Masao Adachi: Until 1974 I had been involved in all kinds of film projects in Japan, but I always believed that film and revolution were the same thing. Around the time that I put together a team for organizing a grassroots roadshow of the newsreel film Wakamatsu and I shot in Palestine, The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), I heard that Jean-Luc Godard had set up the Dziga Vertov Group, and felt it was confirmation that he and I were on the same wavelength. Of course Godard had his way of doing things in France, and I had my own crude way of doing things in Japan, but I think the overall theme was similar. Godard had been to Palestine about a year-and-a-half prior to us. Under the slogan, “Could some Shinjuku drunks become guerillas?” Wakamatsu and I stopped in Palestine to film on our return from the Cannes Film Festival, and we came back with the footage that became Red Army/PFLP. And of course the answer to the question in the slogan was already decided: “You have to be a drunk to be a guerilla!” A few years later, when I went back to Palestine to make a follow-up film, I thought the Japanese kids who were there trying to continue the path of violent political revolution were so naïve that they would get crushed if they kept it up, so I suggested they form the Japanese Red Army, and ended up becoming their spokesman. The next 30-odd years went by in a flash.
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