Wakamatsu: United Red Army (2007)

(video by AsianVirusNet)

Made in 2007, Jitsuroku rengô sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi (United Red Army) is the ninety-ninth movie of Kôji Wakamatsu (the first one, Oiroke Sakusen, dates from 1963). Almost fifty years of activity! The veteran of the Japanese New Wave has created a three hours jitsuroku (the Japanese term for what we call a docudrama) , in which archival footage is mixed wih reenactment of historic events. It is about the famous (and infamous) 1972 Asama-Sansō incident: following a police purge that had left 14 members of the United Red Army dead (along with an innocent bystander), five members of the organization took hostage a woman in a mountain lodge. As the house was kind of a natural fortress, it took ten days for the police to be able to storm the house, to rescue the hostage and arrest the radicals. Two police officers died in the operation. The assault took ten hours and forty minutes (and it was the first marathon live broadcast in Japan).

Wakamatsu (who was close enough to the organization) succeeded to keep strictly to the facts in the movie, without speculating on motives and judgments. It is a truly (and chilly) masterpiece, created with the precision and detachment of a surgeon.

(Japanese New Wave)