When Godard died in 2022, the obituaries called it the end of politically committed filmmaking. William Andrews argues the era never closed. In Japan, Masao Adachi is still working — at eighty-seven, with two new features in four years and a new short screening at NYFF this autumn.

The life is the intersection of art and politics taken literally:

  • Japanese New Wave; wrote and directed for Wakamatsu Kōji — Schoolgirl Guerrillas (1969), Ecstasy of the Angels (1972)
  • Relocated to Lebanon in the 1970s to keep making revolutionary cinema alongside the Palestinian resistance, and became a member of the Japanese Red Army
  • Has always maintained he was never involved in any attack on civilians, despite the group’s 1972 Lod Airport attack
  • Arrested in Lebanon in 1997 on passport violations, jailed three years, extradited home — effectively barred from leaving Japan since
  • Fusako Shigenobu, the Red Army leader released in 2022 after more than twenty years inside, became a close friend during his years with the group

The films are stranger than their agitprop reputation:

  • A.K.A. Serial Killer (completed 1969, released 1975) — a seminal work of landscape theory (fūkeiron), reading the ordinary spaces that produced a spree killer as state power haunting the postwar landscape
  • The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971) — shot embedded with Palestinian guerrillas, dismissed as recruitment propaganda, actually a meditation on daily life inside a revolutionary struggle
  • Revolution+1 (2022) on Shinzo Abe’s assassin and Escape (2025) on fugitive bomber Satoshi Kirishima — neither condemning nor condoning, showing how circumstances pull people toward the act
  • Artist of Fasting (2016), drawn from Kafka and Lu Xun — a man occupies a neighborhood, becomes a spectacle, and everyone tries to exploit him

The context that makes it legible is Japan’s “Long ’60s”:

  • The 1960 Anpo struggle against the US security treaty — a generation haunted by failing to stop it, then written off as compromised by the radicals of 1968
  • That wound explains Adachi’s satirical portraits of student militants: leftists no better than the authorities they oppose, collapsing into LARPing or self-destructive violence
  • Scholarship has since dislodged the stereotype of a protest-free Japan, but the period’s legacy stays contested because its violence ran inward, between rival New Left factions

Adachi answered Godard’s manifesto by insisting on undō — movement, activism — over seiji, politics: a collaborative cine-politics that could hold both.

“Creating is, above of all, firstly about hoping,” he wrote in 1970. His work lacks the formal polish of Ōshima or Yoshida, and that rejection of convention is exactly what Andrews thinks will let it outlive filmographies that date. From 2012: “Through this way, I’ll continue to revolt.”