marco mazzi, seascape (landscape theory), 2022. mixed media, 120x100 cm.
Rather than filming the subject of his film—a recently arrested 19 year old serial killer—Masao Adachi turned the camera 180 degrees, and instead, decided to film the landscapes seen by the subject over the course of his life. The resulting film, A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) introduced the so-called landscape theory, fukeiron in Japanese. This gesture raises many questions: what can a camera, filming a landscape, reveal about the social and political structures of a given place at a given time? And what does this context tell us about the kind of alienation that can lead to violence?
Nature is generally seen as precisely that which cannot be produced; it is the antithesis of human productive activity. In its most immediate appearance, the natural landscape presents itself to us as the material substratum of daily life, the realm of use-values rather than exchange-values. As such it is highly differentiated along any number of axes. But with the progress of capital accumulation and the expansion of economic development, this material substratum is more and more the product of social production, and the dominant axes of differentiation are increasingly societal in origin.