“Revolution is art” (Adachi as quoted by Andrews, 2026, p 208)
“Adachi was not a terrorist,” William Andrews (2026, p. 197) adamantly underlines. Yet, if he was not the dangerous revolutionary as Japanese media have made him to be, who was he? Scum of the cinematic art? A cheeky provocateur? A pioneer of cine-activism? A crude antisemitic? An accidental revolutionary?
With his incredibly well-researched biography, William Andrews seek to straighten out the sensationalist misunderstandings that determine Masao Adachi’s reputation and sketch out an image of him that does right by the division of his subjectivity, a division that signals itself in his activism, his work as screenwriter and filmmaker, and his continued emphasis on collaboration/cooperation.
“Surrealism as attitude, a championing of anti-bourgeois nonconformity and arbitrariness in order to revolutionize everyday life” (Andrews, 2026, p 9).
However, rather than focusing on the interiority of the man, Andrews seeks to approach Adachi’s subjectivity from the perspective of his societal context and present him as a “man of his times, a product of his day,” placing his life’s trajectory firmly within political and sociocultural contexts (Andrews, 2026, XIV). The author seeks to present, in an a-theoretical manner a sliver of Adachi’s subjective truth by exploring, in a chronological manner, the events and encounters that gave his life-trajectory shape up until now. The filmic analyses are utilized as illustrations of show Adachi responds to his political context and to evoke how his surrealist folk worldview structures his creative output (Andrews, 2026, XIII).
“Violence is elevated by the erotic,’ writes Hiroaki, ‘while eroticism is heated up by violence’. This is Adachi Masao’s theory of violence” (Andrews, 2026, p 49).
Andrews, moreover, utilizes what we would call a kaleidoscopic approach to bring the societal context and Adachi’s trajectory within it to life. He utilizes a series of chapters (i.e. Chapter 1 traces Adachi’s birth as filmmaker in relation to the Anpo protests and the Anti-art movement, Chapter 2 from 5 explore Adachi’s collaboration with anti-authoritarian Koji Wakamatsu and his ambivalence towards revolutionary activism and politics, chapter 7 till chapter 10 traces his political awakening, his increased political activity as a propagandist and his ultimate departure to Lebanon, Chapter 11 and 12 the coming into fruition of the JRA, the underground revolutionary party, Adachi’s eventual arrest, his trail, imprisonment and his deportation to Japan, and chapter 13 and 14 the falling apart of the JRA and Adachi’s trajectory after his second trail and imprisonment) to approach Masao Adachi and his career from different, yet overlapping perspectives. While such approach results in many fleeting repetitions, it also helps the spectator to better grasp the context that birthed Adachi as a filmmaker and discern how he, by creatively responding to the socio-political context, brings his own subjectivity into play.
“The enemy is only the Landscape” (Adachi, quoted by Andrews, 2026, p 79).
With his clear and engaging writing style, Andrews does not merely breathe life into his explorations of historical and cultural contexts, but also pushes the reader to, nearly automatically, visualize striking moments within Adachi’s trajectory (e.g. the Closed Vagina Ritual of 1961, the struggle to get Extasy Of The Angels (1972) screened, the aftermath of the Lod incident, the vandalization of the inscription plate of the statue of Ainu-leader Shakushain) and societal occurrences (e.g. The Yodogo Incident in 1970, the austere description of the series of bombings and violence of the New Left in the early seventies, the Asama Lodge event in 1972, the Singapore incident). Moreover, by placing Adachi in a contextualizing frame of artistic currents (e.g. anti-art movements, Japanese avant-garde, the pink film-genre, The New Left, Japanese Red Army), the author also succeeds in whetting the appetite of the readers to explore works of other directors, of Adachi’s direct or indirect collaborators (e.g. Takechi Tetsuji’s Black Snow (1965), Koji Wakamatsu’s Secret Acts Behind Walls (1965), Masato Hara’s The First Emperor (1973), Godard’s Here And Elsewhere (1976) and many more).
“Sex is part of the process of liberation but sex itself is not liberated (…). Sexual liberation does not equate the liberation of existence” (Adachi as quoted by Andrews, 2026, p 109).
Andrews, moreover, strikes a great balance between the expositions of historical and societal context and the unfolding of Adachi’s trajectory so that the spectator, at all times, is able to maintain a clear overview of the contextual changes and shifts that shaped Adachi’s trajectory as a self-identified surrealist and anti-establishment figure. While certain parts within this book are quite heavy, showering the spectator with lots of information and little titbits, what Andrews presents the spectator is always relevant and improves the spectator’s appreciation of the somewhat forgotten political turmoil on the sixties and the seventies.
William Andrews, moreover, pleases the reader with his contextualizing interpretations of selected films in Adachi’s oeuvre. What makes his readings thought-provoking is that Adachi is not merely framed as a subject creatively reworking his political context through fiction-film (conscious), but that the writer also subtly alludes that film, for Adachi, also functions as a tool to (unconsciously) work-through his own relation to the social and political Other (E.g. Prisoner/Terrorist (2006), Artist of Feasting (2016)). In the second chapter, for instance, Andrews shows that, despite changing social mores concerning sexuality, Masao Adachi perceived a need to attack lingering conservatism within the societal field – the patriarchal control of the female body, and artistically expose that the “fight against sexual repression (…) is as much a struggle against the state as ourselves [italics added]” (Andrews, 2026, p 43).
[Click the front cover to discover where you can buy your copy today.]
Yet, it is evident, throughout the book, that the last word on Adachi has not been said – and, probably, cannot be said. The book, in short, instigates a hunger for more. William Andrews, while tracing out societal shifts and political events, and contextualizing Adachi’s creative responses, opens up paths for further exploration and invites readers to embark on their own questioning. His attempt to arouse the reader’s interest is most evident in the provocative questions he confronts the reader with: Were Adachi and Wakamatsu anti-feminists? How to rhyme the emphasis on rape with their love for the maternal?
As Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw is bursting with information, he has no trouble in offering the critical reader enough supports to allow him to formulate thought-provoking hypotheses. We must, in this sense, consider William Andrews’ book the first English giant upon whose shoulders people interested in Masao Adachi and his oeuvre can stand on.
“Film is direct action; it is not simply political, it is politics” (Andrews, 2026, p 139)
For instance, in our reading, we were immediately intrigued by the opposition the author introduces between the rape of the female body and the love for the maternal. The formulation of our hypothesis – our guiding questions – evolved in three stages. First, Adachi’s Sex Zone (1968) and Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels (1967), two of the films exploring the logic of crime, allowed us to discern the importance of the ‘phallic’ injury as inflicted by the female subject. Within these films, the female subject manifest herself as someone who, in some way or another, confronts the male other with his own castration. Does Adachi, thus, not imply that the oppressive quality of the patriarchal society for the male subject lies in its societal over-emphasis on the ‘having the phallus’? Secondly, with Japan Assault Dark History: Blood of an Abnormal Man (1967), Adachi suggests, quite convincingly, that sexual repression and rape are destructive forces inherent to the patriarchal societal system. Or, to reformulate in our terminology, the adoration of the phallus – or the phallic position – within the logic of the father is framed as being the cause both of sexual repression as aimed at the female body and of rape, as the sexual exploitation of the female body to restore the phantasmatic ownership over the phallus. Ultimately – and this is the third stage – we ended up formulating the following questions: Is the female body not the site of male violence within these films because women, due to being a being of language and subjected to societal discourses, can never accede to phantasmatic maternal position sought by the male protagonists? Can the cause of male violence be sought in the ‘lost’ maternal harmony, in a womb-like unity that was always lost to begin with? Is the brutality of the male subject towards the female subject not function of the radicality inability to be the phallus for the non-existing Mother?
“People can’t kill just for fun. You have to do it more earnestly, more seriously, or you won’t believe in anything” (Andrews, 2026, p 163).
The fifth chapter of Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw, which frames Adachi as a subject who instrumentalizes cinema, the creation of fictive filmic frames and newsreel pink films in particular (e.g. Sex Play (1968), Schoolgirl Guerillas (1969), Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), Sex Jack (1970), to deal with the immense disappointment of the (anpo) struggle and to interpret the failure of the student movement and ‘uncontrollable’ futen in the latter half of the sixties, shows Adachi as a creator who turns the sexualized female body – the a-motherly body – into the site where the failure of revolution is inscribed on. The way sexuality is framed within the films implies that failure of activism does not lie in the aimless direction of the revolution – revolution for revolution’s sake, but in a thanatonic excess of phallic enjoyment and the self-destructive consequences of medicating ‘phallic’ injuries via libidinal means. Andrews allows us to provocatively state that the triumph of capitalism echoes itself within the narcistic ‘chauvinistic’ exploitation of the female body. Does sexual ‘liberation’, by misrecognizing the void of subjectivity, not merely lead to the subject to an imprisonment by the capitalistic discourse? Does Adachi not provocatively imply – see Gushing Prayer: A Fifteen-Year-Old Prostitute (1971) and Extasy Of The Angels (1972) – that the decline of the student movement and the failure of revolution is due to a misplaced prayer for capitalistic enjoyment, the misplaced indulging in auto-erotic hedonism to attack the Other as well as narcissistically flee from failure?
“And in today’s globalized world, when society is increasingly homogenised and controlled by invisible powers, landscape theory is more relevant than ever” (Andrews, 2026, p 93).
William Andrews also pays attention to Adachi’s collaboration with leftist critic Masao Matsuda – e.g. A.K.A Serial Killer (1969) – which resulted in latter’s Landscape theory and Baudelaire’s elaboration of said theory – Also know as Jihadi (2017) – to highlight its continued relevance and further arouse interest in its applications. This theory states that the landscape, whether rural or urban, is structured around ‘invisible’ markers of state power, power that does not only conditions the ego but also seeks to represses the subject and his dissent. Matsuda, however, does not merely see landscape as the place littered with capitalistic, imperialistic, and patriarchal inscriptions, but as the physical place from where the capitalistic and patriarchal desires of the Other oppress us as gaze. Directing criminal violence at the landscape is, in this sense, an attempt that hitting what usually remains unperceived, at the gaze that clings to concrete, wood, …, etc.: the desire of Other that radically subjects the subject to its alienating capitalistic and repressive patriarchal discourses.
Whether Andrews realizes it or not, his Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw also confronts the reader from various perspectives – surrealism as filmic envelope, Matsuda’s landscape theory, the news-reel film, propaganda as armed struggle – with the irresolvable tension between fiction, reality, truth, lie. While the author’s exploration of Adachi’s birth as revolutionary re-affirms that the politics is, first and foremost, a fight concerning truth, he leaves it up to the spectator to think through this tension – the Lacanian formulation ‘truth has the structure of fiction’ might be fruitful.
“The truth of the oppressed must be liberated from its degradation by the commercial product that is oppressed reportage” (Adachi in Andrews, 2026, p. 149).
The triumph of Andrews’ illuminating Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw is that it continuously re-affirms the deceitful fictionality of the image of Japanese homogeneity – the ordered harmony of modernity, the unity of revolution, as well as the natural harmony of rural traditional Japan, the struggle of the Ainu and the Okinawans. Adachi signals, throughout his oeuvre, that the subject is structurally at odds with the Other, the societal context that embraces him – see Bowl (1961), A New Dark History of violence in Japan: Vengeance Demon (1969), and many more.
“(…) ‘The scenario for a revolution must be written in the manner of a film script. In a sense, there could be not better metaphor for Adachi’s life and work” (Andrews, p 230).
More than anything, what Andrews emphasizes with Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw and the series of failures (personal, political, …) he introduces is the urgent need for a new generation of artists and theorists to rise up to, once more, deconstruct the fictitious clean image of Japan as last bastion of cultural homogeneity. Andrews, who carefully avoids writing a political pamphlet, turns his exploration of Masao Adachi, Japan’s post-war politico-cultural situation, and his creative response to it into a ‘Red Bus’ text, a well-researched in-depth textual prelude to engender (political) discourse. Can cine-activism instigate divine violence? How can violence escape pseudo-activism and be a true political act? Answers to these questions, as Andrews shows with his impressive work, lie in the field of collaboration, non-hierarchy, and consideration.
Notes:
End-Note 1: Reading the book, it is quite reasonable to assume that Andrews is not deeply familiar with psychoanalytic theory. This is, to emphasize, not a critique; the a-theoretical nature of the book is, in this case, a veritable gift.
From our perspective, we would formulate certain things a little bit differently. For example, we would argue that M, the character of Prisoner/terrorist (2026), does not merely represent Masao Adachi and Okamoto, but that Adachi represents himself through Okamoto. Such ambivalence is inherent to auteur cinema, to the intrusion of the unconscious in the creative process of crafting a script and bringing it to life.
End-Note 2: We do want to add one little remark on Andrew’s exploration Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), Adachi’s personal declaration and attempt at crafting a new form of newsreel film by mixing landscape theory with mediated sensationalism – a provocative and equivocal tool of propaganda.
Andrews underlines, many times, that Adachi would ultimately deem his formalistic experiment a failure: it did not sort its intended effect. In contrast to the author, we would argue his exploration subtly signals that the ‘unintended’ effects of one’s creative endeavours are, generally, more revelatory concerning the position of the subjectivity of its creator. To put it in a form of a question: Does the film’s failure not echo that a sliver of ambivalence still contaminated his so-called political awakening? Moreover, do the ‘misunderstandings’ concerning Adachi’s film not provide proof that audiences, irrespective of the director’s conscious intentions, appropriate film for their own subjective purposes and interpret creative works within a prejudiced subjective framework?