The late 1960s was a time of global politicisation. People everywhere – especially the youth – were becoming increasingly aware of the inequalities in the world. Protest and social movements were rampant against imperial wars of the time in Palestine, Vietnam, Ireland, and elsewhere, as well as grave social injustices, mobilised by civil rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights movements. The ideas of liberation and freedom seeped strongly into the arts, where the avant-garde found space to thrive.
In Japan, people were voicing concerns over a myriad of serious national and foreign policies that included student fees, reallocation of agricultural land, and the continuing American military presence.
At that time, a loose collective of visual artists, writers, musicians and critics inspired by Marxist critical theory, instigated a theoretical discussion around the arts. A group made up of both practitioners and thinkers came to the arts with a focus on its social and political relevance in both medium and message. They developed ideas that rethink their own liberal values, among them was Fukēi-ron (Landscape Theory). They had begun to notice that the post-war landscape around the country was being built for commercial expansion and urbanisation rather than as a national home for its citizens. This was clearly due to an acceleration in capitalism and an imbalance in political power. Through their images and writings, they presented a view of these landscapes showing how the joint venture between the state and the private sector influenced people’s lives. Their radical critique on the socio-economic failures demonstrated the landscape as economically oppressive and repressively isolating.
The cinema of this theory is largely made up of long static takes of landscapes – urban, rural or otherwise – usually overlaid by a soundtrack of an equally expansive nature, punctuated by silences. We ‘hear’ the narratives through these visceral images, allowing the cinematography to drag the landscapes along. The structure and overbearing silences that the film presents to us match the overbearing architecture of dominance and galloping capitalism that we witness looming within the images. By telling the stories passively, rather than as conventional biographies or crime stories, audiences are invited to notice surrounding contexts. Images of order versus chaos, haves versus have-nots, the employed, the healthy, the content and the inverse. But these images also beg the question of what comes along with noticing these elements of one’s surroundings? What does such a context make one feel? In a time of heightened political frustration and consequent isolation, what is a person be driven to do in order to be recognised or create meaning in their life? But also what is visibility in such a complex and exasperating world?
The films presented in this section are directed by Masao Adachi and Eric Baudelaire respectively. They were made fifty years apart, in completely different contexts, yet utilising the same elements and addressing issues with a similar mindset. Here we look at civilian murders, but also the political quotidian that surrounded those murderers. While there are other examples of Fukēi-ron, particularly from the formation era of this theory, these films were chosen for their defining position within the school. Adachi’s Serial Killer is considered to be the seminal work that put the theory into film; its use of sound and visuals in particular was a turning point in cinema. This film also lead Adachi and his peers to move on to more actively political engagement with this strain of cinema as can be seen in the following week’s film, Declaration of World War.
The ideas that make up Landscape Theory are as quietly visceral as the images that define it. Today, we see these ideas have permeated in other disciplines, and in films from other contexts around the world. Aspects of Landscape Theory – the unseen, the unspoken, the layers of dominance that sit within a given landscape – will be present throughout this programme.
11/01/2023
Aka Serial Killer (1969)
86 min | Japan | Japanese with English Subtitles
Director: Masao Adachi
The radical documentary AKA: Serial Killer looked at the life of Nor Nagayama, a nineteen-year-old who killed four people in four different provinces in Japan. In making this film, Adachi did not tell the linear story of Nagayama’s life and crime. Rather, he found that the landscapes that Nagayama came face-to-face with were enough to show the oppression that preceded such a killing spree. Rather than looking at the person at the heart of the story, Adachi looked at the places and spaces that surrounded him. To Adachi, these reflected an imbalance of visibility, where people are unseen and state structures are dominant.
18/01/2023
The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971)
71 min | Japan | Japanese with English subtitles
Director: Masao Adachi
In 1971, on his way back from the Cannes Film Festival, Adachi and his fellow film director, Koji Wakamatsu, also a member of the founding collective, travelled to Lebanon to work with the Japanese Red Army, who were stationed there, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Their idea was to continue the creation of films under this theory, this time with a more international and militant setting. This film was a turning point for Adachi. After this film in 1974, he abandoned cinema and devoted himself to the fight for Palestine. He was imprisoned in Beirut in 1997, and eventually extradited to Japan in 2001, where he continues to make films.
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
The political and personal epic of the Japanese Red Army is recounted by Eric Baudelaire as an anabasis, a military journey that is both a wandering towards the unknown and a return toward home. From Tokyo to Beirut amid the post-1968 ideological fervour, and from Beirut to Tokyo at the end of the Red Years, the thirty-year trajectory of a radical fringe of the revolutionary left is recounted by two of its protagonists. May Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the small group, witnessed it closely. Born in secrecy in Lebanon, a clandestine life was all she knew until age 27. But a second life began with her mother’s arrest and her adaptation to a suddenly very public existence. Masao Adachi, the legendary Japanese experimental director, gave up cinema to take up arms with the Japanese Red Army and the Palestinian cause in 1974. For this theorist of Fukēi-ron, filmmakers who filmed the landscape to reveal the ubiquitous structures of power, his twenty-seven years of voluntary exile were without images, since those he filmed in Lebanon were destroyed in three separate instances during the war. It is therefore words, testimony, memory (and false memory) that structure The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images.
Text from Eric Baudelaire’s website, online at https://baudelaire.net/The-Anabasis-of
For further reading, see Erika Balsom’s text on truth and post-truth in relation to this film, online at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/142332/the-reality-based-community/
01/02/2023
Also Known as Jihadi (2017)
100 min| France| English subtitles
Director: Eric Baudelaire
This possible story of a man, Aziz, is told through the landscapes he traversed: the clinic where he was born in the Parisian suburb of Vitry, the neighbourhoods he grew up in, his schools, university and workplaces. And then, his departure to Egypt, Turkey and the road to Aleppo where he joined the ranks of al-Nusra Front in 2012. This journey is tracked by a second storyline, made of extracts from judicial records: police interrogations, wiretaps, surveillance reports. Documents, like pages from a script, are intertwined with images and sounds to compose a film that pertains less to a singular character, Aziz, than to the architectural, political, social and judicial landscapes in which his story unfolds.
This film was part of an exhibition entitled Aprés, which took place in the Pompidou Center in Paris in September 2017. See the project page for more on the project and the ideas it confronts, online at https://baudelaire.net/Apres
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING: LANDSCAPE THEORY
• Mengna Da, ‘Surveying Landscape for Clues to Political Violence’, Hyperallergic, 14 April 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/372568/surveying-landscapes-for-clues-to-political-violence/
• Becca Voelcker, ‘Landscape Theory in Postwar Japanese Cinema: Fukeiron in Masao Adachi’s A.K.A. Serial Killer’ in Penser l’espace avec le cinéma et la literature, ed. Ludovic Cortade and Guilliaume Soulez (New York: Peter Lang, 2021).
‘We would make a film about how Japan and its landscapes oppressed people. We realised how the landscape reflects the image of society’s power. The landscapes were enough.’ (Adachi). The film is situated in the interval between mounting student and street protests – put down by force in mid-1969 – and armed militancy, in which Adachi took part as a member of the revolutionary Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun).