Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen
(The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War)
Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu
Japanese and Arabic with English subtitles
1971, 70 min
Co-edited by Red Army (Red Army Faction of Japan Revolutionary Communist League) and PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine)
In 1971, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, both having ties to the Japanese Red Army, stopped in Palestine on their way home from the Cannes festival. There they caught up with notorious JRA ex-pats Fusako Shigenobu (see “Jasmine on the Muzzle,” Bidoun 17 Flowers) and Mieko Toyama in training camps to create a newsreel-style agit-prop film based off of the “landscape theory” (fûkeiron) that Adachi and Wakamatsu had developed. The theory, most evident at work in A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), aimed to move the emphasis of film from situations to landscapes as expression of political and economical power relations.
In 1974 Adachi left Japan and committed himself to the Palestinian Revolution and linked up with the Japan Red Army. His activities thereafter were not revealed until he was arrested and imprisoned in 1997 in Lebanon. In 2001 Adachi was extradited to Japan, and after two years of imprisonment, he was released and subsequently published Cinema/Revolution [Eiga/Kakumei], an auto-biographical account of his life.
Watch The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War on UbuWeb
In January 2010, Bidoun Projects, in partnership with the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) launches a course of workshops that focus on writing about art and offer the opportunity for critical debate.
For more information, check the Workshops project page.
December 25, 2009
Born in Leninakan, Armenia in 1938, Artavazd Ashoti Peleshian is an influential director of poetic film-essays. His films utilize a cinematic method developed by Peleshian called “distance montage” to capture everyday life in a manner which transcends documentary. Sergei Parajanov has called him “one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema.”
“Eisenstein’s montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film… Sometimes I don’t call my method “montage”. I’m involved in a process of creating unity. In a sense I’ve eliminated montage: by creating the film through montage, I have destroyed montage. In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning.” —Peleshian
Visit Artavazd Peleshian on UbuWeb
