Reverberance 3

24 March, 2012 - 13:3024 March, 2012 - 15:30
SPHINX

“Shooting a gun or shooting with a camera, it doesn’t make a difference to me” (Masao Adachi)

 

“The revolution has been continuously my main subject” says Masao Adachi (1939). “People Said: Revolutionary Cinema. I said: No. It’s Cinema for Revolution.” Of all the filmmakers that would be inspired by the spirit of resistance and utopia of the 1960s and 1970s, Adachi is without a doubt the most radically and perseveringly militant. Armed with a camera or with a gun: it made no difference to him. To him, both weapons served as possible intervention tools in the fight against political and social oppression. With his surrealistically tinted and politically provoking experiments he inscribed himself rapidly as part of the so called “new wave” currents that shook Japanese culture of the time. In 1971, after visiting the Cannes Film Festival, Kôji Wakamatsu and Adachi travelled to Lebanon to make a propaganda film in support of the Arab fight against Isreali occupation. In 1974 Adachi returned to Palestine, with the idea of making a second film. He would end up staying 26 years, at the service of the Palestinian cause. In 1997, under the pressure of the Japanese authorities, he was incarcerated in Beirut. He was extradited to his country three years later, where he remained in prison for two more years. Two French filmmakers have recently made, independently from one another, cinematographic portraits of the Japanese filmmaker. One from a distance, the other on the skin. Eric Baudelaire confronts landscape images from Beirut and Tokyo with the recollections of Adachi and Maya Shigenoby (daughter of Fusakao, one the leaders of the Red Army). Philippe Grandrieux translates a brief meeting into an intuitive and sensory combustion of image, sound, light and colour. 

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenubo, Masao Adachi, and 27 years without Images

Eric Baudelaire
,
FR
,
2011
,
Super 8
,
colour
,
66'

Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution - Masao Adachi

Philippe Grandrieux
,
FR
,
2011
,
HD
,
colour
,
75'

(It May be that Beauty has Strengthened our Resolve)