Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako―the leader of an extremist left-wing faction of the Japanese Red Army involved in a number of terrorist operations―has been in hiding in Beirut for almost thirty years. May, her daughter, was born in Lebanon and only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven after her mother’s arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, he was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he was an instigator of a “theory of landscape,” fukeiron. Through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Anabasis? It is the name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.
It is this complicated, dark and always suspenseful story that Eric Baudelaire―an artist renowned for using photography as a means of questioning the staging of reality―chose to bring forth using documentary format. Filmed on Super 8mm, and in the manner of fukeiron, contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut blend with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts as a backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. The characters speak of everyday life, of being a little girl in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema, and their fascinating overlap. All of this adds up not so much to an enquiry as a fragmented anamnesis.
[Jean-Pierre Rehm, the FID Marseille catalog]
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images, 2011. single channel video (HD, Super 8mm film transferred). 66 min. Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation
Fusako Shigenobu Family Album, 2012. 27 photographs circa 1900 to 1973. museum board. wood frame. 103 × 153 cm. Courtesy of the artist
AKA Serial Killer, 1969. single channel video. 20 min. Collaboration: Masao Adachi, Mamoru Sasaki, Masao Matsuda, Yamazaki Yu, Masayuki Nonomura, Susumu Iwabuchi. Courtesy of the artist
27 Years, 2012. wheat pasted posters of diagram from Counterterrorism Analysis Course, Defense Intelligence Colleage Introduction to Terrorist Intelligence Analysis, US Department of Defense exhibition poster circa 1980, dimensions variable. Exhibition poster design: Regular/Jean-Marie Courtant. Courtesy of the artist
Pictures of Documents, 2011. silkscreen on paper, framed. 60 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist
Masao Adachi Prison Drawings, 1997-2000. 8 drawings by Masao Adachi made in Beirut prison, pencil, color pencil, ink, water color on paper. dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Adachi Masao Screening Committee
“Start Again on His Long March, Easter of April 1998” (reproduction)
“Once Upon a Time, Human Had Been a Bird, February 1998”
“A Dream in Prison (A Kind of Circulation), April 1998”
“Call to Be a Bride South, May 1998”
“Untitled (Self-portrait (An Unbearable Anger)), March 1998”
“In Front of Visiting Room, November 1997”
“Spring Has Come to Prison Too, March 1997” (reproduction)
“Self-portrait (60th birthday), May 18, 1999”
“Female Student Guerillas, 1969”
“The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of Wolrd War, 1971”
“Ecstacy of the Angels, 1972”
“Lod Airport, Tel Aviv, May 31, 1972”
“Pregnant Fusako Shigenobu, 1973”
“Fusako and May Shigenobu, 1976”
“Fusako Shigenobu’s Transfer to Tokyo Police Headquaters, November 8, 2000”
“Prisoner/Terrorist, 2006”
“Wanted Poster, Tokyo, 2010”
