As films
were mined each week for Occupy Nowhere,
two camps emerged from within the loose genre framework that the column
intended to elucidate. It became relatively consistent that for characters that
deliberately and knowingly occupied a particular nowhere, the act was one of
diversion and avoidance (The Woman With
Red Hair) of the greater tides of change. These tales tend toward
incongruities of personal growth (Young
Adam) and err on the side of defeatism. However, for films in which exile is
forced (The Skin I Live In, Woman in the
Dunes, Pleasantville), a more substantive course is undertaken. Individuals
in the latter camp prove themselves industrious, inventive, and introspective. Certainly,
this genre split is imperfect, with the example of Matthew of The Dreamers who is invited into exile
and evolves within that shared seclusion where his counterparts Theo and Isa do
not. What the draw suggests is that imprisonment foments reactivity and adaptation.
Survival instincts streamline human ingenuity, ferocity, and also patience, therefore
the more engaged exile is the one who finds themself occupying nowhere (World On A Wire), not the one who
decides to.
Though both
camps of films are uniquely existential, the result of diversion tends to
somatic or bodily (The Dreamers, Young Adam), and where imprisonment is
the mandate, the result is something more cerebral. Like The Skin I Live In, which uses sexual reassignment as the material
for one man’s undoing and another’s existential evolution, Director/Writer Koji
Wakamatsu’s incendiary sociopolitical drama United
Red Army inhabits a middle-ground (a nowhere even within the Occupy Nowhere
dichotomy) where its matters of deliberate seclusion by radical communist youth
in “military camps” yields both an intensely cerebral and deeply somatic
product, fusing the connection between physicality and the phenomenon of
ideology. URA creates a new paradigm of nowhere,
in which nowhere is occupied
deliberately, not as a diversion from the tides of change, rather a preparation
for them.
United Red Army (URA) is a film I never
thought I’d see twice, much less theatrically, but this is exactly what has
happened. URA screened at the NY Japan Society in 2008 and quite recently in
Washington DC’s Freer Gallery (which boasts excellent free film screenings).
Much to this reviewer’s surprise, URA is even receiving a US DVD edition on
January 17th from Kino/Lorber. Wakamatsu, who has been making films since the
events of URA took place, is no stranger to the unsavory dimensions of the
human psyche or to the left-wing political wildfire that lapped Japan’s mid
century. He is remarkably unflinching and unsparing in his vision, so much so
that in the two years that lapsed between viewings, precious little detail had
been swiped from memory, and all the stains of its rigor were in tact.
A
perfect candidate for Occupy Nowhere,
this three-hour three-act epic is an expository docu-drama about the uniquely radical
politics of protest in 1960’s-70’s Japan. Analogous to numerous student uprisings
the world over – which the film draws its own connections to - Japan too was
creaking and moaning as it grappled with post war reshaping, but these growing
pains escalated to a violence unseen anywhere else.
Wakamatsu
takes on a reductive strategy with URA. Act one is a quickstep expositional
history lesson aided by narration and archival material spliced with
dramatization. It sweeps through the constellation of names entwined in the complicated
causality that birthed with the National Student League in the mid 60’s,
through the formation of the Red Army Faction from several radical sub-groups,
and ends with the violent implosion of the United Red Army altogether in the
early 70’s. Emerging from the tangled timeline, act two plunges into the radicalization,
politicization and militarization of leftist student groups and their
consolidation into the United Red Army’s now infamous training camps, with a
turn towards visceral dramatization. Act three quarantines the characters and
audience even further as it hurtles towards an action-thriller climax with URA
members on the run from the police.
As
per the second act, in an effort to ready themselves for the inevitable “all
out war” that would decide the socio-political fate of Japan and the world, the
United Red Army assembles in two isolated woodland camps to commence
self-directed military training after unifying under the URA banner. The intent
of occupying this nowhere is to sew bonds of friendship, instill the warrior
instinct, and clarify the language of their political ideology. In camp is
where the ultimately dismantling practice of self-critique, in which
individuals are obliged to appraise and dissect their own “ability to be a
communist,” takes its grip. In some form, self-critique could have been a
helpful ritual of assessing ones actions and their impact on the cohesion and
success of the URA’s movement, instead it becomes a stage to “thin the herd” of
the weak hearted. The megalomaniacal leaders of these camps drive what becomes
a cyclical degradation of purpose and functionality through the redundant practice
of self-critique. The impending “all out war” that is the ultimate intent seems
impossibly distant, and the camps turn on their own proponents.
Act
two of URA bears all the fundamentalist finger-pointing shades of Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible, in which any
infraction, misstep, or objection is put under the microscope of a scrutiny
that can never satisfied to the contrary, where the worst is drawn out of
people and a grand potential for broadly scaled change is squandered. Petty
motivations lead to victimization, and the demand for self-critique becomes a
weapon. The critical point of abstraction occurs when self-critique exteriorizes
to include the other members of the camp; meaning that, in the communist spirit
of universality, the group becomes an extension of the individual, and is
expected to critique with their fists. In that sense, all critique is self-critique,
no matter where directed. This trend, which in a sense absolves anyone’s
culpability through metaphor, escalates to the degree of “death sentences,” handed
out by the titular leader. The intensely physical and psychological act-two stretches
itself well past the point of the audience “getting it,” and rightly so. The confounding,
enraging, and seemingly fruitless practice of self-critique is made as grueling
and seemingly endless as possible to simulate the inescapable horror that it
was for those encamped. Thankfully it breaks.
Act
three is an even further distillation of filmmaking, and takes place as the
remaining URA members of the training sessions are chased down by the police to
the Asama Mountain Lodge (the director’s own lodge is used and destroyed in the
film), knee deep in snow, forced to occupy yet another nowhere. However, this
nowhere, like the Occupations on City Hall and Wall Street, is in plain sight, televised
across Japan. These final members take the lodgekeeper hostage for 10 days as
they are pushed to the brink of their own ideology, to the basest most modes of
survival, and confront their ultimate failures as activists and as human
beings. This final primal stretch of URA - a futile struggle helmed by cornered
wolves raging against the dissolution of their newly consolidated form before
any real war could be waged, before any change could be affected through direct
action - is a confused barrage of attacks and counter attacks, told entirely
from the frenetic perspective of the entrenched URA members. Wakamatsu, in the
reductive end to his earnest, even, and ever-refining film keeps the audience
cloistered in the lodge, as confused and confined as the trapped URA men, left
to grapple with defeat and guilt in nowhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment