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Takahiko Iimura is considered one of the most influential and important experimental filmmakers of our time. In an era of the explosion of Underground Film in the States, Iimura, almost alone in Tokyo, began making experimental film just reading the news from abroad without actually seeing them. His work explores wide range of experiments from poetic cinema with Dadaist and Surrealist influence and Absurdist filmic play in the 1960's through more formal and conceptual investigations in the 1970's and the later. He is also a widely established international artist, having numerous exhibitions including installation and performance in Japan, the USA, and Europe. One of his early films, "Onan", which is the starter of this collection, was awarded Special Prize at the legendary Brussels International Experimental Film Festival, l964. This compilation assembles mainly his early stage of the 1960s except “AIUEONN Six Features”(1993).
Films Included:
Onan(1963, 7min.) Winner of Special Prize at legendary Brussels International Experimental Film Festival, 1964. A surreal short tale of a young guy bears a big egg after masturbation...
White Calligraphy (1967, 11min) is a film featuring calligraphy scratched directly on black film one character in every frame taken from the famous story of Kojiki, written in 8th Century. When projected, it is too fast to read, but seen as an abstract line animation film. It is an almost like autonomous writing of surrealist, lines rapidly explode like firework
AIUEONN Six Features(1993, 7min.) plays on computerized funny faces with Japanese vowels which don't synchronize with the voice except the first time. Repeated delay between the voice and the mouth may actualize the theory of “Differance” with “a” by Jacques Derrida combining “difference” and “delay.”
Face(1968-69, 17min.) is featuring Warhol's super stars, Mario Montez, and underground comic star of the Kuchar brothers', Donna Kerness, in their sexual process on faces in acting mixed with the ”real”one in close-ups questions the difference between what is "real" and what is "fake" in film. Continuous laughing voice over the images makes one wonder as an absurd play.
Filmmakers (1969, 28min.) documents in a very personal manner the portraits of the most active experimental filmmakers in the mid 1960's: Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and Takahiko Iimura. It is a rare historical document of the "Golden Age" of underground film. The film also characterizes the shooting method to each filmmaker as partially uses their style of filming in their parts. The sound counteracts the shooting style as Iimura himself records the voice in words what he sees in the picture objectifying the voice over the image.
All films in a printable format
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Onan
directed by Takahiko Iimura, and
Japan,
Experimental,
1963,
00:07:00
a young man becomes aroused by looking at pictures of naked women in girlie magazines. He makes several visually-startling attacks on the photographs with a penile-looking stick he has heated in a hibachi; th... more info
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White Calligraphy
directed by Takahiko Iimura, and
Japan,
Exclusive,
1967,
00:11:00
In my view the most interesting of Iimura's early films-at least of those I've had the chance to see - is the one least characteristic of this period, White Calligraphy (1967). To make this abstract film, Iim... more info
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AIUEONN
directed by Takahiko Iimura, and
Japan,
Experimental,
1993,
00:07:00
Combining the comical and the absurd, I created six funny faces, which were manipulated by System G(Real time texture mapping developed by Sony), to animate the visual images of Japanese vowels with Japanese ... more info
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Face
directed by Takahiko Iimura, and
Japan,
Experimental,
1969,
00:17:00
Featuring Warhol's super stars, Mario Montez, and Underground comic brother’s the Kuchars' Donna Kerness in their sexual processes on faces in acting which is mixed with another "real" one the film questions ... more info
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Filmmakers
directed by Takahiko Iimura, and
Japan,
Experimental,
1968,
00:28:00
This is a film portrait of the filmmakers in whom I was most interested at the time: Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol, as well as myself. I shot it during my first visi... more info
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This DVD has never been screened
Reviews and Other Info:
Takahiko Iimura has been a pioneer artist of Japanese experimental film and video, working in film since l960 and with video since 1970. He is also a widely established international artist, having numerous exhibitions in Japan, the USA, and in Europe. One of his early films, "Onan", was awarded Special Prize at the legendary Brussels International Experimental Festival, l964. Recently he has been involved in using the computer, publishing multimedia CD-ROMs/DVDs combining film, video, graphics, text, and animation.
2008-09-23 DVD Talk
By Thomas Spurlin
Call me uncultured, call me lacking in artistic competence, call me whatever you like ... but Takahiko Iimura's work covers a spectrum of experimental cinema I just can't fully grasp. He's an artist, a manipulator of normalcy, who plays with the boundaries of coherent perseverance. Gathered together in this collection are several of his short works, ranging from 6 to 11 minutes, as well as a few of his lengthier pieces that go on for nearly half an hour. Within each, he tries to find a creative rhythm that could relay symbolic and filmic ideals to his audience, but ultimately they just left me in a curious, aggravated stupor. Yet, it's still easy to respect where his branching thoughts and thematic perceptions can go.
The Films:
Takahiko Iimura is a purveyor of perpetual motion, meaning that he gets his audience so wrapped up in the chaos bustling about in his films that they might house a cathartic experience. His work mostly embodies the same kind of properties to that of a giant slab of granite in ancient Roman times. To a sculptor, a giant chunk of beautifully marbleized rock could be the start of a work of art; to Iimura, the rock's untouched and raw properties -- displayed in their uncut form -- would probably seem more beautiful. With that in mind, he relishes in filming with little to no obvious output. There's intricacy at work in his symbolism, but it's interpretive instead of guided symbolism. He just shows you the rock and its contours, leaving it up to you to make heads or tails of it all. It's certainly an welcome and bizarrely engaging experience to watch Takahiko Iimura's films, but one that's more likely to affect the viewer with a stronger potency following a few days of digestion.
Films Listed in Chronological Order:
Onan (1963, 7 minutes):
This short holds the only real "narrative" in the collection, as it captures a man engulfed by his perversion and sexual tension. Shortly after searing holes in nude photographs of women with a phallic-shaped rod and -- afterwards -- self-gratifying himself, or so that would seem how Iimura's photography would like for us to perceive it, he discovers an egg "birthed" in between him legs. When confronted with the idea that this may have been his creation, this once-impassioned man now starts to discover maternal tendencies shortly after his orgasm. By far the most compelling work in the collection, Onan tinkers with gradual, real masculine emotionality and eroticism as the focal character playfully and curiously plays with the egg, rendering an odd image of a once perverse man now nurturing the ideals of his passion's product. It can be seen as a metaphor for the cyclical existence of masculine energy, or even as misinterpretation of gender norms once the only other "character" in the film comes out. There's a lot of thought and energy in this seven-minute piece, one that packs more themes than most films ten times its length.
White Calligraphy (1967, 11min):
Just that -- white Japanese characters slapped together so that they overlap repeatedly in a blitzed fashion. It follows along with Iimura's trance-like cathartic attempts, asking you not to necessarily see the characters but to see the white lines as random artwork. Seeing as how this was made in the late '70s, a time before readily-available word processors, each of these countless upon countless Japanese characters had to be drawn out by hand and pieced together. Similar to the experience behind watching clouds form shapes in the sky, it asks you to relax your eyes and try to piece together images from the randomness of collected, overlapped symbols. This can be intriguing and interesting -- for the first three, maybe even four minutes. Sitting at over eleven minutes, it turns into headache-inducing repetition that could probably send someone into epileptic shock if they focus long enough.
Face (1969, 19min):
Probably the most visually intriguing of the series, Iimura's Face also might be the most difficult to embrace. It gyrates and gravitates around "at least" two feminine facial structures, navigating close-ups onto their eyes, lips, and porous skin. One displays a heavy cabaret style of make-up, expressed by Mario Montez of Andy Warhol recognition, while the other harnesses less make-up and more natural beauty, played by Donna Kerness. It creates a questionable dynamic between false, consumer-created beauty and natural, lightly untouched attractiveness, while also addressing the fallacies of what can appear on-screen. It edits between shots of the two talents, showing how seamless edits can interlock two very different entities. What makes it difficult is the runtime, nearly twenty-minutes, and the repetition of cackling laugher that seems to almost mock the audience's perception of the photography.
Filmmakers (1969, 28min):
The disc closes with its longest production, a nearly thirty-minute collage of Iimura's trips to meet several influential experimental filmmakers of the '60s. It captures abstract footage of Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and himself, edited together in a barrage of found rudiments. It clearly takes a personal insight into the life of each artist, finding individual items from the collection of footage and bluntly stating their names "window, friends, Stan Vanderbeek", etc. It's VERY drawn out and obviously personal in nature, something that seems like it might create a similar kind of effect to that of watching home videos at a person's house that you don't really know. For this one, there's little perception I can really relate to any kind of symbology, except that experimental artists vary greatly in their styles of lives. It's worth noting that the Warhol footage is very obscured, showing very little of his actual persona.
AIUEONN (1993, 6min):
Yikes. Here's where Iimura loses me. The Japanese vowel system differs from the English, in that it doesn't correlate to the "a,e,i,o,u" form. Instead, when mouthing the order of Japanese phoenetic vowels, it's more like "ahh, eee, ooo, eeh, ooh" with a "nnnm" tacked on at the end. At first, AIUEONN shows up with digitally manipulated renders of Iimura's face as he coyly makes the face associates with each of the Japanese vowels. Layered atop this, he attaches post-recorded vowel sounds to mirror his facial features. It gets trickier: later down the string, he starts to mush together Japanese and English vowels, yet keeps the rhythm of Japanese vowels voiced atop. It becomes a form of interactive game, kind of like rubbing your tummy and patting your head in different rhythms while keeping the belly rub in normal motion. Sure, it glues together languages for cultural significance, but it also pushes the boundaries of repetitive nonsense as well once it reaches higher numbers of replication.
The DVD:
Microcinema has brought us the films of Takahiko Iimura in a standard keepcase presentation with some rather neat artwork that reflects the AIUEONN short film.
The Video:
Well, there's not really a lot to say about this 1.33:1 fullscreen presentation of Iimura's films. Every single one, except the one from the early '90s, comes absolutely littered with hair, dust, scratches, damage ... the works. Several of them have significant damage along the edges, even some banding here and there. Seeing as how the calligraphy is little more than a black background database/with white lettering, there's nothing noticeably wrong there. Also, AIUEONN seems practically free of any real damamge and, aside from some edge halos, looks pretty solid. It's nice to just have these films in a watchable fashion in a single collection.
The Audio:
Much like the video, the Dolby 2.0 track has a multitude of problems in the older works. Popping and buzzing occur throughout, which mildly distracts from the viewing experience. For a couple of the films that hinge on coping with audio presentations, it's a little difficult to stick with them in this state -- but doable. AIUEONN, of course, sonuds fine, though it's mixed a little loud.
The Extras:
Also included on this disc is a Biography of Takahiko Iimura, as well as a DVDography inside the Biography.
Final Thoughts:
Experimental films doesn't get much more "experimental" than with Takahiko Iimura's early work. He challenges his audience to think outside the box, while assaulting them with enough brash visual stimulation to entrance them in a stupor that might either help or hinder the process. Though compelling, each film is likely to be a one-time experience because of their trying and deliberate aesthetic tone. Iimura's work should be seen, without question, but a Rental should suffice for most interested parties. If this is for an experimental film class of a Japanese cinema course, then the digital transfer is certainly watchable enough for educational purposes and recommended on that front. |
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Exhibition:
Program MC-847 may be licensed for exhibition |
Purchasing for Home Use
This DVD is available from the Microcinema DVD Store |
Institutional Purchasing
This DVD is available from the Microcinema DVD Store |
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Wholesale Purchasing:
Program MC-847 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info@microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750 |
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