[Reader-list] CAMP Rooftop Cinema, Sat 21 Mar, 7-11 pm: An Evening With Masao Adachi

[Shaina A]

*CAMP Rooftop Cinema, Sat 21 Mar, 7-11 pm:*
*An Evening With Masao Adachi*

7:00 pm
*A.K.A. Serial Killer*
Masao Adachi, 1969, 86 min
https://0xdb.org/0239925

9:00 pm
*The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, **Masao Adachi and 27 Years
Without Images*
Eric Baudelaire, 2011, 66 min
https://0xdb.org/2006160

10:00 pm
*It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi*
Philippe Grandrieux, 2011, 73 min
https://0xdb.org/2007401

Directions:
http://studio.camp/campstudio.html + http://studio.camp/directions.html

CAMP and Pirate Cinema Berlin invite you to a rooftop screening of three
films directed, populated and inspired by Masao Adachi.

An evening without Adachi, for certain: the 75-year old filmmaker cannot
leave Japan, since he has spent years in jail for passport violations in
connection with a series of airplane hijackings in the 1970s. Also an
evening without most of his images: they were destroyed in Beirut in 1982.
Adachi knows that he could have made more films, but as a heavy drinker, he
also knows that it might have cost him his life. In 1971, Nagisa Oshima,
Koji Wakamatsu, Yoshida Kiju and Masao Adachi, on their way back from the
Cannes Film Festival, decide to make a stopover in Palestine. They get to
Beirut, and Adachi will stay there for 27 years, as part of the Japanese
Red Army faction of the PLFP, in hiding, in jail - the one-man film-making
wing of the armed struggle, and the one man who meant it literally when he
said: Guerrilla Cinema.

Cinema without Adachi, mostly, until in 2011 Eric Baudelaire and Philippe
Grandrieux make two astonishing and entirely unexpected films, not about,
but rather with and through Adachi. Baudelaire strikes a pact: Adachi
cannot return to Beirut, so he will lend him his eyes, trace the skyline
and coast, account for images lost, shots never taken and stories left
untold. What Adachi says about "AKA Serial Killer" -- in order to make a
political documentary, no script is needed, just a camera to film the urban
landscape, its transformation, the concrete shape of political power --
applies to Baudelaire's film as well. Beirut won't let him down: decades of
struggle peel off the shelled-out buildings, entire continents of unseen
cinema glisten in the sun by the Corniche, and Adachi's letters provide the
distance in time and space across which the images do what images do best:
set forth a motion, travel.

Grandrieux -- infamous for his features "Sombre" (1998) and "La vie
nouvelle" (2002), a cinema of dark intensity often mistaken for just
another color within the 1990s French New Wave of extreme sex and violence
-- in 2011 announces that he is going to make a series of political
documentaries. His first one is a journey to Tokyo where he meets Adachi.
Grandrieux won't stray far from his style: keep the camera on somebody's
neck until your heart beats faster, point it at a tree in a light that will
make your breath stop. Where Baudelaire's film stays half-wide, Grandrieux
gets close, a series of bodies in the city, nightly highway rides and
voices from the back seat. Adachi keeps narrating as he keeps walking and
drinking, and when the film reaches its end, what opens up is an entire
alternative future of political documentary: one in which the image is no
longer an easily transportable form of truth, but a force that returns to
and re-emerges from the material world of sensations.