Revolution+1 (Masao Adachi, 2023).
On July 8, 2022, Shinzo Abe, who had been the longest-serving prime minister of Japan in its postwar years, was shot and killed in broad daylight in a country with barely any civilian access to firearms. The suspect was immediately arrested, and commentators from all over the world began to speculate about the killer’s motive. After a few days, the police revealed that the 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, who had built his own gun and tracked Abe’s movements, had not originally planned to kill Abe. In fact, the most high-profile political assassination in decades was carried out by a man who cared little for politics.
Legendary Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, sensing a story sure to be misconstrued by the press, immediately began production on a biopic—not of Abe, but of Yamagami. At the North American premiere of the film, Revolution+1 (2023), last July, he said that this quick turnaround was not intended to garner controversy, but to preempt the media-led myth about Abe and the killer becoming dogma. Adachi’s decision is tailored to our postmodern political moment, as he knows his film will immediately become part of “the discourse” which will then affect how audiences receive the movie, which will affect the discourse, ad infinitum.
In the ’60s, his left-wing politics alienated him from mainstream studios and distributors; his Japanese New Wave films were full of liberating depictions of sex and violence and calls for Communist political action.These films were shaped by their independent production model, such as the Adachi-scripted Violated Angels (1967), which was produced and directed by fellow New Wave legend Koji Wakamatsu in a mere three days using nonprofessional actors who improvised each scene.
Adachi left Japan in the early 1970s as part of the Japanese Red Army to assist the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He stayed in Lebanon for almost three decades before being extradited to his home country in 2000 to serve a brief prison sentence. His politics never moderated, and his commitment to revolutionary action is evident in his two post-release films, Prisoner/Terrorist (2007) and Artist of Fasting (2016): the former is a semi-autobiographical tale of his own time in prison, while the latter blends satire and performance art as it transposes a 1922 Kafka story to contemporary Japan. Now 84, Adachi made Revolution+1 in the same spirit and at the same pace as his work from the ’60s—only the technology has changed.
Revolution+1 (Masao Adachi, 2023).
Adachi, not exactly a stickler for traditional narrative beats, composes a portrait of Tetsuya Yamagami through a series of flashbacks as the assassin wastes away in prison. Yamagami’s childhood was almost comically awful. His father’s suicide sends the family reeling. Though the family was relatively affluent and could have lived on their savings and insurance, his mother joins the Unification Church and steadily funnels all of their money into it, often leaving Tetsuya and his brother without food, new clothes, or medication. After high school, he cannot afford to go to university, so he settles for vocational school and a stint in the army, neither of which land him a career or any sort of stability. He flirts with political consciousness when he befriends a neighbor involved in eco-activism, but most nights are spent in his own head, where he rages against his family, the Unification Church (UC), and himself. His brother, suffering from untreated glaucoma, violently vandalizes a UC site, goes to prison, and eventually kills himself, spurring Tetsuya to action. Adachi emphasizes Tetsuya’s vague plans to attack UC leaders—notably not political figures—as well as the development of his DIY gun, designed to kill only the target at the end of the barrel.
This is all filmed on a prosumer digital camera that Adachi frequently overexposes to produce a garish white sheen over the image, which signals dreams, flashbacks, or surreal moments worthy of comparison to the digital unheimlich of Inland Empire (2006). There’s hardly a single shot without Tetsuya in frame (almost always in medium shots, unless a disturbing revelation demands a close-up), adding a documentary-esque quality that is juxtaposed with Tetsuya’s constant narration of emotion. In this way, Adachi asks his audience to understand Tetsuya’s plight but remains distanced enough (both literally and through the surreal rain motif) to see him as a historical actor rather than an agitprop hero.
Though Japanese cinema—especially the films of Adachi and his contemporaries, such as Yoshishige Yoshida, Nagisa Oshima, Koji Wakamatsu, Shuji Terayama, and Akio Jissoji—has often portrayed political violence, the subject of political assassination has largely been relegated to the historical drama. Masahiro Shinoda’s aptly titled Assassination (1964) focuses on the tumultuous time of the Tokugawa Shogunate of the mid-19th century, as does Kinji Fukasaku’s Shogun’s Samurai (1978). Every adaptation of The 47 Ronin is a revenge thriller about 18th-century samurai avenging their daimyo through assassination, and Satsuo Yamamoto’s Shinobi no Mono (1962) depicts that classic Japanese assassin, the ninja, attempting to kill Oda Nobunaga in the 16th century. Revolution+1 breaks from the trope of murdered daimyos, continuing in the counter-tradition of adversarial guerrilla filmmaking by taking up the recent assassination of a real political leader. Though plenty of films have dealt with real-world assassinations, representations like Adachi’s are relatively rare; they inevitably constitute a political statement unto themselves, which may anger or alienate a public still working to process the aftermath of the murder.
Assassination (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964).
A year before the premiere of the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), there had already been a filmed representation of an assassination. In The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895), Alfred Clark, working on behalf of Thomas Edison’s company, depicts the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. The trick film, which features the very first special effect in cinema, displays a row of spectators in period garb, their spears raised in soldierly attention in West Orange, New Jersey, made to stand in for Fotheringhay, England. There is no long walk to the gallows, no customary cushion for Mary’s knees, and no portrayal of the legendary pardon of the executioner. Instead, the eighteen-second film, the world’s first cinematic depiction of the death of a political leader, focuses only on the moment of execution. The blindfolded Mary, played by Robert Thomae, secretary and treasurer of the Kinetoscope Company, is replaced by a headless dummy as the axe falls. It’s closer to the Zapruder film than any political drama, as it depicts the moment of assassination in graphic detail but without any context, but, like most historical reenactment films of the 19th century, The Execution of Mary Stuart simply gives life to one of the more noteworthy moments of history. Yet, its violent subject and perverse pleasure made it a success among early cinema audiences, and its core special effect would influence the cine-magician Géorges Méliès.
After Kinetoscope’s treasurer’s head rolled, assassination became a mainstay fascination of Hollywood. Just one month after William McKinley was killed in 1901, Edwin S. Porter directed an Edison Studios short, The Martyred Presidents, which portrayed an American weeping over those assassinated few; later the same year, Porter directed a recreation of the electrocution of McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz. At this time, the character of a President was sacrosanct, though the reprisal suffered by an assassin could be cheap entertainment. Before World War II, most Hollywood movies about assassination stuck largely to distant history or literary sources. In the Days of Buffalo Bill (1922), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), Abraham Lincoln (1930), Rasputin and the Empress (1932), Cleopatra (1934), and Juarez (1939) all depict murder academically, often reducing the central killing to a narrative beat. European cinema was no different: Young Medardus (1923), Napoléon (1927), The Fall of the House of Habsburg (1928), and The Iron Duke (1934) are each set mostly in the 19th century and divorce the act of assassination from its immediate political motives, treating these moments as if they were the stuff of Greek tragedy. In other cases, the petty squabbles of history can take on a universal quality, recontextualized to fit any political moment.
This is not to say that studios shied away from politics entirely. Warner Bros. became known as the studio willing to show gangster violence and abject poverty during the Great Depression, prompting even MGM (thanks to maverick producer Dore Schary) to occasionally ditch the glitz for grimy adaptations of last year’s headlines. By the time the United States entered World War II, the studios were committed to adapting all kinds of war stories to aid the American propaganda effort. These movies would borrow imagery and characters from the Depression-era dramas as well as from the newsreels from the front line. As propaganda, they also served to invigorate an audience’s support of the war effort. Thus, Americans were primed to support an assassin in a movie, so long as they were killing Hitler.
The Nazi assassination movie laid the foundation for the revenge thriller, the secret-agent film, and any drama in which the audience's sympathy is supposed to lie with the assassin, rather than the victim. Fritz Lang, an Austrian expat with no love for Hitler, made two such films: Man Hunt (1941), in which Hitler’s would-be assassin is stalked throughout Europe, and Hangmen Also Die! (1943), loosely based on the assassination of the mastermind of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich. From that point on, at least in the cinematic language of Hollywood, then the biggest cultural exporter in the world, the assassin could be a hero.
Hangmen Also Die! (Fritz Lang, 1943).
Though English-speaking countries enjoyed this development primarily through the character of James Bond, the rest of the globe, equipped with their own production studios and distribution networks, used the figure of the hero-assassin to tell the stories of their own liberation. India produced many films sympathetic to nationalist Bhagat Singh and his assassination of a young British police officer (itself a case of mistaken identity): Shaheed-e-Azad Bhagat Singh (1954), Shaheed Bhagat Singh (1963), and the very successful Shaheed (1965). Such depictions of the violent revolutionary as hero did not resort to the genre trappings of the revenge thriller.
Some assassination films portrayed the act as politically righteous while others mourned their martyred subjects. The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Long Days (1980)—produced by its subject, Saddam Hussein, and allegedly edited by Bond movie veteran Terence Young—are two radically different examples of the former in terms of scope and political allegiance. Two films by Costa-Gavras, Z (1963) and Missing (1982), and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Death of a President (1977) tackle 20th-century political subjects in an attempt to position the slain figure’s story somewhere between agitprop and literary tragedy.
It wasn’t long after the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy that conspiracies around the shooting developed, though it took ten years for the conspiracy film to follow. Most moviegoers are familiar with the inconsistencies of the Warren Commission thanks to Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), but a speculative thriller titled Executive Action (1973), initiated by Donald Sutherland and partially funded by Kirk Douglas, beat Stone to the punch with its depiction of endless backroom meetings between capitalists, politicians, and the mob. The Dalton Trumbo–penned film starred Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, but it was pulled from theaters just a week after its release due to perceived tastelessness.
Executive Action (David Miller, 1973).
The Kennedy assassination was, even ten years later, a taboo subject for a supposedly liberated New Hollywood, but interest in conspiratorial machinations behind political killings continued in the likes of The Parallax View (1974), Winter Kills (1979), and I… for Icarus (1979), which take on the Kennedy assassination more or less explicitly, and films such as Z, The Day of the Jackal (1973), and The Day That Shook the World (1975), which clearly emerge from the same event. These films found their roots in the labyrinthine narratives of film noir, in which detectives follow false leads and can’t find a single authority to trust; the most radical broke with Hollywood tradition by ending without resolution. The conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s paint assassination as an act without lone heroes or villains—instead, an all-powerful monster, the system, acts as an agent of history. Whereas the murder of King Duncan in Macbeth—itself transformed into a political conspiracy thriller by Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation—alludes to power’s corruption of the individual, these films characterize power itself as a being that demands a calculated equilibrium and kills politicos as if balancing a spreadsheet.
Political assassination cinema stagnated after these conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. The old subgenres reappear again and again, though sometimes with a twist: the leftist agitprop film is reborn as the jingoistic Presidential bodyguard drama: In the Line of Fire (1993), Air Force One (1997) (both directed by Wolfgang Peterson), or even Albert Pyun’s Captain America (1990), in which the American President is protected by the titular spandex-laden hero against a villain whose gang assassinated John and Robert Kennedy, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.. And, after many decades had passed, Stone’s JFK garnered controversy only for its extremely serious attempt to sow doubt about Oswald’s role; otherwise, the story now fit into the classic Hollywood mold of martyred public figures—as did Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long (1995), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), and George Wallace (1997).
As the United States fell comfortably back in line with these historical reenactments, so too did other national cinemas: Once Upon a Time in China III (1992) and Hero (2002) are set in the 19th-century Qing Dynasty and the ancient Warring States period, respectively. Jinnah (1998) takes place mostly in 1947, the year of Pakistan’s independence. The Italian Good Morning, Night (2003) dramatizes the 1978 kidnapping of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. The President’s Last Bang (2005) is premised upon the 1979 assassination of Park Chung Hee, then President of South Korea.
The President's Last Bang (Im Sang-soo, 2005).
When killing a contemporary President, both comedies and thrillers nearly always avoid referring to actual figures, installing proxies such as Protocol’s (1984) “emir of Ohtar,” Bob Roberts’s (1992) populist folk singer candidate, Bulworth’s (1998) own lovable demagogue, and the mere symbol of Finnish authority in Matti Kassila’s Farewell, Mr. President (1987). David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983) is the rare pro–Presidential assassin movie, and it arrived just two years after John Hinckley Jr.’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.
In fact, no film was immediately made (though several TV movies appeared decades later) about Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate the movie-star President. In a bizarre reversal of events, Hinckley’s actions were motivated by fame, not politics. He was inspired by the sudden rise to prominence of obsessive fan Mark David Chapman, who had shot and killed John Lennon three months earlier, having become disillusioned with his longtime idol. Hinckley was obsessed not with Reagan but with Jodie Foster, who had acted in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), about a gun-wielding loner who plots a likewise vaguely motivated political assassination before becoming an unlikely hero in the act of killing. Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life brought about a new kind of movie assassin: the starkiller. These films were never political in nature; rather, works like Scorsese’s own The King of Comedy (1983), Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan (1982), and, more recently, Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019)—an homage to both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy—critique a media ecosystem in which a potential killer can see themselves as a lovable criminal, a Bonnie or a Clyde, and take the fast track to fame by taking the life of a celebrity.
In the first two decades of the 21st century, filmmakers restaged and reinvented assassinations from the past in films like Raoul Peck’s Lumumba (2000), Niels Muller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), and Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008). Right-wing pundit Bill O’Reilly’s Killing series retold the familiar stories of Lincoln’s (2011), Kennedy’s (2013), and Reagan’s (2016) attempted or successful assassinations in the extremely popular idiom of true crime, a newly resurgent genre.
Revolution+1 (Masao Adachi, 2023).
In 2022, Shinzo Abe was killed, and it would take a figure from the 1960s to remember how this story should be told. Adachi’s sympathy for Yamagami is evident in the film itself and in its exhibition history, as it was first previewed in Japan on the day of Abe’s state funeral as an act of solidarity with other protests. Public support for Abe in Japan was split before the assassination and significantly waned after Yamagami brought Abe’s connections with the Unification Church to light.But Adachi’s entire point—indeed, the very reason why he made the film so quickly—lies in Yamagami’s purely personal and incidental motivations rather than any grand, unified political narrative. The director clarified at the North American premiere that Tetsuya is not a nihilistic agent of chaos like Travis Bickle or the Joker. He takes the abstracted rage at a wasted life typical of such characters and directs it against a political actor for imperfect political reasons.
Adachi’s film may be seen as agitprop, both by those who argued for its removal from Japanese theaters and by those now opposed to Abe’s legacy, whether that’s due to the Unification Church’s influence on his party or his government’s neoliberal economic policies, which widened income inequality in Japan. But the real political center of the film is Tetsuya the person and the conditions that immiserated him. His actions fit our new era of ever-isolating, atomized individuals for whom the very concept of meaning, a communal invention, can’t take hold. Adachi’s Yamagami often looks to the night sky and yearns to be a shining star, a meaningful part of something bigger than himself. If there’s any through line in all of these films, it’s that assassination is a real-time rewriting of history; this could entail the creation of a martyr, the removal of an important actor from the global stage, or a fundamental change in the political imagination. While plenty of these films reaffirm the status quo, Revolution+1 demands that a moment of bloodshed be followed by serious political reflection.