Takashi Ito

Fragmentary stories of two students with a video camera and an old butoh dancer who finds himself followed by a woman are interwoven.

The film follows the common sense storytelling of a dramatic film in which people meet other people and create relationships, but instead of converging into a single narrative, the aim was to create a film that diffuses and throws us into a sea of chaotic images. two couples in an uneasy relationship. Is she my fantasy, or am I her fantasy? The boundaries blur, and the anxiety about existence gradually grows.

The film follows the common sense storytelling of a dramatic film in which people meet other people and create relationships, but instead of converging into a single narrative, the aim was to create a film that diffuses and throws us into a sea of chaotic images. two couples in an uneasy relationship. Is she my fantasy, or am I her fantasy? The boundaries blur, and the anxiety about existence gradually grows.

A girl goes out destroying things

A girl goes out destroying things

A video installation that Takashi Ito exhibited in January 2009 in Kyoto.

A series of 16 "short stories" created by the creator's group Images Forum.

“I cannot help feeling that some mysterious force is upsetting our emotional balance. The theme of my work over the last few years has been the portrayal of this sense of unease. In this work I seized on a very negative image of Tokyo and tried to portray the emotional state of people struggling and suffering in this very superficial world.” (T.I.)

A film of the interactive video installation and performance art Double/Bunshin that Ito did in collaboration with Butoh dancer Setsuko Yamada in 2009.

In the final scene of my last work, A SILENT DAY, a girl was filming herself with an 8mm camera on a railway bridge. Although the film doesn’t depict the incident, she later jumped off the bridge in an attempt to kill herself. Two girls witnessed her attempted suicide, and in this film I am attempting to depict the broken state of their psyches. In this piece, various images have been generated as a result of my professional interaction with a number of young people with mental illnesses, and the unstable state of mind which I have often experienced in recent days - Takashi Ito

A depiction of a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death.

연속적인 명화 도난 사건이 세상을 떠들석하게 만들고 있었다. '캣츠아이'라고 자칭하는 범인은 범행 예고대로, 많은 사람들이 보고 있음에도 자정 12시에 대담한 범행을 반복하고 있었다. 단서는 전혀 없다. '캣츠아이'의 정체란… 아름다 세 자매인 '루이', '히토미', '아이'. 그녀들의 범행 동기란 실종된 화가인 아버지의 그림을 되찾고 그 소식을 확인하기 위해서였다. 그러나 거기에는 국제적 신디케이트 ‘홍룡단’의 그림자가 있다. '캣츠아이'에 최대의 위기가 다가오고 있다…!

Without warning, the image of a girl wildly waving a baseball bat that slices through the air leaps to my mind. Such speed also reminds me of the rhythm of the filmmaker's previous works. Or is it a symbol of teenage madness? A ceremony to summon some creature from a legend? -Takashi Nakajima

Without warning, the image of a girl wildly waving a baseball bat that slices through the air leaps to my mind. Such speed also reminds me of the rhythm of the filmmaker's previous works. Or is it a symbol of teenage madness? A ceremony to summon some creature from a legend? -Takashi Nakajima

A work produced for the Morimura Yasumasa Exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, (April 6 to June, 1996). It was shown in an old-style theater constructed within the exhibit space that featured photographs of Morimura playing famous foreign and Japanese actresses.

This is a film about a man without a face. His arms and legs, bound with ropes, the disabled man is still without even a shudder in a white room. A series of unusual scenes in this room expresses what lies between memories, nightmares, and violent images.

"A long time ago, I would often dream of the uncanny and mystical landscape that appears in moonlight. Irrational landscapes and spaces filled with unspeakable pleasures like a black object that revolves slowly while flying over the scattered clouds that float in the night sky, their lumps illuminated by the light of the moon." - Takashi Ito

"Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his joys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank." - Takashi Ito

"Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his joys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank." - Takashi Ito

"Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his joys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank." - Takashi Ito

"In the early afternoon, a mother holding her child stands still in the park of a housing project. The kind of sight that is a symbol of beauty and love. Be as that may be, they have no face. The camera is aimed persistently at the spot from which they have vanished as if to find something. A work that began out of the search to understand the relation between the family and the self." - Takashi Ito

하야시 가이조 감독의 세 번째 작품으로, 최초 컬러 작품이다. 에도 시대 초기를 무대로 검객, 여도적, 닌자군단이 뒤엉켜 '황금의 나라'를 둘러싸고 항쟁을 벌이는, 전기(傳寄)이야기의 제맛을 충분히 다룬 장대한 스케일의 칼싸움 영화이다. 그러나 시대극의 기량과 스타성 모자라는 배우나 스탭에 익숙하지 못해서 그런지 불만족스러운 결과로 끝나고 말았다.

The filmic version of a city in which all surface beauty has rotted away. In order to find images of death like landscapes of the city from which people have vanished, and buildings from which the decorations have been stripped away and the inner organs exposed, I walked all over Tokyo taking photographs, then animated them. (T.I.)

A film in which the one 60-story skyscraper that soars in the spaces between roofs spins with incredible speed. I centered the circumference with its 400 or 500 meter radius on the skyscraper and divided it into 48 sections, then took photographs from those spots and shot the photographs frame by frame.

방송 리포터인 나미에게 비디오 테잎이 배달되는데, 테잎에는 한 여자를 난도질해 죽이는 일종의 스너프 필름이었다. 이에 그녀는 시청률을 위해 동료들을 데리고 비디오에서 보여지는 영상을 따라 그 살육의 현장으로 찾아가는데...

"I turned my gaze to the various events in daily life and made this filmic diary in a manner as if confessing my feelings. Of course, since I was making the film, I wanted to depict these feelings and events with tricky techniques. I used various methods to shoot photographs of a relative’s wedding, the landscape I see from window of my house, commemorative travel photographs and the like frame-by-frame." - Takashi Ito

"The further developed and completed version of a 15-second advertisement for an interior design firm on which I had worked. It repeats over and over again the violent back-and-forth, half-revolving motions of a giant brick storehouse inside the frame of a hand-held photograph. I wanted to emphasis the flat nature of the photograph while creating a dynamic feeling of depth inside the photograph's frame." - Takashi Ito

"The majority of my 8-mm works were made for the three-minute "Personal Focus" film special put on in Fukuoka. This film is an animation of photographs I had taken on a regular basis as a sort of diary, and was made to have a rough feel to it." - Takashi Ito

"With this work, I developed/fleshed out the idea I had when making GHOST of peeling only the skin from various objects in the room, floating the skins in midair and then sticking them on different objects. This film was also shot entirely frame-by-frame with long-exposures. Along with GRIM, its meaning is 'as if to do forever.'" - Takashi Ito

“I made this work because I wanted to try out the idea of floating images in midair that had come to me when making Thunder. The entire work was shot frame-by-frame with long exposures. I filmed this in the company dorm I was living in in the middle of the night after I had come home from work, and thought I might die from what had become my daily pattern of sleeping for two hours in the morning then going off to work.” – Takashi Ito

"The filming of the entrance to the company dormitory in which the film-maker was living. Centering the film on one pillar, he warps the spaces to the left and right and creates an unstable space similar to painting that employs anamorphosis. Made as were SPACY and BOX with a large number of photographs, the film ends with a violent movement, but is poetic for this." - Takashi Nakajima

Ito is one of the leading experimental filmmakers in Japan. He graduated from Art and Technology Department of Kyushu Institute of Design in 1983 during which he made a debut with the film SPACY in 1981 (Inagaki who created sound effects for the film was also a filmmaker and his classmate at the institute). He was rather a premature virtuoso.

A woman’s face disappearing behind, and emerging from, a pair of hands. Flashing lights. An empty building full of dark hallways. Designs drawn in the air with light and long-exposure cinematography.

"I stuck landscape photographs on the faces of a cube and shot them frame-by-frame. It looks like the box is forever revolving, but in truth it only revolves 90 degrees. The trick to this sensation is fundamentally the same as the one used in SPACY. I was aiming at disturbing our awareness of space in the movement from the three-dimensional to a plane and back again." Takashi Ito

"His films are like a roller-coaster. His way of throwing the act of seeing into utter confusion is an attack on the eyes in their corporeal function, and to attack the eyes is to take on tile body itself as your opponent. The film makes you break out in sweat only by shooting a safe, peaceful gymnasium in the dark." - Koharu Kisaragi

Story about a poor Japanese woman living near an American army base who resorts to prostitution.

Jidai-geki starring Kanjuro Arashi