The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images

Filmmaker Eric Baudelaire in person for Q&A!

Conceptualized while researching the Japanese Red Army during a residency in Japan, the French artist Eric Baudelaire’s first feature-length film is a probing and often mesmerizing weave of Super-8 footage, television clips, film excerpts, and archival miscellany. In voiceover, May Shigenobu (daughter of former Red Army Faction member and Japanese Red Army founder Fusako) and militant filmmaker Masao Adachi delve into their respective histories, including the “27 years without images” during which Adachi spent fighting alongside the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon. Their narrations unfold over imagery that both applies and extends what Adachi called his “theory of landscape”—the illustration of oppressive social structures through the meticulous filming of landscapes in which they are obliquely inscribed.

Screening with:

The Makes
Eric Baudelaire | France | 2009 | DCP | 26m
An adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s notes on unmade films, published in his book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber.