“United Red Army”: Crazy ’70s radicalism attacks the screen!

Tue, 31 May 2011 20:03:00 +0000

Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu's "United Red Army" is three hours long, mixes drama and documentary in an often-disorienting Brechtian collage, and would be wildly confusing to all but a tiny handful of American viewers (which does not include me, by the way). It's about as nichey as a niche film can get; I'm impressed that Lorber Films is actually giving it a one-week New York theatrical run on the way to home video. But if you're keeping tabs on the recent cinematic reconsideration of 1960s and '70s left-wing terrorism, Wakamatsu's devastating chronicle of the ultra-violent fringe of Japanese student radicalism is a must-see.

It's not as if the global wave of radical violence, extending from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground in the United States to the Irish Republican Army, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and various Palestinian and/or Arab groups in the Middle East, is a brand-new topic for film and literature. (I assume that various Ph.D. candidates have already noticed and explored the fact that the defeated Axis powers -- Germany, Japan and Italy -- produced the scariest varieties of left-wing wackos.) Headline-grabbing events like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the murder of Italian premier Aldo Moro or the 1972 Olympic massacre in Munich have been retold several times. But as the global political chaos of that era has faded into collective memory -- and if you weren't there, it's nearly impossible to convey the level of craziness -- filmmakers have given themselves permission to reexamine it from formerly forbidden points of view.

“Carlos”: International terror, Sopranos-style

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:01:00 +0000

For some obvious reasons and others we can guess at, quite a few 21st-century filmmakers seem drawn to the shadowy and outrageous history of 1960s and '70s radicalism, especially at its outermost fringes. "Carlos," the dazzling, epic-scale movie and/or mini-series from French director Olivier Assayas, is the latest and probably greatest example, but it's definitely not alone. In the last few years we've also seen Steven Soderbergh's "Che," Uli Edel's Oscar-nominated "Baader Meinhof Complex," Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu's docudrama "United Red Army" (never released in the United States) and Italian director Marco Bellocchio's "Good Morning, Night." (It might be stretching the point to include Steven Spielberg's 2005 "Munich," but it's definitely related.)

Salon.com > Carlos

“United Red Army”: Crazy ’70s radicalism attacks the screen!

“Carlos”: International terror, Sopranos-style