Retrospective | MASAO ADACHI
The genre of “pink cinema” had emerged in 1963, and Wakamatsu took advantage of the characteristics inherent in the genre, including low budgets and quick production times...
Masao Adachi appeared in the new film movements happening in Japan from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The New Wave in Japan, including Shochiku’s Nûberu bagu (Nouvelle Vague) with Nagisa Oshima and Kijû Yoshida, as well as Toshio Matsumoto’s documentary group, is widely known; but, simultaneously, in a sphere completely removed from the major film studios and production companies, three independent film currents were born. These three currents are represented by the Student Film Group, with the Nihon University Film Study Club (Nihon Daigaku Geijutsu Gakubu Eiga Kenkyû-kai, sometimes shortened to Nichidai Eiken) as its center, the Arts Film Group (Geijutsu Eiga), which took theories of the avant-garde as its basis, and the group of individual filmmakers who used 8mm home video cameras. The background to the emergence of these new currents took place as the nation was concluding the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Nichibei anzen hosho joyaku, also referred to as Anpo), the gravest historical situation to emerge in Japan in the wake of the Second World War. The student-centered New Left emerged within the resistance to this treaty, breaking off from the Japan Communist Party, which had, up to that time, been the focal point of the political avant-garde. One could say that the 1968 Revolution in Japan was already anticipated in form by 1960. Within this turbulent period, politics, culture, and the arts all underwent enormous transformations, with new theories and practices permeating the film world as well. Among these, the current of student films played a major role in terms of both cinematic history and the history of activism, and the leaders of this movement were Adachi and the group of people with whom he worked. Even after the failure to prevent the passage of the security treaty, Adachi and his associates continued to explore various genres and modes of expression, from production methods to screening forms, conducting all manner of experiments that transcended the existing conceptualizations of cinema as such, and thoroughly pursuing the spirit of independent cinema, or what would later be called underground film, and its philosophies.
Subsequently, Adachi himself, through the VAN Film Science Research Center, which had emerged as the successor to the Nihon University Film Study Club, joined up with Kôji Wakamatsu’s production group, Wakamatsu Pro. The genre of “pink cinema” had emerged in 1963, and Wakamatsu took advantage of the characteristics inherent in the genre, including low budgets and quick production times—commonly considered as shortcomings—in order to continue his guerillalike experiments. Though he began drawing attention as the star of antiestablishment cinema, it was through the participation of Adachi that Wakamatsu Pro became transformed into an even more radical activist organization. The films that emerged from this group, including Wakamatsu’s Okasareta hakui ( Violated Angels, 1967), Yuke yuke nidome no shojo (Go, Go Second Time Virgin, 1969), Seizoku (Sex Jack, 1970), Tenshi no kôkotsu (Ecstasy of the Angels, 1972), and Adachi’s works Seiyûgi (Sex Game, 1968) and Jogakusei gerira (Female Student Guerillas, 1969), both anticipated and reflected on the revolution of 1968 and at the same time, in their militant agitations, drew the enthusiastic support of the Zenkyoto activists who were leading the 1968 rebellion. At the same time, Adachi continued to produce his own independent films and, after his collaboration with former Nihon University Film Study Club members on the film Gingakei (Galaxy, 1967), went on to produce Ryakusho: renzoku shasatsuma (A.K.A. Serial Killer, 1969), with the film critic and anarchist Masao Matsuda and scriptwriter Mamoru Sasaki.
This work, which followed the landscapes that must have been witnessed by Norio Nagayama, a nineteen-year-old man who drew much attention at the time as a convicted serial killer, gave birth to the activist theory of fûkeiron, a new key concept that replaced the then popular notion of a situation (jôkyô), provoking considerable debates. The film took Nagayama, who had roamed throughout Japan from rural regions to cities as a migrant worker during the period of high economic growth, and made him into a medium through which state power could be witnessed. Paradoxically, the landscapes that greeted him were relentlessly uniform, bearing no signs of individualized senses of place or space, instead displaying a homogenized essence symbolizing the ubiquity of state power. This theory thus nimbly equated state power with landscape and, from 1968, in which massive battles and riots erupted between feuding powers in the streets, launched a more guerilla- like and nomadic battle style that would continue post-1968. This sensibility informed Oshima’s Tokyo sensô sengo hi wa (The Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970) and was further radicalized by the photography of Nakahira Takuma. Moreover, Adachi, along with Wakamatsu, veered off to Beirut on the way back from the Cannes Film Festival, where they completed Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai sensô sengen (Red Army/ PFLP: Declaration of World War, 1971), a new film in which they shot the “everyday” of Arab guerillas as a text for world revolution. Refusing the existing mode of film screening, and based on the declaration that screening itself is a form of activist movement, Adachi formed the Red Bus Screening Troupe (Aka basu jôeitai). Through this group, the work was screened in Palestine and Europe, becoming a monumental achievement for the notion of cinema as movement in Japan. Hôdôron (theory of reportage) has been proposed as a means of elevating the theory of landscape to a critique of the state, but the development of landscape theory, which emerged as a means of signaling and resisting the homogenization of the world, deserves reconsideration in the current moment when the system of post-Fordism is complete.
The Red Army work provided the opportunity for Adachi to throw himself into the Palestinian revolution, and he left Japan in 1974 to do so. His whereabouts thereafter remained unknown for some time, but after a quarter century in prison in Lebanon, he was extradited to Japan and imprisoned again. However, after his release from prison, he completed his most recent work, Yûheisha – Terorisuto (The Prisoner, 2006), which focuses on the figure of Kôzô Okamoto, the lone surviving perpetrator of the Lod Airport raid of 1972. Tracing the trajectory of Adachi and his films, including this most recent work, his first in thirty-five years, poses questions about the theory and practice of independent cinema at the current moment; in his effort to grasp for new possibilities, his will to confront the difficult conditions of the contemporary world, Adachi underscores the way these theories and practices must be synonymous with these greater struggles.
Go Hirasawa