Kôji Wakamatsu's most current contribution in his retrospective of the berlinale forum was UNITED RED ARMY from 2007 - a 3-hour marathon that softens the viewer and conveys to him in an almost penetrating way the extent which human stupidity can reach. It is the personal, angry reckoning of a disappointed leftist with his generation, with those who wanted a revolution and yet only destroyed themselves in their self-sufficient circles and living environments.

First documentary news clippings from the early 1970s are edited together. Little by little we delve into the world of the “United Red Army” - the Japanese counterpart to the German RAF. In this context, the film also aroused the interest of German viewers, as the proximity…

One of the more ambitious and difficult films I've seen. It feels like the film Wakamatsu was born to make, the one all those pink films must've been practice for. And about half of UNITED RED ARMY is among the most towering achievements of cinematic leftism I've had the pleasure of knowing. That half is not evenly divided, however. It's the beginning and the end, with the middle introducing some complications I'm not sure Wakamatsu resolves satisfactorily. Still, despite the complaints I'm about to register, I have to credit him for giving life to Japan's eclipsed left history, especially as Shinzo Abe continues making moves to re-militarize a nation blessedly pure of that toxin.

For the first third or so,…

Cult Challenge 2023
Week 16, April 16 - 22
Koji Wakamatsu 

Very overlong ambitious and especially political, United Red Army, was a whole lot of fictional and real life footage. The story follows a group of young folks who organize into a communist political movement. And it seems to also be about a historical movement in Japan in the mid 20th century.

Well filmed and certainly well acted, Koji Wakamatsu is a competent director, no doubt! It’s overly long and dramatic in it’s scope. I just really didn’t connect with this one.

Feels like a movie that 3rd year Japanese university students watch for their political film class… which was not really my vibe. Maybe you’ll connect with it more. Part…

What must be realized about United Red Army before anyone watches it, regardless if they've seen a Wakamatsu film before, is how intrinsic the leftist movement in Japan was for the success of Wakamatsu and his production company (and those within in it, such as Masao Adachi). From about 1965 until 1972 (incidentally, around the time Adachi departs for Lebanon), Wakamatsu's best films, to say the least, are almost always imbued with the spirit and, oftentimes, actual footage of protests and demonstrations from the Zengakuren, other student groups, and the widespread sects that seem to rise and fall rather quickly through this politically volatile period. Some (Wakamatsu himself) have claimed this to be a commercial decision to cash-in on whatever…

“He could not critique his own defeatism, and that resulted in death.”

Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi made Red Army agitprop in 1971 with Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War and then mourned the movement’s disintegration in 1972 with Ecstasy of the Angels. Both are romantic in their respective revolutionary fervour and grand tragedy. Ecstasy of the Angels is even beautiful and cool, painting in smoke clouds and orgasms as much as ideological splinters and individual violence. Thirty-five years later, Wakamatsu returned (sans Adachi this time) to this birth and death of the Red Army with no romance or nostalgia. United Red Army is ugly and punishing. The light is ambient and unflattering, digital grain heavy and camera often shaky…

”– There’s no such thing as an anti-revolutionary cookie!
– What are you saying!?”

For a director so used to the format of 70 minute bursts of radical intensities, the more than 3 hour long United Red Army – a passion project of Wakamatsu’s – feels very much like a culminating statement of a long and partly tumultuous career. Wakamatsu here tracks the emergence of the United Red Army from the radical student movement in the 1960’s, and follows it through its quite harrowing development and disintegration. It starts out a bit awkward with its mix of archival documentary footage and ugly enacted dramatised scenes. But soon it grows into a really strong exploration of ideological commitment and the relation between…

"Even if we destroy the armed enemy, the unarmed enemy remains. We must root out enemy toxins and our own impurities. Revolutionary war is the antidote."

Wakamatsu's golden age of the late 60's and early 70's was by and large a product of Japan's political turmoil of the time. Student protests, police riots, Mishima's suicide, undercover spies, and self-destructive alienation in the name of revolutionary movements. He made films of this nature not merely from an exploitive outsider's perspective, as both he and longtime collaborator Masao Adachi were politically active as well, shown especially through the call to arms documentary Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971).

As a result, Wakamatsu made a name for himself that ensured a decade-spanning…

a movie that has gripped my entire political being and beaten it in the stomach, tied it to a post, assaulted it, mutilated it, ruined all of it and killed it off for good. is there anything left of me now? hydraulically presses all leftism with the pressure of sexuality and hatred and hopelessness and the human drive toward death into a pathetic, whimpering disk of despair.

this is so brutal. wakamatsu's hideous camerawork and that glaring lighting, his cheap sets, all of it is heinous in the same way the violence is. anti-anti-real. too real. a movie that is a third documentary and two thirds melodramatic death cheese soap opera, a movie that is three hours long and still…