Kashima Paradise

Director: Yann Le Masson, Benie Deswarte

1973 / 110min / DCP

A crucial document of a contemporary Japan torn between its ancient traditions and the dictates of industrial modernization, Le Masson and Deswarter’s film is a record of the Sanrizuka Struggle in opposition to the Narita Airport near Tokyo, which found leftist radicals fighting alongside farmers who were being forced to give up their ancestral land for scanty compensation. Marker, who wrote and delivered the French-language narration for this key work of international militant cinema, would say of the project in a 1975 letter to Le Masson: “As we know, the symbol of cinema’s magical privileges is often the ‘flower blooming in time lapse,’ this intrusion of another time into the familiar one. This may be the first film where the story/history is filmed like a flower.”

Copy from the collection of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse and courtesy of Mathilde Le Masson

Custom English subtitles courtesy of Light Industry

Introduced by writer Ethan Spigland on Saturday, June 1st

Part of Chris Marker's Le Dépays