SAT. OCT. 5, 2019 – 09.30 PM – BUY TICKETS HERE
DIRECTOR LUTZ DAMMBECK WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE – Q&A after the film with an introduction by W. Seth Howes, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, German Department of German And Russian Studies, University of Missouri-Columbia
Germany 2018, 105 min
Director: Lutz Dammbeck
Cast: Lutz Dammbeck, Masao Adachi
Legendary author and filmmaker Masao Adachi was a member of the Japanese New Left who shifted roles from political filmmaker to guerilla fighter. After the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, he and his friend and fellow filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu drove from France to Lebanon, where they worked on a documentary about the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, RED ARMY / PFLP: DECLARATION OF WORLD WAR. Three years later, Adachi joined the Japanese Red Army, founded by Fusako Shigenobu, in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Adachi went underground with a new identity and a fake passport and, for the next 23 years, lived at the center of an international network of radical, leftwing revolutionary groups. In 1997, he was arrested and tried for passport violation. Sentenced to four years in a Lebanese prison, he was released after 18 months. He was then deported to Japan, where he was arrested on other passport violations. After another 18 months, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to time served. Following his release, he resumed working on films after a 30-year hiatus.
Dammbeck met Adachi in Tokyo in 2018, and the two engaged in a wide-ranging discussion that encompassed topics including art, revolution, the influence of western avant-garde culture and of the American underground, the Japanese Red Army, collaboration with secret services, the role of the Left after 1968, and the reasons for the failure of leftist ideas and strategies. Dammbeck filmed their conversation, and the result is this new documentary, which represents an extraordinary meeting of minds.
Dammbeck began his career in the context of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Born in Leipzig in 1948, he studied painting and graphic art, and eventually directed six short animated films for East Germany’s DEFA film studios. At the same time he was working on his own, more experimental short films, including METAMORPHOSES I – one of the first experimental films to be shown publicly in the GDR. This work marked the beginning of his long-term art project, the HERCULES CONCEPT, which Dammbeck conceived of as a total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) comprising research materials, media collages, photographs, texts, painting, dance, film, and music. He has continued to work on various sequences for and variations on his Hercules project ever since, as well as a related website, herakleskonzept.de.
In 1986, after many obstacles and official interference in his work, Dammbeck and his family moved to Hamburg, West Germany, where he continued working on the HERCULES CONCEPT and soon began creating the full-length documentaries that he’s become known for more recently – complex, carefully-researched, philosophical works that treat the topics of art, power, radicalism, and science.
“DIRECTOR AND MEDIA ARTIST LUTZ DAMMBECK IN PORTLAND” has been organized by the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has been supported by the DEFA Film Library, DEFA-Stiftung in Berlin, and the program Wunderbar Together, an initiative of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Goethe-Institut, with the support of the Federation of German Industries (BDI). Special thanks to Hiltrud Schulz (DEFA Film Library).
