The voices and the remembrances of May Shigenobu and Masao Adachi – the two characters of Baudelaire's Super 8mm documentary – are presented onto the backdrop of images with different sources. From the panoramic depiction of Tokyo and Beirut, to found footage material from TV clips and films, The anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu presents itself as a contemporary Fukei Ron, a theoretical reflection on Japanese Landscape.

By tracing the disjointed stories and entangled recollections of May Shigenobu and Masao Adachi, Eric Baudelaire creates in his film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011), an intricate and disorienting tale of the history of the Japanese Red Army, their exile in Beirut and ultimately their forced return to Japan. An anabasis that is told through memory fragments and illustrated by contemporary vistas of Beirut’s and Tokyo’s urban and suburban landscapes as well as excerpts from the films of Adachi and archival footage. The anabasis, deriving from Xenophon’s famous account of the Greek army’s struggle in Persia, has been adopted since to describe the epic confusions of a journey into the unknown and the final return home. In Baudelaire’s film this anabasis is as much a physical journey as an ideological and mental meandering in which the return home does not mark the end of the narrative.

In his short story ‘State of Grace’ Harold Brodkey has his young protagonist explain his favoritism of a set of backstairs as: “(…) a form of rubbing a hurt to make sure that it was still there.” This repetitive act of examining a sore spot for its existence can be likened to the formation and summoning of a memory. Certain marks prompt us to return to a memory and each visit, each rubbing of the wound affirms its existence, as it keeps the wound open and the memory alive. The two narrators of the film are for different reasons denied images as a reminder and correction of their respective memories. May Shigenobu grows up as the secret daughter of Fusaku Shigenobu, the head of the radical left-wing faction of the Japanese Red Army. Born in exile in Lebanon May is forced to hide her real identity from the world for 27 years until the arrest of her mother and her return to Tokyo. The second voice belongs to Masao Adachi a seminal screenwriter and filmmaker of the Japanese Avant-Garde cinema of the late sixties and early seventies who abandoned his filmmaking practice to fully commit to the armed struggle and the Palestinian cause in Lebanon. The little filming he did after 1974 got lost in an air raid that destroyed his apartment in Beirut. Both protagonists are robbed of their images and forced to rely exclusively on their memory for their recollections. The film analyses the relationship between identity and ideology, questioning their status as fixed constants and positioning them instead as constructs that are continuously made up through repetition and, without anything tangible to rub against are bound to create fiction – each recalling shaping and changing the next, continuously adding a layer of sediment.

Baudelaire’s focus on preliminary landscape/cityscape material is of particular importance, as it recites well Adachi’s theory of landscape orfukeiron. Fukeiron is a cinematic strategy developed by Adachi and a group of filmmakers in the late sixties. It relies entirely on the depiction of landscape to expose underlying causalities of power and ideology in a given society. The most pertinent and maybe sole example of this strategy is Adachi’s film AKA Serial Killer, a film that portrays a serial killer exclusively through the physical environments that formed the backdrop of his existence. In The Anabasis Baudelaire puts Adachi’s method to the test. Interestingly enough, Baudelaire does not choose the majestic vistas that one would associate with a more romantic and grandiose understanding of landscape, but instead we notice his attention to small, intimate details, like bandaged architecture, dusty backyards, and mundane activities on the streets, many shots are framed by window sills or shot out of a moving train, mimicking the views and vistas of the inhabitants of the two cities and the insight they have into the life of each other.

In advance of the filming in Beirut, Adachi instructs Baudelaire to revisit and film a selection of places from his time there and Baudelaire sets out to film these locations that Adachi used to attend before he was forced to leave Beirut and denied to go back. The list reads at once like an inventory of places that will induce Brodkey’s notion of ‘rubbing a hurt to see if it is still there’ as much as a shopping list to assemble raw footage for a future film. Shot on Super 8 film the soft and withered colours, so firmly anchored in the aesthetic we associate with the early seventies, appear to reinstate the missing images of the lives of the two narrators. Without clear distinctions, we see the panoramas of Beirut and Tokyo drift in and out like stations on a long train journey. Location and narration mold together often making it hard to distinguish where one city ends and the other begins.

Reminiscent of the borrowed sceneries that the Japanese elite would incorporate in their manicured gardens the vistas in The Anabasisemphasize the ‘neither here nor there’ state of the narrators. Like postcards the backdrops function as stand-ins for a lost sense of place and location. And more than that they tell about the ever-changing panorama of two cities whose appearance is in constant flux, bound to liken each other due to the increase of the unified aesthetics of globalized architecture. Emphasising the statement by Adachi on which Baudelaire ends the film, he remarks that wherever one goes there is only the here. “The point is to pursue a here elsewhere.”

Credits

Director: Eric Baudelaire
Assistants : Eléonore Mahmoudian, Siska Habib
Camera: Eric Baudelaire
Sound: Diego Eiguchi, Philippe Welsh
Editing: Eric Baudelaire, Laure Vermeersch, Minori Akimoto