Join us on March 24, 25, and 27, at e-flux Screening Room and Pratt Institute for Landscape Theory: Post-1968 Radical Cinema in Japan, a screening program curated by Go Hirasawa and Ethan Spigland.

This series of screenings and discussions will be focused on “landscape theory” (fukeiron), which was proposed by film critic and anarchist Masao Matsuda in 1969, and further developed by film director Masao Adachi, screenwriter Mamoru Sasaki, and photographer Takuma Nakahira as a new theory of politics and revolution. The birth of landscape theory coincided with the production of the film Ryakusho renzoku shasatsuma (A.K.A. Serial Killer, 1969), a documentary film about an absent protagonist, nineteen-year-old Norio Nagayama, who had been convicted of a series of indiscriminate gun murders that had occurred between October 1968 and April 1969, in Tokyo, Kyoto, Hakodate, and Nagoya. The film consists entirely of shots of landscapes that he may have encountered in his wandering from his birth until his arrest. Landscape theory attempted to locate the power-state not in a typical political domain, but rather in the ordinary everyday landscape, expanding the interpretation of existing discussions dealing exclusively with visible landscape further, to the extent of naming invisible as well as visually recognizable structures “landscape.” Screenings of films by Masao Adachi, Koji Wakamatsu, and Nagisa Oshima will be followed by discussions with Adachi and film scholars. The aim will be to situate landscape theory in its Japanese historical context and to assess its relevance today. A screening of a selection of films by Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group will contrast Japanese landscape theory with investigations of the politics of representation by filmmakers working outside of Japan during the same time period.

The program is co-presented with Pratt Institute, and co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Program

Nagisa Oshima and Landscape Theory
March 27, 2023, 7pm

Koji Wakamatsu and Radical Cinema
March 25, 2023, 5pm

Landscape Theory Beyond Japan: Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group
March 25, 2023, 2pm

Screening of A.K.A. Serial Killer and Conversation
March 24, 2023, 7pm