Kinema Nippon is a series of fund-raising screenings that present curated programs of experimental films, video art, and Japanese classics, held in several international cities in collaboration with local film and art institutions. This evening presents two back to back programs in Squeaky Wheel's Microcinema, featuring experimental moving image works from Japan, ranging from late 60s to contemporary works. Audience members are suggested to donate $5-$10 for the entire evening. The first program starts at 7pm, the second program starts at 9:15pm. Audience can choose to stay for both programs.
*All proceeds from this program go toward disaster relief efforts via Japan Society NY's Earthquake Relief Fund.*
still from For the Damaged Right Eye by Toshio Matsumoto
ABOUT THE PROGRAMS:
A spectrum of experimental moving image works from Japan, ranging from late 60s to contemporary works, are presented in Kinema Nippon’s two-part program. Although varying greatly in their formal and aesthetic concerns, the works all rigorously reexamine the everyday through their respective experiments and innovations in their medium.
7:00 PM Program: Nippon Re-Read - I (total running time 68 min)
Abstractions of the mundane are seen in the graphic films in Program I, which deal directly with the materiality of their medium rather than focusing on a visual referent. In White Calligraphy Re-Read (1967), Takahiko Iimura activates the Japanese characters of the Kojiki, the earliest Japanese historical chronicle, by deconstructing text into its constitutive graphic ciphers. These works, including Lika (2007) by Stom Sogo and Still in Cosmos (2009) by Takashi Makino, direct the attention of the viewer to the pictorial, emphasizing more painterly concerns, digital and celluloid textures, the visceral correlation of sound and image, and of flatness vs. representational depth.
Takahiko Iimura / White Calligraphy Re-Read / 1967, 12 min, 16mm In White Calligraphy Re-Read, the Japanese characters of the Kojiki (the oldest known written record of Japan, from the eighth century) are scratched directly onto dark leader, one frame at a time. When projected, it is too fast to read, and appears as an abstract line animation. It recalls the automatic writing of the Surrealists, as the characters become lines that rapidly explode like fireworks.
Takashi Makino /
What may at first appear like an abstract film of hypnotizing visual noise slowly deploys its singular captivating force as it reveals itself as a dense layering of light traces and images. Still in Cosmos depicts Makino’s conception of what lies in the cosmos beyond our imagination. Multiple exposure and single frame images are compounded, rendering the myriad and infinite images that make up the chaos of the cosmos.
Yoi Suzuki, Naoto Kawamoto, Manami Tanaka, Takehiro
See-Sea-Saw is the result of a collaborative project between four students from Tama Art University’s Department of Moving Images and Performing Arts and five students at the University of the Philippines Film Institute, under the supervision of film professor Yoi Suzuki. Highly collaborative and experimental, from Manila Bay and Tokyo Bay. Intuitive processes (cine- calligraphy and direct painting on hand processed 16 mm film) highlight the characteristic materiality of film, while the work’s vibrant imagery and soundtrack examine the spirited nature of collaboration, communication, and creation across cultures.
Daisuke Nose /
A short work that reveals the physicality of the film medium, and playfully highlights its idiosyncratic imperfections.
Stom Sogo /
Lika is a glimpse into the mesmerizing world of Stom Sogo: a lush kaleidoscope of manipulated video fragments set to an entrancing electronic score. Lika subverts common signifying processes as it weaves rhythmic variations of radiant textures into a captivating immersive experience, equally mysterious and seductive in its masterful play with degrees of abstraction.
still from Kagi by Eriko Sonoda
9:15 PM Program: Nippon Re-Read - II (total running time 67 min)
The works in Program II offer a poetic investigation into the fragmentary experience of the quotidian by eschewing narrative and rendering cultural images and references to unveil the uncanny within the familiar. Tomonari Nishikawa’s in-camera manipulation of bustling metro hubs in Shibuya-Tokyo and Tokyo- Ebisu (2010), as well as Shiho Kano’s pensive meditations on quintessential Japanese subjects form a counterpoint to Toshio Matsumoto’s split-screen filmic hallucination of the late-60s underground, For the Damaged Right Eye (1969), which was made in conjunction with his seminal feature Funeral Parade of Roses (1969).
Tomonari Nishikawa / Shibuya - Tokyo / 2010, 10 min, 16mm
Tomonari Nishikawa’s Shibuya–Tokyo is an entrancing in-camera patchwork constructed from multiple viewpoints from the platforms of Tokyo’s busiest metro, the Yamanote, which runs as a loop. At each of its twenty-nine stations, following a clockwise route, Nishikawa recorded scenes of bustling commotion distilled via his camera into spectral apparitions of trains, people, and advertising billboards, creating an unusual portrait of a mega-city.
Tomonari Nishikawa /
Tokyo–Ebisu shows the views from the platforms of ten stations on the Yamanote line, from Tokyo station to Ebisu station clockwise. The in-camera visual effects and the layered soundtrack enhance the character of each location.
Eriko Sonoda /
Quietly complex, Kagi uses stop-motion animation in a twofold manner: many life-sized photographs are affixed to the wall of a domestic space through which Sonoda moves, which is recorded frame-by-frame, simultaneously rendering multiple temporal and physical dimensions.
Toshio Matsumoto /
For The Damaged Right Eye was made at the same time as Toshio Matsumoto’s wildly experimental and critically acclaimed feature film Funeral Parade of Roses. It features some of the same footage, presented in a split-screen format. Juxtaposed images both compete with and provide clues that inform each other. Formally, it demands active viewership as it challenges habitual structures of perception. In a fast-paced collage of rapid edits and sounds it cinematically renders the built-up tension and latent contradictions underlying the late-’60s counterculture in Japan, addressing highly charged themes of gender, sexuality, violence, and activism.
still from For the Damaged Right Eye by Toshio Matsumoto
Shiho Kano /
Kano’s contemplative piece on early Japanese filmmaker Mansaku Itami was inspired by a simple landscape photograph taken by him while traveling. Shinonome Omogo Ishizuchi is Kano’s imaginative interpretation of what Itami might have seen on his journey. Layering his original film footage with her own from the present, she creates a space in which images from multiple eras resonate with one another in a lyrical exploration of nostalgia.
Shinkan Tamaki /
One Record on December seems to contain a virus that affects the image: disorienting imagery and fragmentary 16 mm shots of crowds all printed in reverse black and white grow more and more uncanny with the increasing intensity of formal alienation from their original referent. Visible spots and stripes add to the unrest. Slowly, cracks and tears appear, until eventually the emulsion completely flakes off. What remains is blank film, and silence.
Daisuke Nose /
In Time for Radio Exercise, Nose deconstructs the quintessential quotidian activity—exercise—and rhythmically edits the course of a year into the frame of a single ten-minute routine, collapsing time by way of seasonal cues. Nose highlights the presence of a single moment repeated throughout a year, and a year seen through a single moment.
still from Still in Cosmos by Takashi Makino
*The Programs are curated by Aily Nash and Nine Yamamoto-Masson. All works courtesy of the artists.*
