HIRASAWA GO EVENTS/JAPAN UNDERGROUND ARCHIVES at UC BERKELEY

Tue Mar 18 03:59:17 EDT 2008

......  I'm very pleased to announce the schedule for the visit by  
Hirasawa Go to the UC Berkeley campus on Tuesday and Wednesday of  
this week.  A film scholar, archivist, and political activist,  
Hirasawa Go (Meiji Gakuin University,Tokyo).  has been active in the  
anti-WTO and anti-globalization movements as well as other Japanese  
and international critiques of neoliberalism.  He  is the author of  
many books on politics and cinema including Eiga/Kakumei (Film/ 
Revolution) [with Adachi Masao] and The Underground Film Archives and  
has edited collections in Japanese on Wakamatsu Koji and Rainer  
Werner Fassbinder.  You are invited to attend any or all of four  
screening/discussion events, but  I have to personally recommend the  
two events on Tuesday: powerful work by Jonouchi Motoharu and Adachi  
Masao.

Yours sincerely,
Jonathan M Hall

1) Tuesday 18 March: 3:30 to 5:00  Nestrick Room, 142 Dwinelle Hall,  
UC Berkeley
Edit the Barricades!: The Political Aesthetics of the Japanese  
Underground/ Jonouchi Motoharu and Oe Masanori

?

This program features a conversation between Hirasawa-san and  
Jonathan M Hall on the radical aesthetic developed in the Japanese  
radical underground of the 1960s and its gradual erasure in the early  
1970s.  Jonouchi Motoharu was an important figure in the emergence of  
a collectively authored underground film movement that later  
developed a uniquely potent form or radical aethetics to accompany  
the student revolution of late 1960s Japan.  We look at the powerful  
short films of Jonouchi, including the brilliant Gebartopia Trailer.   
Jonouchi's relentlessly political and imaginative films include  
remarkable shots from within the student-occupied Yasuda Tower on the  
Tokyo University campus and of the spear-toting student militias each  
edited with the alternately seductive and alienating rhythms of  
experimental musician Kosugi Takehisa.  In addition, we screen the  
ironic commentary on Johnson's "Great Society" by New York-based Oe  
Masanori.

2) Tuesday 18 March: 7:30 to 9:30  Nestrick Room, 142 Dwinelle Hall,  
UC Berkeley
Adachi Masao, Matsuda Masao, Sasaki Mamoru, et al.
AKA: Serial Killer (Ryakusho renzoku satsujin), 1969, 90min, 35mm?DVD

Nearly impossible to classify, AKA was a true underground film,  
screening only once until recently.  Beginning and ending with a  
brief voiceover, ?In the fall of last year, four murders took place  
in four cities using the same gun.  In the spring of this year, a 19- 
year-old youth was arrested.  He was called the serial killer? the  
film traces the imagined itinerary of this serial killer, Nagayama  
Norio.  On the one hand, it is an almost meditative journey across  
Japan with no characters or dialogue and only the sparse but  
evocative score provided by Yamashita Yosuke?s free jazz trio; but  
shot by shot, small details and the relentless homogeneity of the  
country?s landscapes reveal something far more sinister at work? 
the way in which state power was embodied in the suffocating  
landscape itself. Thus it was this landscape that had to be  
confronted and the film then served as a manifesto for this ?theory  
of landscape.? The theory was also debated in journals, making a big  
impact not only on other notable film radicals including Oshima  
Nagisa and Wakamatsu Koji, but across multiple fields of photography,  
literature, design, and theory. A rarely seen, quietly unsettling  
film experience. (Notes by Hirasawa Go, translated by P. Kaffen for a  
program organized by Sharon Hayashi) Following the screening,  
Jonathan M. Hall will moderate a discussion with Hirasawa Go.

3) Wednesday 18 March,  Wednesday afternoon, UC Berkeley

?
Hirasawa Go, Radical Collective Bookstore, Frankfurt, 2007

Open Chat: (tentative) Hirasawa will meet for a casual and friendly  
discussion with faculty, graduate students, and advanced  
undergraduates to discuss popular anti-neoliberalist movement in  
Japan and opposition to the upcoming WTO Summit in Hokkaido, Japan.   
Place/Time TBA.

4) Wednesday 19 March: 6:00 to 8:00  188 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Screening: Adachi Masao/Wakamatsu Koji, dirs.,  The Red Army/PFLP:  
Declaration of World War (Sekigun PFLP Sekai Senso Sengen), 1971.

?

Following his AKA Serial Killer, Adachi Masao left Japan for the  
Middle East where he created a documentary with Wakamatsu Koji on the  
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.  After screening the  
film, we will discuss the relation between the Japanese Red Army,  
Japanese intellectuals' relation to Palestine, and the documentary  
style that marks this shift in Adachi's goals--a shift that would  
mean his remaining in the Middle East until his arrest in Lebanon in  
2000.

Thanks to Profs. Miryam Sas and Alan Tansman, the Program in Film  
Studies, the Center for Japanese Studies, and the Department of East  
Asian Languages and Cultures for their support of these events.   
Thanks also to Sharon Hayashi of York University and, of course, to  
the filmmakers--not present, but powerfully sharing their work.

With best wishes,
Jonathan

----
Jonathan M. Hall
Japanese Film, Media, and Modern Literature

Visiting Assistant Professor (Spring 2008)
East Asian Languages & Cultures
UC Berkeley

Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature / Film & Media Studies
320 Humanities Instructional Building
UC Irvine, Irvine CA 92697-2651 USA
office: 1-949-824-9778
fax: 1-949-824-1992

Co-Chair, Caucus Coordinating Committee, Society for Cinema and Media  
Studies
Co-Chair, Queer Caucus, Society for Cinema and Media Studies

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