Film Series: Landscape Theory
An encounter between cinema and radical politics in 1960s-70s Japan
Curated by Go Hirasawa
UCLA GSA Melnitz Movies has partnered with the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies to invite film scholar Go Hirasawa to curate a series on Japanese Landscape Cinema. Filmmaker Masao Adachi is often viewed as the progenitor of Japanese "landscape theory." Inspired by Marxist film criticism of the 1970s, the theory posits that even the landscape around us is an expression of the dominant political power. The series will take place at James Bridges Theater, located in Melnitz Hall at UCLA on February 3rd, 4th, and 5th, with an opening night gala and a closing night lecture by Go Hirasawa. Each night will showcase two films, with the first screening beginning at 6pm.
February 3rd, 2015
Please join us at 5PM in the Bridges Theater lobby for an opening night gala
6:00P - AKA Serial Killer (1969)
Directed by Masao Adachi, Susumu Iwabuchi, Masayuki Nonomura, Yutaka Yamazaki, Mamoru Sasaki, Masao Matsuda. A companion to Nagisa Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film, AKA Serial Killer documented the social upheaval and political oppression that roiled Japan in the 1960s. Director Adachi, screenwriter Sasaki and film critic Matsuda put fukeiron (landscape theory) into practice in their profile of nineteen-year-old serial killer Norio Nagayama. An indictment of media sensationalism, the film humanizes the young man by situating his crimes in the larger context of his environment. - Go Hirasawa, MoMA
86 MIN / JAPAN / COLOR / 1969 / DIGITAL PROJECTION / JAPANESE
8:00P - RED ARMY PFLP: DECLARATION OF WORLD WAR (1971)
Returning from the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu traveled to Lebanon to collaborate with the Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (both of whose ranks Adachi would later join) to make a radical propaganda newsreel promoting the Palestinian resistance against Israel. The purest expression of Adachi's call for a "cinema for the revolution,” Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War interweaves footage of Palestine refugee camps, freedom fighters in training and landscape theory-style imagery of city and landscapes over which plays a soundtrack of fiery speeches openly embracing armed violence and Maoist revolution as an effective means to reinvent the world order. Adachi and Wakamatsu used guerrilla methods to independently distribute and exhibit Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War, sending the film via the "Red Bus Film Screening Troop" throughout Europe and Palestine. - Go Hirsawa, Harvard Film Archive
71 MIN / JAPAN / COLOR / 1971 / 16MM / JAPANESE, ENGLISH, ARABIC, FRENCH
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/night-one-landscape-theory-tickets-15485032148
More on Masao Adachi: http://www.bordersphere.com/events/adachi3.htm
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February 4th, 2015
6:00P - Boy (1969)
At once dreamlike and punishingly direct, Boy is the story of parents who habitually send their son into the street to be grazed by oncoming cars in order to wrest payment from the drivers. In this way, the itinerant family makes a living. It’s a fantastic tale, based on a true incident. Oshima is never one for sentiment, and he does not disappoint even in a film built around a young boy and his baby brother. Inexorably, he takes us through the progressive desperation of a war-damaged father and an ambivalent stepmother who callously use each other and their children and call it love as they strive for a place in the postwar economy. The settings grow increasingly stark until a climax finds the boys cozily blanketed in snow. Oshima uses the avant-garde music of Hikaru Hayashi and an array of distancing devices to, paradoxically, draw us into this boy’s life. - Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
97 MIN / JAPAN / COLOR / 1969 / 35MM FILM / JAPANESE / JANUS
8:00P - Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1971)
While clashes between demonstrators and police are raging in the streets of Tokyo, a young man takes refuge at his policeman brother's house. The two brothers soon come to blows, but the intervention of the policeman's wife leads to the death of her husband by his own gun. The young man and the wife cover up the murder by making it look like a suicide. They become lovers and flee north into the Tohoku area, as if they were being pursued by the ghost of the murdered husband, their sexual passion and the pulse of the changing times. - Samuel Jamier, Japan Society
72 MIN / JAPAN / B&W/COLOR/ 1971 / DIGITAL PROJECTION / JAPANESE / BLAQOUT
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/night-two-landscape-theory-tickets-15485047193
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February 5th, 2015
6:00P - Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), Koji Wakamatsu
Prolific Japanese filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu's Go, Go Second Time Virgin tells the tale of two Japanese teens brought together by sexual violence, revenge, and rebellion. A girl (Mimi Kozakura) is forcibly carried to a rooftop and gang-raped, as a boy of similar age (Michio Akiyama) stands to the side watching the events unfold. The boy remains on the roof until the next morning, waiting for the girl to wake. When she does finally rise, the two teens begin sharing intimate details about their lives, including the fact that the boy has recently killed four people that forced him to take part in an orgy. As the two kindred spirits sink lower and lower into depression and delusion, they exact revenge for the crimes against the girl and take a bold, tragic step to end their misery once and for all. - Ryan Shriver, Rovi
86 MIN / JAPAN / B&W/COLOR / 1969 / 35MM / JAPANESE / BLAQOUT
8:00P - Lecture by Film Scholar Go Hirasawa
8:45P - A Man Who Left His will on Film (1970), Nagisa Oshima
Japan. Directed by Nagisa Oshima. Screenplay by Masato Hara, Mamoru Sasaki. With Kazuo Goto, Emiko Iwasaki, Sugio Fukuoka. Following activist demonstrations, a student filmmaker discovers a last will and testament recorded on film by a man who may or may not have existed. Much like Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the footage seems to be innocuous and visually uneventful, yet its very banality suggests a tantalizing mystery that invites imaginative speculation. The student concludes that the only way to understand the ghostly man’s last will is to re-shoot the landscape locations himself. The tension between subjective experience and historical fact lies at the heart of fukeiron, a landscape theory that gained currency in Japan in the 1960s. - Julian Ross, MoMa
94 MIN / JAPAN / B&W/ 1970 / 35MM / JAPANESE / JANUS
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/night-three-landscape-theory-tickets-15485066250
Co-Sponsors: The Japan Foundation, GSA Melnitz Movies