January 2023
11/01/2023
Aka Serial Killer (1969)
86 min | Japan | Japanese with English Subtitles
Director: Masao Adachi
AKA Serial Killer is a documentary made up of landscape footage with voice-over commentary about Norio Nagayama, a nineteen-year-old Japanese man who committed four murders between 11 October and 5 November 1968. With his camera, Adachi retraces the young man’s footsteps across the country and films the landscapes that Nagayama most probably saw during his life, before and during his crimes. The filmmaker posits the ‘landscape theory’, an idea he formulated with anarchist intellectual Masao Matsuda, to explain Nagayama’s crimes. The theory views landscape as an expression of political and economic power relations. Here, he suggests that the young man’s violence could mirror a violence embedded in the landscapes in which he grew. In an increasingly capitalist society, Adachi questions the way the media covers events and seeks an alternative to sensationalism.
18/01/2023
The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971)
71 min | Japan | Japanese with English subtitles
Director: Masao Adachi
In 1971, Masao Adachi travels to Lebanon to meet the Japanese Red Army faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There, he makes a propaganda newsreel film for a global revolution, showing the daily lives of Palestinian resistance fighters in Lebanon preparing for imminent battle. Adachi mixes images of the fighters’ lives, voice-overs of Maoist and revolutionary speeches embracing violence, and his signature slow-paced landscape images. He reveals the political and economic power relations embedded in the landscape. He distributed the film across Japan travelling on a red bus and then left the country in 1974, committing himself to the Palestinian revolution and linking up with the Japanese Red Army.
25/01/2023
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011)
66 min | France | Japanese and English with English Subtitles
Director: Eric Baudelaire
This documentary touches upon the life and exile of Fusako Shigenobu, the leader of the Japanese Red Army faction for the Liberation of Palestine, and his daughter, May, born as he was hiding in Lebanon. She was twenty-seven years old when she discovered Japan. Along with Masao Adachi, filmmaker and former member of the group (see Red Army/PFLP and AKA Serial Killer), May testifies about these years of struggle and clandestine life. Eric Baudelaire illustrates the two testimonies with contemporary images of Tokyo and Beirut, shot with Super 8 film, as homage to Adachi’s ‘landscape theory’.
01/02/2023
Also Known as Jihadi (2017)
100 min| France| English subtitles
Director: Eric Baudelaire
A French man of Algerian origin led what was the most violent attack on French soil since WWII. Where did he come from? Baudelaire takes us to the place where he grew up. We see it and feel it through his observational images. The story of Aziz, a French-Algerian young man from the Paris suburbs, and his journey to join al-Nusra Front in Aleppo, linking with ISIS to fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Aziz himself never appears in the film. His story is construed through the landscapes he viewed during his life, from France to Syria and back, juxtaposed with documents – court records, police reports, surveillance and interrogation transcripts. Also Known as Jihadi was shot in multiple locations including France, Spain, Algeria, and the Syrian border with Turkey, and was produced in the aftermath of the Bataclan attacks that took place in Paris in October 2015. The film’s title and genre both call on Masao Adachi’s A.K.A Serial Killer (1969), which interrogates a cinematographic approach known as landscape theory. The theory, developed out of Marxist film criticism of the 1970s, posits that all surrounding landscape is an expression of dominant political power. Just as in Adachi’s movie, Baudelaire goes against media sensationalism and Manichaeism, to attempt to understand the motivations of young men like Aziz.