English

In Conversation with Fûkeiron (Landscape Theory): Two Films by Eric Baudelaire In the late 1960s, Japanese filmmaker and activist Masao Adachi along with a group of his collaborators came up with fûkeiron which is often translated as Landscape Theory. AKA Serial Killer (1969), codirected by Masao Adachi is often referred to as the initial manifestation of fûkeiron on screen. The film examines the sociological make up of a Japanese serial killer through a focus on the spaces and broader landscapes inhabited by the protagonist. Landscape Theory posits that the power is not to be found in the people as such, but in the landscapes and built environments that surround them. In other words, we are what we see, not just what we say and know. This program presents two critically acclaimed films by the French artist Eric Baudelaire’s which are in direct conversation with fûkeiron: The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), and Also Known As Jihadi (2017). The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images Director: Eric Baudelaire Year: 2011 Language: English & Japanese Subtitles: English From Tokyo to Beirut amid the post-1968 ideological fever, 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 motherʼs 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 the fûkeiron (a movement of filmmakers who filmed the landscape to reveal the ubiquitous structures of power) his 27 years of voluntary exile were without images, since those he filmed in Lebanon were destroyed on three separate occasions during the war. Adopting an experimental documentary format, the accounts of May Shigenobu and Masao Adachi overlay new fûkeiron images, filmed in Super 8 in the contemporary landscapes of Tokyo and Beirut. Courtesy of Eric Baudelaire and LUX, London Also Known as Jihadi Director: Eric Baudelaire Year: 2017 Language: French Subtitles: English Also Known As Jihadi (2017) follows the progress of a young man’s journey from France to Syria, and back to France where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining Daesh. Based on real events, and drawn from thousands of pages of judicial documents, the cinematic work employs the so-called landscape theory (fukeiron in Japanese). The theory originated in the film AKA Serial Killer (1969) that is codirected by Masao Adachi, who was the subject of an earlier film work of Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011). In Also Known As Jihadi the character’s paths to radicalism are rendered purely through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject: a biography determined not by what the subject did, but by what the subject saw, and one that questions how these landscapes reflect the social and political structures that are the backdrop for a journey of alienation and return. Courtesy of Eric Baudelaire and LUX, London. **Cover Image, Courtesy of Eric Baudelaire and Lux London