The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images
Eric Baudelaire, 66mins, 2011
The political and personal epic of the Japanese Red Army is recounted as an Anabasis, a journey that is both a wandering towards the unknown and a return towards home. From Tokyo to Beirut amid the post-1968 ideological fever, and from Beirut to Tokyo at the end of the Red Years, the thirty-year trajectory of a radical fringe of the revolutionary left is recounted by two of its protagonists. May Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the small group, witnessed it closely. Born in secrecy in Lebanon, a clandestine life was all she knew until age 27. But a second life began with her mother’s arrest and her adaptation to a suddenly very public existence. Masao Adachi, the legendary Japanese experimental director, gave up cinema to take up arms with the Japanese Red Army and the Palestinian cause in 1974. For this theorist of fûkeiron (a movement of filmmakers who filmed the landscape to reveal the ubiquitous structures of power) his 27 years of voluntary exile were without images, since those he filmed in Lebanon were destroyed on three separate occasions during the war. It is therefore words, testimony, memory (and false memory) that structure The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images.
Two intersecting accounts, mixing personal stories, political history, revolutionary propaganda and film theory. Thirty years of self-invention in which the recurring theme is the question of images: public images produced by the media in response to terrorist operations planned for the television era, and personal images that are lost or destroyed amid the chaos of the struggles. Adopting an experimental documentary format, the accounts of May Shigenobu and Masao Adachi overlay new fûkeiron images, filmed in Super 8mm in the contemporary landscapes of Tokyo and Beirut •
Eric Baudelaire
Eric Baudelaire (1973) is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris, France. After training as a political scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist with a research-based practice incorporating photography, printmaking and video. Since 2010, filmmaking has become central to his work. His feature films A Flower in the Mouth, Un film dramatique, Also Known as Jihadi, Letters to Max, The Ugly one and The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images have circulated widely in film festivals (including Locarno, Toronto, New York, FIDMarseille and Rotterdam). When shown within exhibitions, Baudelaire’s films are part of broad installations that include works on paper, performance, publications and public programs, in projects such as Après at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and The Secession Sessions, which began at Bétonsalon in Paris and traveled to Bergen Kunsthall, the Berkeley Art Museum and Sharjah Biennial 12. Baudelaire has had monographic exhibitions at the Witte de With [formerly known as], Rotterdam, Tabakalera, San Sebastian, the Fridericianum, Kassel, the Beirut Art Center, Gasworks, London, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and has participated in the 2017 Whitney Biennale, the 2014 Yokohama Triennale, Mediacity Seoul 2014, and the 2012 Taipei Biennial. In 2019 Baudelaire was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Prix Marcel Duchamp •
