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Tatsuya Kawakami's mother becomes a member of a religious group after her husband commits suicide, and makes a large donation to the organization. Her three children are forced to live in poverty, and her eldest son, who is blind in one eye due to illness, takes his own life. Kawakami comes to believe that the religious group has ruined his life, so he creates a homemade gun and carries out an assassination plot against former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who has close ties to the religious group, which has been accused of siphoning off money from its members.
Overripe with psychosexual poetry and stark, oneiric rituals, Adachi's filmmaking debut, made while he was still an undergraduate, counts among the more resonant accomplishments of the now famous Nihon University Film Club. Adachi's obvious fascination with the wide-eyed watchfulness of childhood and the uncanny is an expression of the important surrealist strand running throughout the post-WWII Japanese avant-garde. - Harvard Film Archive
In 1970s Japan, Satoshi Kirishima was a member of the "Scorpion Cell" of the East Asian Anti-Japan Armed Front, a recently formed left-wing extremist group. Wanted for a series of corporate bombings, he spent half a century evading capture while living under an assumed identity. What did he discover in the depths of his loneliness? What did he spend his life chasing?
AKA Serial Killer documents the social upheaval and political oppression that roiled Japan in the 1960s, profiling a 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.
"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
During a militant attack on an airport, the hand grenade of 'M', one of three terrorists, malfunctions, leading to him being captured and held indefinitely in prison. Exposed to mistreatment behind bars, he slowly loses his grip on reality as he is forced to confront his ideological convictions.
A masterpiece of militant cinema of 1968, filmed on the actual barricades of Adachi's very own Nihon University during the period of social struggles. The film begins in a lengthy free-love session taking the form of a 'play' rape being enacted by a group of aimless, listless and political apathetic students. The subtext intended by Adachi informs the rest of the film – that there is a world of difference between direct action politics, and merely talking the talk.
A wordless man stages an unexplained hunger strike and the people surrounding him exploit his silence to further their own cause...
On their way back from the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, filmmakers Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao visited Lebanon to meet Japan's Red Army faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to shoot a newsreel film promoting the Palestinian resistance. Conceived as a ‘declaration of world war’ that implicates us all, the directors capture the everyday banality of military training and preparation exercises for imminent battle.
Inspired by the true story of a Geisha murdered in a city famous for its baths, Adachi forged here his favorite style, a kind of conceptual documentary recounting the incident in monotone. The same event that at the beginning of Violated Angels escaped every principle of causality, is portrayed here as a singular anti-spectacle.