November 2023 – Page 2 – Sidecar admin

Since Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October and the ensuing assault on Gaza, the Biden administration has performed what is euphemistically described as a ‘balancing act’. On the one hand it praises the collective punishment of Palestinians; on the other it warns Israel against overreach. Its support for aerial bombardment and targeted raids is steadfast, but it has posed ‘tough questions’ about the ground invasion that started earlier this week: Is there an achievable military objective? A roadmap to release the hostages? A way to avoid untenable Israeli governance if Hamas is extirpated? Washington is pressing the Israelis on such issues – and sending its own advisers to help solve them – while also giving the green light for the ongoing massacre. Its response to the crisis has been driven by a confluence of factors, including the desire to outflank Republicans and the reactive instinct to ‘stand with Israel’. Yet it can also be placed in the context of its broader vision for the Middle East, which crystallized under Trump and was consolidated by Biden.

Aware of the chaos wrought by its regime change efforts, and eager to complete the ‘pivot to Asia’ initiated in the early 2010s, the US has sought to partially disentangle itself from the region. Its goal is to establish a model that would replace direct intervention with oversight from a distance. To contemplate any real reduction in its presence, though, it first needs a security settlement that would strengthen friendly regimes and constrain the influence of nonconforming ones. The 2020 Abraham Accords advanced this agenda, as Bahrain and the UAE, by agreeing to normalize relations with Israel, joined a wider ‘reactionary axis’ spanning the Saudi Kingdom and Egyptian autocracy. Trump expanded arms sales to these states and cultivated connections between them – military, commercial, diplomatic – with the aim of creating a reliable phalanx of allies who would tilt towards the US in the New Cold War while acting as a bulwark against Iran. Obama’s nuclear deal had failed to stop the Islamic Republic from projecting its influence. Only ‘maximum pressure’ could do so.

Once in office, Biden adopted the same general coordinates: using the Negev Summit to deepen ties between the Abraham countries and suing for formal relations between the Saudis and Israelis. The JCPOA remained a dead letter and efforts to contain Tehran continued, through a combination of sanctions, diplomacy and military exercises. As Brett McGurk, the White House Coordinator for the Middle East, put it in a speech to the Atlantic Council, the premises of this policy are ‘integration’ and ‘deterrence’: building ‘political, economic, security connections between US partners’ which will repel ‘threats from Iran and its proxies’. Having developed this programme and presided over a trade boom between Israel and its Arab partners, Biden began to make good on the ‘drawdown’ promised by his predecessor – executing the pullout from Afghanistan while reducing troops and military assets in Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

The incumbent also refined the US approach to Palestine. Whereas Trump had choked off aid to the occupied territories and tried to gain assent for his delusional ‘peace deal’, Biden simply accepted the imperfect reality – in which Israel, despite having no workable plan for the Palestinians, seemed to enjoy relative security thanks to the collaborationist authorities in the West Bank and the military stranglehold on Gaza. In the abstract, he may have wanted to revive the ‘two-state solution’, of a nuclear juggernaut flanking a defenceless and bantustanized Palestinian nation. But since that was a political impossibility, he learned to live with the situation that Tareq Baconi describes as ‘violent equilibrium’: an indefinite occupation, punctuated by periodic confrontations with Hamas which were small-scale enough to be ignored by the Israeli population.

This regional blueprint always suffered from serious problems. First, if its raison d’être was Great Power politics – stepping back from the Middle East to sharpen the focus on China – it proved partly counterproductive. For in signalling its diminished appetite for interference in the region, the US conveyed to its allies that they would not have to make a zero-sum choice between American and Chinese partnership; hence the PRC’s increasingly warm welcome in the Arab world: its construction of a military base in the UAE, its brokering of the Iran–Saudi rapprochement and its network of technology and infrastructure investments. Second, in pinning its imperial strategy on the Israeli normalization process, the US became especially reliant on this settler-colonial project just before it was captured by its most extreme and volatile elements: Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Galant. If American support for Israel has historically exceeded any reasonable political calculus, under Trump and Biden it acquired a coherent rationale: to place its ally at the centre of a stable Middle Eastern security framework. Yet the Israeli cabinet that came to power in 2022 – addled by eliminationist fantasies, and determined to draw the US into war with Iran – proved least able to play that role.

Now, in the wake of October 7, this equilibrium has been shattered and those fantasies activated. Hamas’s attack aimed to unravel a political conjuncture in which the apartheid regime had become convinced that it could repress any serious resistance to its rule, and in which Palestine was rapidly becoming a non-issue in Israel and beyond. That intolerable state of affairs was its primary target. The leadership in Gaza anticipated a ferocious response, including a ground incursion. It also expected that this would cause problems for the Abraham settlement by sparking regional opposition, at popular and elite levels, to Israeli atrocities. All this has so far been borne out: the Saudi–Israel deal is delayed, the next Negev Summit remains on hold, the Arab nations are roiled by protests and their rulers have been forced to denounce Netanyahu. What does this mean for Washington’s overarching policy ambitions? The final answer will depend on the trajectory of the conflict.

As many onlookers have noted, Israel’s stated aim of ‘destroying Hamas’ poses a risk of continual and protracted escalation. In planning an urban war against an embedded guerrilla army, the national unity government has contemplated various endgames, including the depopulation of the northern Strip and mass expulsions to the Sinai. Any such strategy is liable to cross the ambiguous thresholds that could trigger major reprisals from Hezbollah and – potentially – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (Yemen’s Houthis have already launched missiles and drones at Israel, and are primed to send more over the coming weeks.) Biden’s deployment of warships to the Mediterranean and Red Sea, plus Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy, are intended to avert this outcome. It is too early to assess the impact of their efforts, but failure would see the hegemon drawn deeper into this bloody quagmire. The effect would be to widen fissures in the Arab–Israeli axis and distract America from its priorities in the Far East.

In the event that the invading army manages to demolish Hamas politically and militarily, the US would also have to grapple with the problem of succession. At present it hopes to corral Arab states into providing a force to govern the territory so as to relieve Israel of the burden. US officials are reporting that American, French, British and German soldiers could be dispatched to defend this hypothetical dictatorship. But if regional powers refuse to cooperate, as seems likely, alternative proposals include a ‘peacekeeping’ coalition modelled on the Sinai’s Multinational Force and Observers – to which the Pentagon currently contributes almost 500 troops – or an administration under the auspices of the UN. Such schemes would effectively restore the US to the status of neo-colonial authority in the Middle East, despite its years-long attempts to fill the role with local subordinates. They would turn American forces into a visible target for the rage and resentment created by the Zionist war – an unenviable legacy for Biden to leave behind.

But it may not come to that. There are other foreseeable scenarios that would be more favourable to the White House. Given Egypt’s refusal to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the banishment of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents seems unlikely in the short term. This, combined with American diplomatic pressure, has evidently caused Israel to modify the plan for its invasion, choosing an incremental approach over a rapid sweep. Whether this will reduce the chances of intervention by Hezbollah or Iran remains unclear. But the first is mindful of its precarious standing in Lebanon, which could be further harmed by a military conflagration, while the second is anxious to avoid the perils of direct involvement. The Saudis, though outwardly critical of the US position, are no less keen to prevent a conflict that would consume the entire Middle East and derail their ‘Vision 2030’. In each case, a number of domestic political imperatives are at odds with the regionalization of the war. A ray of hope for the declining empire?

Whether or not the violence is contained, however, Israeli success is hardly assured. Hamas’s 40,000 hardened fighters, adept at hybrid warfare and capable of ambushing the enemy via underground tunnels, are a stark contrast with the Israeli reservists who just received their refresher training. As the streetfighting begins, the numerical and technological asymmetries between the two may seem less decisive. One can therefore imagine a timeline in which the militants fight Netanyahu to a stalemate, the taboo on a ceasefire is lifted, and both sides eventually declare victory: Hamas because it repelled an existential threat from Israel; Israel because it can claim (however disingenuously) to have inflicted irreparable damage on Hamas and precluded any recurrence of its attack.

Thereafter, Gaza would slowly emerge from the rubble and return to something resembling the status quo ante – yet with worse humanitarian conditions, as well as a wounded neighbour that is even more obsessed with its destruction. Although the US claims it wants Hamas to perish, it would stand to benefit from this situation in several important respects. It would save it from coordinating the post-war governance of the Strip; it would allow Israeli normalization to resume after a necessary hiatus; and, in the best-case scenario for Biden, it would place limits on further escalation while also undermining Russian and Chinese attempts to straddle both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The Abraham paradigm could thus be reinstated, at least until the next major flare-up. Rather than transforming the Middle East, then, the war may leave intact the ‘security architecture’ built by Trump and Biden. Yet the instability of this edifice has been proven. It would only be a matter of time before it buckles once again.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, NLR 48.

‘In the autumn of last year, there were four cases of homicide committed in four cities using the same handgun. This spring, a 19-year-old man was arrested. He became known as “the handgun serial killer”.’ So begins Adachi Masao’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), an experimental documentary that retraces the steps of Norio Nagayama, arrested in Tokyo on 7 April, 1969. Linguistic narration is otherwise scarce in the film, restricted to a handful of isolated statements supplying biographical details in a matter-of-fact voiceover. In place of conventional plot and character, the film offers a cascade of landscape images shown without commentary, accompanied by a careening free jazz soundtrack. Crisscrossing Japan, Adachi uses long takes to capture the locations of Nagayama’s life, from his childhood in Tōhoku’s Aomori Prefecture, a move to Tokyo as part of a mass-hiring initiative at age 15, and finally a disaffected drift across the country that culminated in murder. Trains, highways, ships, streets: whether desolate or crowded with people, these images are haunted by the troubled young man who perhaps once passed through them. What relation exists between Nagayama’s deeds and these impersonal spaces? Why tell his story in this way?

Adachi Masao / Iwabuchi Susumu / Nonomura Masayuki / Yamazaki Yutaka / Sasaki Mamoru / Matsuda Masao, ‘A.K.A. Serial Killer’, 1969, 4K Single-channel projection (original 35mm), Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A.K.A. Serial Killer is the central work in ‘After the Landscape Theory’, on view from 11 August to 5 November at Tokyo’s Photographic Art Museum. Curated by Tasaka Hiroko in collaboration with film scholar Hirasawa Go, this fascinating presentation of moving images, photographs and documents situates Adachi’s film as a key node within a diffuse, multi-faceted engagement with landscape in lens-based Japanese art from 1968 to the present. At the entrance of the exhibition is a copy of The Extinction of Landscape (1971), an essay collection by Matsuda Masao, a film critic who collaborated on the production of A.K.A. Serial Killer and was a central figure in the articulation of fûkeiron, or ‘landscape theory’. Resolutely rejecting the idea of landscape as a pictorial form devoted to the contemplation of natural beauty and severing any connection it might have to nationalist sentiment, this discourse posited that the power of the state and of capital can be rendered visible in commonplace images of the built environment. It recognized that power is everywhere: not only in spectacular moments of violence, as when police clash with protesters, but in everyday life. Forces of domination are present in transportation infrastructures and norms of bodily comportment, in the ways cities are constructed and local specificities effaced. So often this is overlooked, naturalized. But when caught on film, the petrified surfaces of the world can be defamiliarized and opened to scrutiny.

Matsuda Masao, ‘Fukei no Shimetsu’, Tabata Shoten, 1971, Private Collection

Matsuda’s thinking took shape during a period of tremendous economic growth and social tumult, in the twilight of the so-called ‘season of politics’ of the late 1960s. It was a time when anti-authoritarian sentiment ran high in Japan – whether in university struggles, protests against the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), or the conflicts surrounding the construction of the Narita International Airport at Sanrizuka. It was also when, as Hirasawa puts it in the exhibition catalogue, ‘the entire Japanese archipelago was being transformed into one gigantic metropolis’, with intense development and new transport links eroding the distinction between city and countryside. The turn to landscape in A.K.A. Serial Killer was, then, a way of placing Nagayama’s killing spree within the larger frame of these social transformations rather than seeking individual, psychological explanations for the working-class teenager’s crimes. As Matsuda wrote of the film, ‘We became very conscious of that very landscape as hostile “authority” itself. It is very likely that Nagayama shot bullets to tear apart the landscape. State power recklessly cuts through the landscape to clear the way, for instance, for the Tomei Freeway. As we enjoy a pleasant drive on that highway, at that very moment the landscape possesses us, and “authority” entraps us.’ Looking at the built environment entailed turning one’s back on media spectacle to mount a critique of capitalist modernity through the typically spectacular and eminently modern art of the cinema. It meant producing a counter-image, a counter-cartography.

Following the initial display of Matsuda’s book, ‘After the Landscape Theory’ pivots to the present. This reverse-chronological organization has the felicitous effect of loosening the hold of historical material over the interpretation of the contemporary works. The notion of being ‘after’ the landscape theory has two possible implications: the simple fact of coming later, or a more direct relation, be it of homage, imitation or critique, as in the convention of titling a work as ‘after’ the style of a master. The curatorial decision of presenting more recent works first encourages the former approach, avoiding notions of origin and derivation, and circumventing claims to influence that may be tenuous. The presence of Sasaoka Keiko’s photographic series PARK CITY (2001–) in the exhibition’s first room is striking in this regard, as these images of Hiroshima challenge the conceptions of visibility and legibility upon which landscape theory as deployed in A.K.A. Serial Killer depends. The series title, which refers to the Peace Memorial Park, places Sasaoka’s images unmistakably in the shadow of nuclear aggression. Eight photographs of exterior spaces made between 2001 and 2009 are so dark that the distant bodies within them are scarcely discernible. Blackness floods these frames, with the white socks of uniformed schoolgirls in one picture dotting the obscurity like beacons. Elsewhere, Sasaoka shoots plain streetcorners and the interiors of the Peace Memorial Museum. Across these different approaches, she confronts the limits of what can be seen of history’s wreckage, as if to echo the famous line from Alain Resnais’s 1959 film: ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima’. Where A.K.A. Serial Killer considered how one might produce knowledge of a traumatic event, Sasaoka’s landscapes evoke muteness and unknowing. They hint at the possibility that images of the built environment might conceal as much as or more than they reveal. Theories, after all, are not facts; they are liable to fall short of their explanatory aims, and landscape theory is no exception.

Sasaoka Keiko, from the series ‛PARK CITY’, 2001-2009, Collection of the artist

Endo Maiko’s X (2022) and Takashi Toshiko’s 12-part Itami series (2005–10) are both serial moving-image works that approach landscape in a distinctly personal register. Made during the pandemic as an online project for the 14^th Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, X was initially updated with new footage each day, producing an unfolding chronicle of the artist’s life. Itami similarly embeds the production of images in quotidian experience, such that the landscape is aligned with habit and intimacy, while the changing seasons provide a means of marking time. Such emphatically subjective approaches contrast sharply with not only Adachi’s film but also with the rule-based form of Imai Norio’s 8mm work Abenosuji (1977). An artist previously associated with the Gutai group, Imai filmed a series of traffic lights as they changed from red to green in a neighbourhood of Osaka. By allowing the presence of red lights to dictate where and when to make an image, he mitigates intentionality. This constraint intensifies the presence of contingency within the work, since all else that might appear in the frame besides the artist’s privileged motif is left to chance. Notably, traffic lights are responsible for regulating the movement of the masses at specified intervals; they tell Imai when to stop and film, just as they tell everyone when to stop and go. The concern with how social control manifests itself in urban space that so deeply marks A.K.A. Serial Killer resurfaces here in altered guise, as part of the relinquishing of authorial agency that is a hallmark of some strains of conceptual art.

Imai Norio, ‘Abenosuji’, 1977, Single-channel projection (original 8 mm), 22 min, Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A pristine 4K projection of A.K.A. Serial Killer leads to the exhibition’s final room, which presents an array of documents, photographs and film clips from when landscape theory first took hold – including Nagayama’s handwritten journal and a copy of the book, Tears of Ignorance, that he published from prison in 1971. Rather than shore up Adachi’s film as an origin point, this room emphasizes that the discourse on landscape lacks a single authoritative formulation; it was a dispersed and contradictory debate occurring across diverse films and publications. On display are a trailer and stills from Oshima Nagisa’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), in which an activist filmmaker who is being chased by the police jumps to his death. The ‘will’ he leaves on film depicts the cityscapes of Tokyo; his friends wander the metropolis in search of those same locations, as if in search of their elusive meaning. Since A.K.A. Serial Killer was not released until 1975, it was Oshima’s film – originally titled ‘Tokyo Landscape War’ – that was initially taken to be exemplary of landscape theory; meanwhile, Matsuda first used the term in relation to the pink filmmaking of Wakamatsu Koji, also present here in the form of excerpts and stills. In 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu went to Beirut to make Red Army/P.F.L.P.: Declaration of World War, which marries the strategies of A.K.A. Serial Killer with the agitprop newsreel, depicting Palestinian fedayeen and members of the Japanese Red Army amidst landscape images. Three years later, Adachi would leave Japan to join the struggle in Palestine, abandoning filmmaking for nearly three decades.

Standing in this final room, it is possible to glimpse Sasaoka’s PARK CITY photographs back at the start: an architectural loop linking past to present. Why revisit all this material today? For a start because, as the exhibition demonstrates, the bond between landscape and power endures as a concern in artistic practice. In the catalogue, Hirasawa notes that, ‘Since the turn of the 21^st century, a re-evaluation of landscape theory has taken place internationally, and it is likely not perceived as a specifically Japanese discourse.’ If it ever was: a programme of film screenings accompanying the exhibition gestures to the longstanding interest in landscape on the international left through the inclusion of works made between 1969 and 1981 by the Dziga Vertov Group, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville and Danièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub. Yet Hirasawa is correct in emphasizing contemporaneity. Today, landscape films comprise a vital current on the global circuit of festivals and biennials and, as a corollary, historical works of this kind have been the subject of renewed interest. Sometimes the connection to this past work is explicit: for instance, French-American artist Éric Baudelaire has produced a trilogy of films made with and ‘after’ Adachi, culminating in Also Known as Jihadi (2017). Meanwhile, the looser notion of coming after encompasses an avalanche of work. Whether in relation to concerns with climate, ecology and extractionism, out of a desire to move away from anthropocentrism, or as part of an effort to unearth traces of marginalized histories, landscape films have proliferated. As critic Leo Goldsmith has proposed, they ‘persist at a significant moment…in which the planet’s physical spaces are subject to increased quantification and abstraction on the one hand, and transformations to its geography accelerated by capitalism-driven human activity on the other’.

The present context is different to that which fuelled the debates in 1960s Japan, but there are affinities. Although, as works by Endo and Takashi show, landscape films can be tethered to first-person expression, their contemporary manifestations generally seek to transcend human perspectives and temporalities. The durational work of James Benning or Nikolaus Geyrhalter, for instance, is best understood as a response to crisis – to a ruined world in which ‘nature’ is a chimera. These are films for a time when anthropogenic changes to the environment are violent and ubiquitous, when rampant individualism must be refused, and when structural diagnoses are needed. Whether or not landscape theory produces the knowledge it promises remains an open question. What is certain is that it endures as a resource for filmmakers who seek to contest their present and, in turn, as a provocation for spectators for whom cinema is not only aesthetic but political and epistemological.

Read on: Jeremy Adelman, ‘The End of Landscape?’ NLR 126.