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.

Part of film series

Read more

Film = Activism. The Revolutionary Underground Cinema of Masao Adachi

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Melville et Cie.

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf