The URA, Politics and the Aesthetics of Memory

Abstract

This chapter introduces the United Red Army incident and lays out a rationale for investigating its mediation through film. It argues that a particular way of sensing the incident — an aesthetic of madness — was established by the event’s mediation, which has had an impact on political action in Japan ever since. Film, as an aesthetic technology of cultural memory has the potential for reframing and producing new ways of sensing the incident, and thus for producing new political subjectivities. The chapter then sets out the theoretical framework and method that will be used to investigate the different ways in which films about the URA incident have remediated and challenged the dominant memory aesthetic of madness.