February 4, 2017
International House Philadelphia

Masao Adachi, Female Student Guerrilla, 1969, 72min, film transferred to video

Organized in collaboration with Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ)’s partner researcher, Go Hirasawa (Meiji Gakuin University), this screening event underscores recent preservation and digitization efforts by international institutions and individuals. This screening will feature a new digital transfer of Masao Adachi’s Female Student Guerrilla; curator and scholar Go Hirasawa will introduce the program.  

About Female Student Guerrilla

Masao Adachi’s fifth ‘pink-film’ directed under the Wakamatsu Productions, the new direction of the post-1968 student protest movement is depicted in this film about five high school students who take up military weapons to embark on a guerrilla-style revolution in the mountains for their fight against their school’s graduation ceremony. The portrait of the psychotic fighters in the film suggest a premonition of the following year’s coups d'état of the Self-Defense Force base led by writer Yuko Mishima; and the high school members’ inner group frictions (uchi-geba) in the mountains foreshadows the Asama Sanso Incident of 1972 where conflicts culminated in a shoot-out between police and student activists in the mountains. In order to limit production costs, this film was shot sharing the staff, the cast, and the location of another film, Violated Virgin (1969) directed by Koji Wakamatsu and written by Atsushi Yamatoya. Intricately fusing the subjects of sex and politics, Female Student Guerrilla is Adachi’s masterpiece.

--Go Hirasawa (translated by Ann Adachi-Tasch and Julian Ross)