Masao Adachi: color club Siska

“If you can work without any system of regulation or control, then you can increasingly utilize and develop a fresh mode of cinema.” Masao Adachi

Color club is a workshop for ten participants to learn how to operate super 8 cameras and hand process color reversal films. The workshop will last five days, in addition to one day to screen, the films shot and developed during the workshop. The workshop is part of Beirut art center’s educational and outreach program, organized by Siska in conjunction with Eric Baudelaire’s exhibition, now here then elsewhere. Film processing will take place in mansion where the lab is installed.

The theme of the color club workshop is fukeiron, a theory conceived of by Masao Adachi, a Japanese filmmaker, and scriptwriter who first came to Lebanon in the early 1970s and was active with the red army faction during the war. It is a ‘theory of landscape’, a way of reading landscape’s many facets, from a site of fiction to a space for political engagement.

As an introduction, together with Eric Baudelaire, who has collaborated with Adachi since 2010, Siska will screen some of Adachi’s films on the first day of the workshop. The participants will then conceive of a synopsis for a scene that they would like to shoot over the next four days, adapting the cinema of landscape and anticipating the final edit of their film. They will be working with Kodak Ektachrome 100d film, a format that is no longer being produced as of December 2012. Each participant will work with 3 minutes of film, devising, scripting, shooting, and then developing a scene. Edited together, the scenes will form a 30-minute film that will be screened to the public at Beirut art center and mansion.

Detailed program:

Wednesday 20 Feb meeting and screening 12 pm (BAC auditorium) meeting participants presentation of the workshop and the program screening aka serial killer break screening PFLP: declaration of world war, 1971 meeting Eric Baudelaire discussing anabasis and the cinema of Adachi splitting the participants into two groups of 5 each planning day 2

Thursday 21 Feb camera tests and processing 10 am group 1; 2 pm group 2 (color club lab, mansion) filming tests for group 1 mixing chemicals presenting synopses; planning group 1 shoot break filming tests for group 2 developing the test film presenting synopses and planning group 2 shoot

Friday 22 Feb group 1 shoot 10 am (color club lab, mansion) shooting processing finished films

Saturday 23 Feb group 2 shoot, finish processing group 1 10 am (color club lab, mansion) shooting processing finished films

Sunday 24 Feb processing group 2 10 am (color club lab, mansion) processing rest of films g2 meeting everyone to organize the screening

Tuesday 26 Feb screening with live accompaniment by Charbel Haber 8 pm (BAC auditorium)

Siska is a filmmaker and visual artist, born in Beirut in 1984. He is the founder of lab Beirut, now the color club lab. He has been part of many experimental film projects and his works have been screened in a number of festivals and exhibitions, including the Rotterdam film festival, Oberhausen, video works. Siska currently lives between Berlin and Beirut.

Masao Adachi (born 1939 in Fukuoka prefecture) is a Japanese screenwriter and director. As well as writing for directors kōji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima, he directed a number of his own films, usually dealing with left-wing political themes. he stopped making films in the early 1970s and joined the Japanese red army, an armed militant organization. After living in Lebanon for 28 years, he was arrested for passport violations, and was found guilty in September 2001, receiving a four-year sentence suspended to 18 months. After his release, he was deported to Japan via Jordan, where he was re-arrested on other passport violations. After being held for a year-and-a-half he was convicted and released based on the time he had already served. Since his release, he has resumed making films after a 30-year absence.