Landscape Theory in Post-War Japanese Cinema: Fūkeiron in Adachi Masao’s A.K.A. Serial Killer

This chapter discusses aesthetic representations of Japanese landscapes produced by Marxist filmmakers, photographers, and theorists around 1970, whose work came to be known as fūkeiron or ‘Landscape Theory.’ Fūkeiron films document modern landscapes of commerce and transportation. They resemble crime scenes in which perpetrators are invisible in human form, and omnipresent in oppressively homogenised architectures of capitalism. The chapter argues that fūkeiron necessitates reading landscape in a dialectical mode that identifies contradictions in its concrete forms — manifesting as tensions between individual and institutional forms of violence, for example — in order to name the political and economic forces operative in it.