The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971)

The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971)
aka Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai senso sengen
Genre: Documentary
Country: Japan | Director: Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu
Language: Japanese | Subtitles: English (.srt file)
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1 | Length: 70mn
Dvdrip Xvid Avi - 720x480 - 29fps - 699mb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067730/

It was a milestone of film as activism, cinema as movement in Japan’s context. Adachi and Wakamatsu went to Beirut on the way back from the Cannes Film Festival. There, in collaboration with the Red Army members and PFLP, they produced this newsreel film depicting the everyday activities of Arab guerrillas as a cinematic narrative on the world revolution. Being a fusion of intense agitation and the ‘landscape theory’ approach inherited from “Aka. Serial Killer,” the film was conceived as a new form of news report, and was discussed in synchronicity with J-L Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group and the revolutionary films of Latin America, transcending geographical distances. In order to negate the conventional idea of a film screening, the Red Bus Film Screening Troop was organized and the film screening was acted out nation-wide. The English and French subtitled versions were produced and the film has been screened internationally, including in Palestine. The film is important in the sense that it was an embodiment of the collaboration between Japanese filmmakers and Palestinians in that era, and also as a historical document of Palestine, where constant bombings made it hardly possible for Palestinians to possess their own images.

Screenshots

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2 comments:

the saucer people said...

Classic and ultra-rare early seventies revolutionary propaganda that only really makes sense when you understand the context in which it was made and the back story of the bloody ultra-Marxist Japanese Red Army (who killed twelve of their own members in a winter training camp before a small number of them took refuge in a winter holiday home which was eventually stormed by the riot cops but not before the siege was broadcast 24/7 on Japanese TV)...

A really excellent film that fills in the details is the 2007 'United Red Army' and the more recent 2010 documentary Children Of The Revolution by the excellent Irish director Shane O'Sullivan which focuses on the daughter of one of the RA women featured in this documentary (along with one of the daughters of Ulrike Meinhoff of the German Red Army Fraction urban-guerilla group).

December 22, 2011 4:09 PM
The Lonely Loser said...

Hi, can you reupload this film? Too bad, its a great film but filesonic stop its download service. Thanks.

May 6, 2012 12:05 PM

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