United Red Army

Koji Wakamatsu

Japan

Synopsis

Five youngsters barricaded in a mountain lodge engage in gun battles with the police. They are members of the United Red Army, who laid it all on the line for revolution.

REVIEW

In the late 1960s in Japan, a radical student movement rose up against the Japanese government in reaction to its domestic security treaty with the U.S., the Vietnam War, and to U.S. imperialism in the global sphere. The protest reached its apex when the two most radical student groups merged together under the banner of the "socialist global revolution" as The United Army. After being martyred by the state police for its terrorist leftism, in the early 1970s, the surviving members of The United Red Army escaped the city in order to keep fighting. In the seclusion of the mountains, they formed their own militia. In 1972, the survivors holed up at the Asama Sano Mountain Lodge, where the last 12 members lynched each other during "self-criticism" sessions and became entangled in a nine-day confrontation with the state police. This confrontation marks one of the most pivotal moments in Japanese history.

United Red Army is a black-and-white docudrama that incorporates historical, archival footage. It portrays the multiple national agonies from this singular historical event in Japan: the conflicts between intellectual leftists and the democratic state, individual and government, reality and ideology, rationality and emotion, sexuality and asexuality, and the negation of aestheticism. This film uncannily reminds us of Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers (1966) that dramatizes Algerian struggle against French colonization in the 1950s and 60s, both from a thematic and technical point of view, especially in its portrayal of the national distress, and its use of black-and-white tone and the historical archival footages. Apart from its historical significance, the film also has personal meaning for director Koji Wakamatsu, who is a former member of the United Red Army himself. According to many sources, he is barred from entering the United States for this political affiliation.

The film's narrative consists of three: the emergence of the leftist student movement, the group's battle against the state police, and its internal struggle and eventual destruction in the mountains. What distinguishes United Red Army in particular is its portrayal of self-enunciation and self-renouncement at the same time. Without straightforwardly enforcing any particular political position, the film tries to transparently investigate the impact of ideology in the society, whether democratic, communist, or socialist. The pitfalls of ideology are evidenced by the members of the United Red Army at their mountain base when, during bomb-making sessions and military training, they criticize, doubt and betray their comrades, and more astonishingly end up killing them, in the name of revolution.

Stylistically, United Red Army's filmic spaces (e.g., secret place, underground, burrows, etc.) brilliantly and claustrophobically rendered to stage a sense of despair and self-destruction. In addition, the film effectively uses the sounds of low-key hard-rock and jazz guitar to contrast with the film's menacing, rapid flow-a wonderful combination of a poetic sensation and epic narrative. The film also makes commentaries on both the policies of the United States post-9/11, and a resurgence of neo-nationalism in Japan.

-Meera Lee