Also known as Jihadi

In 1969, avant-garde Japanese film director Masao Adachi directed A.K.A. Serial Killer, the portrait of Noro Nagayama, a 19-year-old serial killer who had committed murders in various places across the country. The singularity of the film lies in Adachi’s illustration of the “landscape theory”, which he had been instrumental in creating. According to that theory, once a landscape is well-described and skilfully filmed, it can reveal the structures of oppression that have shaped it and that it keeps transmitting. As is well known, Éric Baudelaire’s famous first feature film was about Adachi. But the issue of landscape caught between its double status – at once a silent enigma and a text to decipher – is also driving his other film and photography work. In this film, Eric Baudelaire takes over the “landscape” method, explicitly quoting Adachi’s title, this time to apply it to a young French jihadist. Exploiting some legal documents, the film follows the life path of a young man who was born in Vitry. The camera films the maternity hospital, then the boy’s high school, his university, his work place, then his trip to Egypt, Turkey and finally the road to Aleppo, where he joined the Al-Nusra front in 2012. But the camera doesn’t really settle for static shots, or distant descriptions with skilled pan shots. Quite the opposite, actually, as it hesitates, seems to be looking for something, always in motion: anxious. Anxious to understand. (JPR)