Masao Adachi: Pt II

II.


Still from Artist of Fasting (2016). All images: Courtesy Masao Adachi.

ART iT: We were just talking about contemporary protest movements, but what do you think about the current media situation?

MA: The media are the media. Their fixation on power is driven by nothing more than greed and self-preservation. This is on a different level from the bureaucratic will to power that was cultivated over such a long history. The media quickly capitulate to the power of the system.
In the West, particularly in the United States, France and the United Kingdom, the media exists to monitor the prevailing authority, and in principle that’s supposed to be the basis for journalism, but that’s not how it works in Japan. At most there are only cases of minor, individual resistance. So we can bash the media all we want, but what we probably need right now is for reform carried out from within the media itself.

ART iT: But don’t you think the emergence of social media and file-sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has shaken up the traditional mass media?

MA: It has definitely shaken up those media entities who do nothing but fawn over power, and it has made clear the necessity for everyone to have their own media literacy. So I think it has led to a kind of media renaissance. But what comes next is up to your generation. The problem is how to stop social media from getting bloated like the mainstream media. The mass media won’t change just because it’s been watered down into a sea of SNS, so I think we need to produce something that can transform it. Just don’t ask me what that should be. That’s for you young people to figure out.

ART iT: Certainly SNS sites are credited with facilitating events like the Arab Spring. On the other hand, these sites are already themselves large corporations, and all their information is controlled by algorithm, so many users end up seeing only the information the algorithm decides they should see.

MA: That’s why I thought, and hoped, that it would be interesting if the different SNS sites challenged each other, and it’s a shame it hasn’t turned out that way. But I think rather than seriously considering how to reform SNS, it’s more interesting to think about how to overturn the entire system. Like hacking or something that could break the control and pull up everything at once – even pacifists could do something like that. I want the young people to think up something like that.

ART iT: For example, did you view your grassroots roadshow movement for Red Army/PFLP, in which you and a group of volunteers drove around the country screening the film at local venues, as a form of hacking the existing information networks at the time?

MA: I think that was part of it, in fact. There is a reason why it was a grassroots roadshow movement and not just a screening movement. At the time Godard had formed the Dziga Vertov Group, but that never got beyond the level of a kind of screening movement, which I thought was wrong. In other words, since I was the one who made the newsreel film Red Army/PFLP, the idea that I should screen it could end up getting framed as a kind of auteurism in itself. So I came up with a form of screening that included discussions with the audience after the film was finished. It was a grassroots roadshow movement, and not just a screening movement, based on the principle that because it was a newsreel film it wouldn’t make sense unless we had proper debates and built solidarity between the people who brought the news and those who watched it.
Wakamatsu gave us a bunch of money when we started off, but we ran out at some point and kept the screenings going while eating scraps we picked up from the morning produce markets. And then some of the people getting on and off the bus started to attract attention from the police, so on top of the 30 or 40 people riding the bus, we were followed by several patrol cars and a riot squad bus. Kozo Okamoto had been one of the participants during the Kagoshima leg of the trip, and after his involvement in the May 1972 terror incident at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, we had to shut down the tour for the first time. We came up with a second movement lasting another two-and-a-half years or so that distributed the newsreel film without relying on the bus. The idea was that we would try to build solidarity between filmmakers and viewers and decide all together what to do from there.
Another thing is that at the time there was still a multitude of minor parties in the New Left movement, so our theme was that we would ignore all those factions and territorial mentalities in the name of building solidarity. Whenever we borrowed a local community center, all the New Left factions would come in turns checking on us to make sure they weren’t being criticized. The funny thing is that even with the riot police waiting by the venue, there were people who tried to trash everything. Actually, with everybody claiming to be the only ones who were right, I wanted to tell them it was meaningless, like “acorns comparing heights.” But the bus kept getting attacked, and then there would be another wave of people who chased them off, and from the outside it probably looked like we were going around agitating. But what I really wanted to make was solidarity, not agitation. That’s what the grassroots roadshow movement – as opposed to screening movement – was about.

ART iT: Do you still think making solidarity is important?
 
MA: I’m still seeking solidarity. I’ve tried actions seeking solidarity with young people, and there is a huge gap in the things that we share across generations. But I realized solidarity is impossible without that kind of gap. I learned a lot from that experience.


Still from Artist of Fasting (2016).

ART iT: The idea of the generational gap is also central to Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” on which your latest film, Artist of Fasting, is based. I feel the story is in a sense an allegory of history.

MA: Actually, there were still “hunger artists” in cities all across Europe around the time Kafka was born. They were ordinary street entertainers. It wasn’t some new vision that Kafka came up with. He drew upon existing stories about real hunger artists.
There isn’t another story among Kafka’s works in which the historical background is so meticulously reflected. I had read “A Hunger Artist” a long time ago, but reading it again this time I figured out that Kafka was writing a rakugo-style comic story. In rakugo there is always a punch line that overturns everything that has come to that point. At the end of Kafka’s story, the hunger artist says that he simply couldn’t find anything that he wanted to eat, right? That’s just like a rakugo punch line.
So the first idea for making this film was to do a kind of rakugo-style picture-card show (kamishibai). Reading Kafka, the images just came to me. On top of that, I was also thinking about Lu Xun. Kafka and Lu Xun are of the same generation, so how is it these two equally disturbed people could be born at the same time? I actually drew quite a bit from Lu Xun for the film.

ART iT: In the film were you also trying to draw out the relationship between the historical past and Japan’s current situation?
 
MA: Yes. The time of Kafka and Lu Xun – in particular Lu Xun’s China – was a time of chaos. As can be seen in the violence and radicality of The True Story of Ah Q and A Madman’s Diary, Lu Xun witnessed and thought about amazing things. As with Kafka, reading Lu Xun’s stories is like watching a film for me. And in that sense, I wanted to give equal weight to both Kafka and Lu Xun in filming this picture-card story.

Part I | II | III

Masao Adachi: Reconceiving Solidarity – Rentai o souzou suru

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