alr

Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War
(Sekigun-P.F.L.P: Sekai senso sengen)

Screening on Film
Directed by Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu.
Japan, 1971, 16mm, color, 71 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

Returning from the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu traveled to Lebanon to collaborate with the Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (both of whose ranks Adachi would later join) to make a radical propaganda newsreel promoting the Palestinian resistance against Israel. The purest expression of Adachi's call for a "cinema for the revolution,” Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War interweaves footage of Palestine refugee camps, freedom fighters in training and landscape theory-style imagery of city and landscapes over which plays a soundtrack of fiery speeches openly embracing armed violence and Maoist revolution as an effective means to reinvent the world order. Adachi and Wakamatsu used guerrilla methods to independently distribute and exhibit Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War, sending the film via the "Red Bus Film Screening Troop" throughout Europe and Palestine.

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