Cinema + Revolution

A book-length interview and career retrospective of seminal Japanese filmmaker and political militant Masao Adachi.

Cinema + Revolution: The Life and Work of Masao Adachi is the first-ever full-length interview and career retrospective of legendary filmmaker and militant Masao Adachi. These interviews, conducted and edited by Go Hirasawa and Ethan Spigland, offer readers unprecedented access to Adachi’s reflections on a life lived at the intersection of cinema and radical politics. Rising to prominence in 1960s Japan as an experimental filmmaker and theorist, Adachi helped define the avant-garde cinema of the era with formally daring works like A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) and Gushing Prayer (1970). In the early 1970s, he left Japan to join the armed struggle in the Middle East, spending nearly three decades in Lebanon with the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine before his arrest, extradition, and imprisonment in 2000 

Cinema + Revolution is a documentary experiment in dialogue form, weaving Adachi’s own voice together with critical analysis, archival materials, and newly translated texts from his theoretical writings. From his formative years in the Japanese New Wave to his collaborations with Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima, from exile and incarceration to his recent films on contemporary political violence, Adachi recounts a trajectory that illuminates the possibilities and costs of revolutionary commitment. Essential reading for anyone interested in radical history, film studies, or the enduring question of what it means to align one’s art with one’s politics.