Movies: Takahiko Iimura

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years....

Anma (The Masseurs) is a representative and historical work by the creator of Butoh dance, Tatsumi Hijikata in his early period in the 1960s. The film is realized not only as a dance document but also as a Cine-Dance, a term made by Iimura, that is m...

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades....

A document of Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh dance with Kazuo Ohno as the guest dancer shot in Hijikata's early period when he was emerging as the originator of Butoh. All of the male dancers are dressed up with evening suits and move gracefully, yet an in...

Camera, Monitor, Frame is the first installment of Takahiko Iimura's "Video Semiotics Triptych" (the other two works are Observer/Observed, made in 1975, and Observer/Observed/Observer, made in 1976). The work analyzes the fundamental components of v...

One of Takahiko Iimura's (and modern art's) earliest works in conceptual video, A Chair entirely consists of a steady (and usually ghosted) image of a chair to the accompaniment of the firecracker pops of television static. While formally minimal, A ...

"On John's 31st birthday, Yoko held an art exhibit, "This Is Not Here", at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y.. The show was taped and aired on U.S. TV on May 11, 1972 as "John and Yoko in Syracuse, New York."...

'What I am concerned with in this film is not only the flicker effect, but also the coming and going of an eye-like shape on screen which was created by a fade-in-out device while shooting the light/the bulb of the projector. The viewer literally loo...

Iimura analyzed some footage he had made in Katmandu of a man taking a bath in a sacred river. A meditational experience is, thus, presented in a film whose minimal action and quiet pace can create meditational possibilities for viewers -Scott MacDo...

A touching portrait of his partner Akiko and the days following their wedding, Iimura's conceptual rigour loosens in favour of intimacy in Honey Moon. (Julian Ross)...

The three faces (two women and one tranvestized man) in the series of close up, which are shot separately in their sexual process of the acting and the real, are intercut and edited making into a film. The sound is the voice of continuous laughing of...

While I was staying in New York in the 1960s during the rise of the hippie movement, I filmed performances of body painting by the artist, Kusama Yayoi, together with the performers. As I wasn't satisfied with merely documenting her performance, made...

White Calligraphy is an abstract short made by scratching characters from 'Kojiki', an early Japanese text, into the frames of 16mm black leader....

Visually, each section of the film is composed of 10-second spans of clear and dark leader, arranged in a progressive fashion so that at first there is more and more light and less darkness, then vice versa....

"It's a mixture of [dead] animals, pieces of [broken] furniture, industrial waste, kids playing. I didn't have in mind any of the kind of historical perspective, nor was I trying to make an ecological statement. I was showing the new landscape of our...

Cameras observing each other....

MAN AND WOMAN shows full body shots of a naked man and woman shot from above without movement. They are shown alone as well as together, one over (or under) the other symbolizing in words at the same time, their positions...

"In 1 to 60 Seconds Iimura does an extraordinary thing: he abstracts time from any concrete associations, seems to put it on the screen and there you sit looking at (or for) it, experiencing it. The film is all black leader except for the numbers 1 t...

An attempt at time travel in a very conceptual sense....

Demonstrates the visual logic (and illogic) of sign combining with limited movements of camera for panning and zooming....