The Music of Ramón Raquello and his Orchestra: Fukeiron, or the Politics and Poetics of Landscape

This conference is co-organized with the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

Rather than filming the subject of his film—a recently arrested 19 year old serial killer—Masao Adachi turned the camera 180 degrees, and instead, decided to film the landscapes seen by the subject over the course of his life. The resulting film, A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) introduced the so-called landscape theory, fukeiron in Japanese. This gesture raises many questions: what can a camera, filming a landscape, reveal about the social and political structures of a given place at a given time? And what does this context tell us about the kind of alienation that can lead to violence? Based on their own work and experiences as filmmaker, film editor, film theorist, and curator, the speakers will explore the politics and poetics of landscape in cinema, while showing excerpts of films that relate in one way or another to this concept of fukeiron, including films by Chantal Akerman, and Eric Baudelaire’s work-in-progress Also Known As Jihadi, which were edited by Claire Atherton.

This event is part of the program of the exhibition The Music of Ramón Raquello and his Orchestra by Eric Baudelaire, on view until 7 May 2017. Two more conferences complete the series, on The Form of a City as a Political Outcome (22 April 2017) and on Assembly (22 April 2017).