A.K.A. Serial Killer

The documentary was made after the killings committed in 1968. Its subject is Norio Nagayama, nineteen years old. The film neither shows him nor calls his name on screen. Instead it records, in order, the landscapes he is likely to have seen through his life: where he was born, where he worked, the cities he passed through. The director’s own voice reads biographical facts over those images. The method rests on the landscape theory Adachi helped develop. By it, a crime is to be looked for not in a person’s mind but in the places they grew up inside. The film is also an objection to the way the press presented the case. The work was finished in 1969 but first shown in 1975. Masao Adachi’s eighty six minute Japanese documentary was completed in 1975.