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Rating: Masao Adachi is probably the most borderline director ever to walk the earth. The most outsider, militant and controversial in Japanese cinema and beyond. The artistic, political, and social importance of his cinema is immense, yet Adachi's work is, today, unknown to most. Erased from the Japanese imagination in favor of authors who, compared to Adachi, become pop (think of Nagisa Oshima), more due to the director's attitude than to the actual difficulty in accessing his films.
An author so politically committed and revolutionary that he was exiled from his own country, forced into years of artistic inactivity, which, however, did not deter him. But it is the Adachi-director I would like to talk about.
An author emerged from the realm of pinku-eiga, more akin to that of Wakamatsu (for whom he is also a screenwriter) than to that of Takashi Ishii, so to speak. A pink-film cinema that exploited (in the '60s) the softcore element to narrate scorching socio-political themes. Adachi based his poetics on the study of youth unease: from the intensely sick reflection on the doubt of whether or not to abort among some overly hasty teenagers in the body-horror "Abortion" (1966) to the search for a perverse sexuality leading to self-annihilation in "Gushing Prayer" (1971).
An autonomous and very personal cinema, capable of opening up great reflections and being memorable once encountered.
There is also another portion of Adachi's career, indeed: besides being a screenwriter and director of "pink films," he is also a documentarian. At the center of his investigations, once again, are young people. Young people alienated by a rigid and cold world like the Japanese one, driven to transgress and drown their impulses in the despair of violent sex or murder.
The most interesting experiment in this perspective is surely the historic "A.k.a. Serial Killer" (1969). An essential film, a must-have in the collection of any self-respecting cinephile or anyone particularly in love with the documentary genre.
The Japanese director takes up a news story: Four people have been killed. The murder weapon is the same gun. After desperate investigations, the culprit was finally found: a young man living in misery, desperate, and a victim of a repressive society. The motive: none.
"A.k.a. Serial Killer" recounts yet another story of Adachi-esque youth disillusionment by rejecting the rules of classical documentary: rejection of interviews, testimonials, archival materials, photography, voice-over commentary, in-depth biographical references...
The sparse information is provided every five minutes and is minimal, often vague about the murders and the boy's life. As if mere information and statistical data are unable to emotionally outline the young man's anger and the victim's terror.
Adachi makes an extreme choice: the best way to talk about such a story is to retrace, through cinema, the places where the boy lived and killed. The landscape is seen as the only possible eyewitness to portray.
Therefore, places. Empty, bare, lifeless, and decaying places, chronologically traversed from the boy's birth to his arrest. Places immersed in agonizing diegetic silence, where the only outlet (extradiegetic) is given by the excellent free-jazz soundtrack ("Isolation" by Masahiko Togachi and Mototeru Tagachi).
There are no dialogues: we are not allowed to know.
We are only allowed to feel the discomfort of a dehumanized world.
An extraordinary documentary that, even today, retains all its cinematic strength and impact. Yet another great piece of an extraordinary and obscure filmography waiting to be discovered.
I realize this is not cinema for all tastes, but for those willing to delve into the vision, I want to say that the film is not available through traditional channels (DVD, etc.), but fortunately, it is fully viewable on YouTube.
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