Courtesy of IFFR
On October 8, 1968, a .22 caliber Rohm RG-10 handgun––colloquially known as a “Roscoe”––was stolen from a U.S. Naval Base in Yokosuka. Over the course of the next month, four shootings took place in Tokyo, Kyoto, Hokkaido, and Nagoya. The perpetrator, Norio Nagayama, was arrested and imprisoned the following April, two months shy of his 20th birthday. The cold, hard facts of this teenage murderer’s case served as the basis for Masao Adachi’s pioneering, hauntological landscape documentary A.K.A. Serial Killer, completed in 1969 but not shown publicly until 1975.
The film explores the sites of Nagayama’s turbulent youth, widely dispersed across Japan, as the director intones a sparse account of his movements through voiceover. The film’s subject is never directly named or photographed, but his absence presides over every locale. Half a century later, this spectral travelogue doubles as a psycho-geographical map of a nation in transition, evoking the placelessness of a generation left in the lurch by the previous decade’s so-called “economic miracle,” which thrust millions of people in the direction of urban spaces whether they belonged there or not.
Aiming to rebuke a recent sensationalist streak in depictions of violence and upheaval––particularly news coverage of the clashes between state powers and the country’s increasingly disillusioned youth––Adachi’s approach staunchly avoids direct depictions of his topical subjects. A.K.A. Serial Killer is composed almost entirely of seemingly disconnected images, transformed and complicated by juxtapositions within and between the frames.
The opening shots observe an oncoming parade marching dutifully down the main street of a small town; fabulous colors and costumes clash against surroundings of mud and concrete, with a backdrop of countryside greenery visible in the distance. This is the first of many observed encroachments of urban drudgery on rural life, but Adachi’s camera regards both city and country with equal suspicion. Its roving, quivering movements wind through the crevices of Nagayama’s hometown of Abashiri and its surrounding farmlands. A seemingly endless barrage of vehicles and pedestrians cuts through the town’s pockets of natural splendor, and the lens prowls with the same frigid, piercing gaze through back alleys, bustling street corners, gravel roads, and grassy fields. The unshakable air of menace that emerges is compounded by a discordant, arrhythmic soundtrack. Baritone woodwinds, crashing cymbals, and breathy flutes shift from hushed tones to clamorous crescendos in tandem––and in contrast––to the trembling visuals. As Adachi recounts Nagayama’s two thwarted attempts to run away from home, apple trees bend in the breeze, window reflections shiver and quake with the wind, and an endless procession of bicycles swerves in and out of linear formation.
This initial not-quite-pastoral sequence climaxes with a miniature montage of futile motion. A haggard, grimacing runner glances at the camera, which tracks his movements down the side of a road. We cut to three more runners jogging in formation, and then four more, as trucks and rickshaws roll by. Sinister sunflowers are shot like looming deities, swaying and basking in sun-kissed disquietude. The lone runner is shown again, this time in a slo-mo wide shot, and his grueling, stymied journey through the frame––serenaded by the gutting, spectral score––is charged with the sourceless perils of youth. Though the cause may not be entirely clear, the context is unmistakable: natural histories and industrial futures overpower an individual adrift between them.
A prolonged shot of a departing train heralds Nagayama’s first taste of big-city life. “The year he graduated from junior high school, he was taken into custody after being caught stealing from a clothing store. This, however, did not prevent him from going to Tokyo to look for a job with the other graduates that year. He found work at a fruit parlor in Shibuya and lived in the company dormitory.” Adachi’s voice is accompanied by a rotating pan through a Tokyo train station. “He quit the job roughly six months later and stowed away on a ship in Yokohama port,” he continues. Thus begins Nagayama’s cyclical schlep through a pitiless gig economy, in which a job is first and foremost a place to sleep. We are thrown into a larger and even more unfeeling world along with him as the frames become overwhelmed by industrial stimuli. Small corners of affection, however, are found in a public park, which functions as a fleeting oasis of communal connection and relaxation amid a latticework of power lines, steel structures, and neon lights.
His illicit voyage is shown through the murky and mechanized bowels of a ship, which churn to the same beat as the waters outside. Sensations of adventure and discovery are evoked and quashed in the same breath as Nagayama habitually quits one job after another, uprooting his life and shrugging off the constrictions therein only to pass through yet another mechanical maw: the shipyard leads to an auto shop, the auto shop to an airport, the airport to a dairy delivery, the dairy delivery to a truck stop, and the truck stop to another shipyard. He stows away once again, but this time they catch him. “His wrists were slashed. He arrived in Yokohama with his hands and legs bound,” declares Adachi as a breathtaking sunset shimmers atop the waves. This first described act of violence in the film––coming after nearly 40 minutes of magisterial dread—serves less as disruption than confirmation.
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Adachi’s ability to emphasize the eldritch contours of seemingly neutral landscapes sprang from an organized aesthetic tradition he spearheaded in the late ’60s, known as fûkeiron (“landscape theory”). The tradition has been theorized as an inversion of subtextual principles in the work of Eugène Atget, the turn-of-the-century French photographer whose conspicuously desolate landscapes were interpreted by the likes of Camille Recht and Walter Benjamin as reminiscent of crime scene photography. “The scene of crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial. This constitutes their hidden political significance,” writes Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Fûkeiron, instead, sought to film sites of real violence (actualized or portended) in such a way that their political significance would be front and center rather than emerging incidentally.
Masao Matsuda, a collaborator on A.K.A. Serial Killer and a fixture of fûkeiron, wrote in his 1970 essay “City as Landscape” that their film intended to reconceptualize state power as an overwhelming, widespread homogeneity. Adachi’s Marxist leanings inform his observations of the rampant industrialization that eroded the “unique local character” of small towns in favor of a relentlessly interconnected archipelago, which Matsuda describes as “a single megalopolis.” In Erika Balsom’s recent essay “Landscapes of Contestation,” she notes how the film severs any connection that Japan’s natural beauty may have to nationalist sentiment, and instead posits that “the power of the state and of capital can be rendered visible in commonplace images of the built environment.”
The uniformity the film establishes between natural and constructed spaces is achieved through associational means, brought about by the twin forces of montage and duration. There are more than 30 cities depicted in the film, and our movements between them don’t always line up with Adachi’s narration. The audience’s sense of place becomes gradually and increasingly unglued as Nagayama’s violent spree draws nearer, and even the clashing juxtapositions between the natural and the artificial in his surroundings are folded into the lulling dislocations of Adachi’s style. To someone both compelled and impelled toward perpetual, restless movement, an unfamiliar city is no different than the town you were born and raised in. One of the most disturbing side effects of A.K.A. Serial Killer’s technique is how human subjects are absorbed by their surroundings. This impersonal quality also recalls Atget’s photographs, particularly those of shop window displays, where mannequins gaze lifelessly toward the street, reflections of the outside world superimposed onto them in an uncanny combination of human and architectural forms. The moments when humanity punctures through Adachi’s faceless aesthetic––like the aforementioned track team members––make his depictions of teeming masses seem that much more inhuman.
As Conor Bateman observes in his essay “The Hills Have Ideologies,” fûkeiron was isolated to a specific era and largely used as a framework for understanding future cinematic depictions of Japan, but its lasting impact on landscape portraiture at a global scale cannot be overstated. A lineage can be traced between Adachi’s modes of observation and the works of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (Fortini/Cani, 1976; Too Early/Too Late, 1981); Eric Baudelaire (whose 2017 film Also Known as Jihadi deliberately references A.K.A. Serial Killer in name and form); James Benning (Two Cabins, 2011; Stemple Pass, 2012); and even Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi, 1982).
Benning’s masterpiece, Landscape Suicide (1987), is perhaps the most potent repurposing of fûkeiron, stripping back the disturbed psyches of two subjects—the infamous human taxidermist Ed Gein and the inscrutable, lesser-known teenage killer Bernadette Protti—by training an unflinching camera on the terrestrial and constructed geometries of Americana. Benning’s films take principles of duration to a formalist extreme, with his camera fixed for minutes on end upon incident-free patches of (usually exterior) space, but the resulting effect is the polar opposite of Adachi’s stultifying postcard homogeneity. Whereas Adachi overwhelms the viewer with a barrage of visual information, enabling an instinctual contention with the bigger picture in hindsight, Benning staunchly withholds immediate stimuli, inviting viewers to take an active role in extricating the meanings and contradictions contained within and between the landscapes as they appear.
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An understanding of fûkeiron brings many of A.K.A. Serial Killer’s subconscious appeals to the surface. Adachi observes and constructs geometries of waste not only through structure but also through the movement of both camera and subject. The tension between linearity and circularity pervades the film; all manner of vehicles move back and forth through the frame, their wheels spinning tirelessly to carry them along their respective roads and tracks. An aesthetic of arcing, rotating pans is interrupted on numerous occasions by a sore-thumb tracking shot. One show-stopping scene places us in the passenger seat of a careening car, shifting scenery rushing toward and past an audience who—for three-and-a-half minutes of dead silence—is not only an observer but also a participant. Two parallel, lateral tracks ironically create a full-circle effect. In the opening countryside sequence, the camera surveys a long line of horses, boats, and carts along the harbor, which in the final sequence is replaced by a string of cannons, tanks, and Humvees as military troops sprawl along a city block in formation. The film’s final shot shows a rack of brightly colored pinwheels in dizzying motion. In context, these children’s toys look uncannily like cogs in an invisible machine, wheels that keep turning without care or mercy.
Though Adachi’s film invites engagement with and interpretation of its various formal patterns, that A.K.A. Serial Killer remains remarkable 50 years after its release is because even its most seemingly consistent gambits (structural, associational, sensual) are eventually thrown askew. Every image is a new mystery, presented without embellishment or ceremony. Its anatomy is not one of overarching themes or throughlines, but countless stray moments and split-second impressions of life that fade into the ether one after the other, flattened by a linear momentum toward an illusory narrative endpoint. The film’s visual construction of an unfeeling, dysfunctional social machine is not just enhanced by but also dependent on the absence of any real violence in the frame. In a world whose organizing principles are money and murder––locked in a never-ending tug-of-war between exaggeration and occlusion as genocides and mass killings are opportunistically dredged up or paved over––death is already omnipresent and need not be directly shown.
Nagayama emerges as both product and symptom of the withering world he moved through. He became a well-known, controversial novelist during his incarceration. He was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, which was overturned by the Supreme Court of Japan in favor of the death penalty in 1983, an event considered crucial to the persistence of capital punishment in the country to this day. His eventual execution in 1990 thoroughly cements the cycles of violence that A.K.A. Serial Killer once depicted, and yet it sits atop a bottomless repository of subsequent global events that make this oblique rendition of adolescence all the more stirring. Japan’s urbanization rates were at 72% circa 1975, and they have since swelled to 92%. Such increases also exist in the rest of the world.
The resulting psychosocial displacement that Adachi’s film posits ripples across cultures and continents. Countless killers and victims have been rendered spectacular, “true crime” fodder for an unslakable media polylith. Even Adachi himself seems to have adapted to the shifting tides, quickly filming Revolution +1 (2022)—a biography of Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who assassinated Shinzo Abe—and publicly screening a rough cut before they even put the ex–prime minister in the ground. Though such cascading occurrences may afford A.K.A. Serial Killer a loaded sense of hindsight, its simmering, guttural despair is entirely its own.
This piece was first published in the Spring 2025 print issue of Documentary, with the following subheading: Close reading the definitive landscape theory film, Masao Adachi’s A.K.A. Serial Killer, on the 50th anniversary of its release.
Alexander Mooney is a critic and programmer based in Toronto. His writing has appeared in Exclaim!, Screen Slate, MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies, In Review Online, and In the Mood magazine.