The Image, Seeing and the Siege

Abstract

This chapter analyses the next two films to depict the URA incident: Harada Masato’s The Choice of Hercules (2002) and Wakamatsu Kōji’sThe True Record: United Red Army (2008). Harada’s Choice presents the URA incident entirely from the police perspective, which provoked a very strong reaction from Wakamatsu — so strong that he used his personal savings to fund the production of True Record, a sprawling docudrama hybrid that tells the story entirely from the perspective of the student radicals. This chapter argues that the two films exhibit very different approaches to their relationship with history. Harada ties his film to the aesthetic of the television news coverage of the siege, arguing that this is the only safe method of representation, while Wakamatsu’s intervention is based on the axiom that the original images of the siege obscured more than they informed and that the overwhelming deficit in images from the perspective of the URA must be addressed by the director in order to redress the historical record. After analysing some of the features of Choice, this chapter investigates Wakamatsu’s aesthetic method, the reactions it has provoked, and the impact it has had on memories of the URA.