20 April 2010: Observer/Observed – The Films Of Takahiko Iimura

Time: 8pm. Doors open at 7.45pm
Venue: The Working Men's Club, 44-46 Pollard Row, London E2 6NB
Ticket: £5/£3 to Close-Up members

This programme is a survey of the work of Japan's most influential experimental filmmaker, Takahiko Iimura, from his earliest 1960s experiments and conceptual videos to his later videos on semiology and identity.

"Taka Iimura has been making films since the early 1960s. His work has gone through a series of relatively clear, consistent developments: from 1962 to 1968, Iimura was largely involved with surreal imagery, with eroticism, and with social criticism; from 1968 through 1971, he continued to use photographic imagery, but worked with it in increasingly formal ways; from 1972 until 1978, he devoted himself very largely to a series of minimalist explorations of time and space. During the years since, Iimura has been more fully involved with video than with film." — Scott MacDonald

"Although Taka was and continues to be an active part of the New York avant-garde scene, he always remained an enigmatic, mysterious presence, pursuing his own unique route through the very center of the avant-garde cinema. While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde film movement inspired him and attracted him, his Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema's minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else." — Jonas Mekas

1. 60s EXPERIMENTS

JUNK
1962 | 10 mins | B&W | 16 mm

"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 civilization. My point of view was animistic. I tried to revive those dead animals metaphorically and to give the junk new life." – Takahiko Iimura

ON EYE RAPE
1962 | 10 mins | B&W | 16 mm

"The original film was rescued from a Tokyo trash bin. It is an American sexual education film in which plant and animal sex are explained. I, together with an artist friend, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, punched big holes in almost all of the frames. It was a protest against Japanese censorship of explicit images of sex, particularly pubic hair which the censors would cover with black marks. I inserted a few subliminal frames of pornographic imagery from magazines several times throughout the film. At the end, I even punched holes in these subliminal pictures, thereby 'censoring' the censored image." — Takahiko Iimura.

"Moving beyond Junk, which itself was already in response to, or an effort to surpass the much-appreciated 'Junk Art', Iimura endeavoured to continue his investigation into the waste object. Here, he uses the remains of educational films, which treat the birth of zebras and insects, or the growth of plants. He edited this found footage, and then pierced the film with holes. The original images are 'hidden' from view by large splashes of light, which appear so violent to the spectator that Iimura named this work On Eye Rape. Indeed, he also intercut the original footage with single images culled from pornographic movies, which were then banned in Japan. This subliminal technique serves a quintessentially 'suggestive' and structural cinema." — Christopher Charles, Les Arts de l'image dans le Japon contemporain: Iimura Takahiko, in Takahiko Iimura film et vidéo, 1999.

2. EARLY CONCEPTUAL VIDEOS

"These videos are experiments in perception, and are very minimal in form consisting of a single object which requires a lot of attention. Visual Logic (and Illogic) (1977) shows visual logic (and illogic) of sign combining with limited movements of camera for panning and zooming. These early videos signify very early experiments of a particular "conceptual video", that almost no other video artists had ever tried at that time. Furthermore this is an important collection to clarify later developments of the art of iimura's video." — Takahiko iimura

3. SEEING / HEARING / SPEAKING + TALKING PICTURE

"Throughout these videos I have examined the validity of an identity in video, which is different from the actual voice, between "the I who hear" and "the I who speak". It extends also to "the I who see" and "the I who is seen"." – Takahiko Iimura

"Talking to Myself (1978) seems almost preposterously ambitious; its beauty (I say this, of course, only on examining the script) seems to lie in a kind of vertigo, an infinitization of replications, mirroring, suspected detours, half-forgotten and neglected stops, arrests, reconfirmations and confusions. It surely is the strongest, most effective statement one could make from the work of Derrida." — David Allison, Professor of Philosophy and translator of "Speech and Phenomena" by Jacques Derrida.

4. OBSERVER/OBSERVED

CAMERA, MONITOR, FRAME
1975 | 8 mins | B&W | Video

This video is the first part of a video trilogy: ""Camera, Monitor, Frame", "Observer/Observed", and "Observer/Observed/Observer" create a video semiology as a video work rather than a written text. The main aim is a study of the structural relationships of video and language using English. Based on the feedback system of video, I assigned the system into the relation of the observer and the observed using the words as "I" and "YOU". What I am concerned is the structure of "seeing" involved for both the observer and the observed as in a sentence of "I see you", which is posited by the closed-circuit system of video." – Takahiko Iimura

Total Running Time: 120-130 mins

For more information on Takahiko Iimura visit:
- http://www.takaiimura.com

- An Interview with Takahiko Iimura by Damien Sanville & Niina Hartikainen
- I saw my first Iimura film in 1964… by Jonas Mekas
- Takahiko Iimura in Interview by Esperanza Collado