Japanese Red Cinema: around Masao Adachi

Three high school girls plot to steal the school’s diplomas and sabotage their graduation ceremony. Using their charm to strip soldiers from their uniforms and weapons, they retreat into the mountains to regroup, making hostages and slaves of intruders. While negotiations with the school are set to begin, the group’s internal strains begin to take their toll on the operation.
Following his post-surrealist experiments and theoretical research, Adachi turns the page once again with this incursion into the Pink/rebel teenage girl trope, a genre which will become more popular in the years to come. Out of all of Adachi’s films, "School Girl Guerrilla" is the one the resembles Wakamatsu’s work the most, the latter being the producer of this film. The style and the black and white cinematography with occasional hints of colour (used mainly to highlight nudity) are noteworthy elements, as well as the latent political critique which presaged the student revolution’s tilt towards armed conflict.

A film-essay based on a news item wherein 19 year-old Norio Nagayama murders four people without any apparent motive, Adachi and his fellow filmmakers build this story around the "landscape theory", which posits that all landscapes are fundamentally linked to a figure of power, rendering Japan a toxic place that can drive sane men to madness.
The film is composed of a series of views and landscapes that the young man could have been exposed to and which may have insidiously shaped his worldview and provoked his criminal acts. While the film does not directly address social upheaval, it points out the symbols and structures of power which are omnipresent and which inevitably elicit a call to action...

More than 30 years after his previous directorial effort, Adachi brings us a film about psychological digression loosely adapted from a text by Auguste Blanqui and no doubt inspired by Adachi’s personal experiences. M., a member of the Japanese Red Army, is the only surviving perpetrator of the suicide operation at the Lod airport in Israel in 1972. He begins to lose his composure during his incarceration and begins to see the spectres of the revolutionary ideal in his daily hallucinations. Instead of partaking in the stigma that often marks terrorist prisoners detained in Israel, "Prisoner/Terrorist" is first and foremost a brave exploration of the human soul’s meandering into a state of permanent revolution. With this film, Adachi completes Wakamatsu’s "United Red Army", who also makes a discreet appearance alongside his favoured musician, Jim O’Rourke.

Fusako Shigenobu left Japan in 1971 to found the Japanese Red Army - a terrorist fringe group dedicated to supporting the Palestinian cause - and lived in Lebanon for 30 years. During Adachi’s own exile in Beirut, he met Shigenobu, and bonded with her not only over the experience of being far from home, but also over their shared fate of coming back to Japan without the possibility of ever being able to leave.
Eric Baudelaire explores the shuttle between Tokyo and Beirut and interviews May Shigenobu - Fusako’s daughter, who would only discover Japan following her mother’s arrest - and Adachi himself, touching on their respective trajectories towards the construction of their identities. The film also breaches the subject of imagery and the imaginary, comparing May’s absolute lack of visual trace of her origins and Adachi’s constant visualisation through his films which he lost during the conflict. Baudelaire makes use of archival images and film, especially Super 8 excerpts, which were shot in Tokyo and Beirut and which evoke Adachi’s landscape theory. Baudelaire’s role in the voyage eventually led him one step further, towards the creation of "The Ugly One".

Eric Baudelaire will be at the Nova May 4th to present his films and to discuss his collaborations with Adachi. He will be accompanied by Juliette Navis, lead actress in "The Ugly One".

Following his first meeting with Masao Adachi, Eric Baudelaire takes on a new creative challenge, responding to Adachi’s desire to return to Lebanon without the possibility of physically carrying out his wish. In a unique take on the process of filmmaking, with Adachi taking on the script from Japan and Baudelaire transforming it into moving images, the directors produce a film essay about commitment and life, including romantic life, within the revolutionary factions.

Eric Baudelaire will be at the Nova May 4th to present his films and to discuss his collaborations with Adachi. He will be accompanied by Juliette Navis, lead actress in "The Ugly One".

Cinema Nova, in collaboration with the Cinematek, welcomes two Japanese cinema specialists to a conference on Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu, with the participation of Masao Adachi from Japan.
Gô Hirasawa is a researcher and professor at the Meiji-Gakuin University in Tôkyô, and is particularly interested in avant-garde and political movements in the experimental films of the 60’s and 70’s. He has written several works on Wakamatsu and Adachi.
Dick Stegewerns is an associate professor at the University of Oslo in the Modern & Contemporary Japanese Studies department.
Both lecturers regularly organise programmes focusing on Japanese cinema and significantly contributed to the conception of this cycle.

Like many other films of the period, "Sex Jack" opens with images of anti-Anpo protests. Filmed in black and white by Wakamatsu, the film follows a defeated militant group whose hideout has been discovered by the police, resulting in the arrest of their leader. A mysterious young thief helps them escape, and despite their initial distrust towards him, they manage to regroup around this marginal figure whose working background greatly differs from their own. Wakamatsu’s focus is, as usual, more on the human dynamics within the revolutionary group than on the revolution itself, highlighting failure, stupidity, rivalry, domination and sexual violence. Wakamatsu and his screenwriter Izuru Deguchi (Adachi’s pseudonym for the more subversive films) are a severe duo, pointing their criticism at the world and at those whose political sympathies they share.

After visiting Palestinian camps in Lebanon and Jordan and spending time with Arab revolutionaries, Wakamatsu and Adachi test the "landscape theory" in foreign lands. The images filmed there will be Adachi’s basis for a radical film manifesto against disinformation, a propaganda tool for world revolution and a rare document which shows the battle from within its ranks. The film was excluded from traditional circuits, assimilating the broadcasting process into the guerilla mindset of discreet and calculated infiltration. The filmmakers improvised a series of screenings and organised a tour aboard the "red bus", which crossed Japan and went inland into Europe and later the Palestinian territories.

In 1970, following the defeat of the battle against the Anpo, the political movements that were once pillars of resistance began to dissolve. Small fringe groups such as the Red Army emerged, sweeping the scope of extreme political tendencies. In "Ecstasy of Angels", a revolutionary organisation (inspired by Auguste Blanqui’s "Société de saisons") is mired by internal turmoil, betrayal and ambient paranoia. "Ecstasy..." is a cocktail of revolt, sex, violence and dialectics, often simultaneously, in Wakamatsu’s incomparable style.
Shot right after their trip to Palestine, with a script by Adachi and the help of several members of the Red Army, the film was accused of inciting terrorism after its release coincided with several attacks, including the Asama hostage crisis of 1972. It was pulled from most theatres, with the notable exception of ATG’s Shinjuku Bunka, which would go on to support the film till the very end.

While Kôji Wakamatsu never quit filmmaking, he was absent from the international scene until the 2008 release of "United Red Army". The three-hour fresco (with music by Jim O’Rourke) reconstructs a history of the revolutionary movements in Japan during the 60’s and 70’s, marking Wakamatsu’s return to political filmmaking. This unvarnished view of the upheavals strives to understand the motivations, evolutions and divisions within the groups behind them, from their genesis in the 1960’s to the dramatic hostage crisis in the Asama chalet in 1972. Wakamatsu also seeks to digest the national trauma that was caused by the fall of the Red Army, and the conflicts that their actions instilled within the once supportive Japanese populace.

Three young Japanese men freshly out of school go for a swim at the beach and discover in amused bewilderment that their clothes have been exchanged for Korean tunics. They pursue their adventures wearing their new costume, with two bloodthirsty Koreans at their heels.
With this film, Ôshima reveals his concern over the discrimination of the Korean minorities in Japan. In this pop comedy, co-written by Adachi (who also appears in the film in a minor role), Ôshima reminds viewers that it is indeed possible to treat sensitive social themes such as racism and illegal immigration with intelligence, humour and inventiveness.

In this blasting of capital punishment (still in vigour in Japan) and racist nationalism, Ôshima shows with humour and ferocity the hanging of a Korean youth charged with the rape and murder of Japanese women. The rituals framing the final moments of the soon-to-be hanged man are without aplomb - until the hanging itself, where even though the culprit has a noose around his neck, he is still breathing! Worse yet, he appears to have lost his memory and is now but a mere lamb. The Nippon code is stringent on this level: one cannot apply capital punishment to a man who has lost his mind. In order to remediate the situation, a small troupe forms in order to re-establish the man’s diabolical nature, so his hanging will be once again justified. We see Adachi in one of the main roles of the film - as a prison guard, no less.