are atom smashers, breaking history and social movements down into their elementary particles: people. Lying, cheating, brave, cowardly, despicable, honorable, terrible people.

Through February 4 (32 Second Ave., 212-505-5181).