Takahiko Iimura

In 1973 the Kino Arsenal – then in its Welserstraße location in Berlin-Schöneberg – showed a programme of videos by the Japanese artist Takahiko Iimura. At the time, it was not yet possible to project the video images on the screen at the Arsenal, so employees brought in their own televisions from home, which were then synchronised to facilitate a collective experience of the then novel medium.

This is a film about a medium approaching extinction, an 8mm documentary film about a vanishing 8mm cinema. Blending two genres, the science film and the personal film, and benefiting from the participation of multiple generations of cineastes, it is a reflection upon the original cinematic experience.

An animation film in which the outline of the image of a stone garden was traced on computer. As the result while the camera-crews moved in film-making, the stone, the drawn line moved in animation.

This video deals with the perception of seeing including the words as I see you, I am seen, and I am not seen. These words are superimposed over the pictures of a face, eyes, and a face in the frame. The video changes in quite rapid motion framewise with the occasional stills inserted.

Experimental short by Keiji Aiuchi.

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

Sky and ground which was cut off momentarily / A camera wanders seeking its own shadow / The images which explore the limit / of solitude in New York / A mythological verbal space in which / snakes and birds are intermingled / A unique world where these images / and words meet.

"This Is A Camera Which Shoots This" and "As I See You You See Me" are both set up facing two cameras and monitors and the performer walks between them while voicing the sentence of the title. Here the words "This" and "You" have the same form in the nominative and the objective cases, switching the roles of not only the signifier (word) but also the signified (object).

"This Is a Camera Which Shoots This" and "As I See You You See Me" are both set up facing two cameras and monitors and the performer walks between them while voicing the sentence of the title. Here the words "This" and "You" have the same form in the nominative and the objective cases, switching the roles of not only the signifier (word) but also the signified (object).

Experimental film involving letters.

Experimental film involving letters.

Experimental film involving letters.

A compilation tape of performances including John Cage Performs James Joyce, Arakawa, and Iimura's first AIUEONN and As I See You You See Me shot mostly 1980s. All deals with the relationships of words and performance in image-making.

An image synthesized version of Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans, in which many colorized images flow slowly left to right as the parade of the floats goes by in front of the camera with the decorated messages. The title Scared to Death is one of them. The development of the images is somewhat similar to the old Japanese scrolled painting: Makie.

"The Making..." showed not only the process of film-making, but also the creation of "MA" as a work.

The early sixteenth-century Japanese garden in the Zen temple of Ryoan-ji, in Kyoto, is considered a masterpiece of the karesansui or "dry landscape" style... In this film, the viewer is invited to experience the garden as an embodiment of ma, a Japanese concept that conveys both time and space... The aesthetic of the film is the message, it has the quality of an experimental film, a conceptual film-an artwork in itself. Good balance of music/visuals/titles. If not as compelling for some viewers as for others, still rated as very effective. Makes one want to visit the actual garden and experience its spiritual energy. – Art on Screen

The early sixteenth-century Japanese garden in the Zen temple of Ryoan-ji, in Kyoto, is considered a masterpiece of the karesansui or "dry landscape" style... In this film, the viewer is invited to experience the garden as an embodiment of ma, a Japanese concept that conveys both time and space... The aesthetic of the film is the message, it has the quality of an experimental film, a conceptual film-an artwork in itself. Good balance of music/visuals/titles. If not as compelling for some viewers as for others, still rated as very effective. Makes one want to visit the actual garden and experience its spiritual energy. – Art on Screen

“Double Portrait” and “I Love You” are a paired piece with Akiko Iimura. Both Iimuras play individually as well as a unit. In “Double Portrait” they are never together, but one by one in three points of view, front, side, and back, assigned to the words “I”, “You” and “He/She” respectively. The pronouns rotate with every repetition, for instance, in front view with “You”, then “He/She” and back to “I”. Often the words are destroyed acoustically making them unintelligible. “I Love You” is not a style of confession, but the words, and a linguistic practice using a sentence and shifting the pronouns.

"Double Portrait" and "I Love You" are a paired piece with Akiko Iimura. Both Iimuras play individually as well as a unit. In "Double Portrait" they are never together, but one by one in three points of view, front, side, and back, assigned to the words "I", "You" and "He/She" respectively. The pronouns rotate with every repetition, for instance, in front view with "You", then "He/She" and back to "I". Often the words are destroyed acoustically making them unintelligible. "I Love You" is not a style of confession, but the words, and a linguistic practice using a sentence and shifting the pronouns.

A voice performance by John Cage who "reads", "vocalizes" and "whispers" in three different manners his artificial language taken from "Finnegens Wake" by James Joyce. Cage freely composed the letters according to a chance operation using the I-Ching.

A portmanteau of two films about Uluru (then known as Ayres Rock). "A huge isolated rock in the midst of desert in Australia: Ayers Rock. I produced two films around this rock; however, the method of the filming are different. The first, "Moments At The Rock," shot with an amateur video camera, was made as a free style improvisational film. The camera got strange halations from the strong sunshine in the desert of Australia, and I was quite surprised by the result which surpassed the color change caused by nature over the rock. This film was awarded Grand Prize at the Edison International Film Festival. In "A Rock In The Light", I requested the music of Haruyuki Suzuki, a contemporary composer. This music is unified with the image, which is visually structured, setting the rock at the center, along the axis of light. For the new DVD version, I titled "Air's Rock" - Takahiko Iimura

‘New York Hot Springs’ (1984) is scenes of steam coming out of many streets of New York, a typical scene in winter, in repeated cycles of short shots. Though the scenes are shot at the same locations, the timings are differed slightly in every cycle.

A kind of first person cinema where the filmmaker is the cameraman as well as the actor. Acting like a total stranger in the city who does not speak or hear the language, he walks with a camera to such sight-seeing spots as Times Square,and the top of the Empire State building, etc., only listening to himself speaking the words: "I hear myself at the same time that I speak" in two languages: Japanese and English. The words are a quotation from the book by Jacques Derrida, French philosopher, which he calls "phenomenological essence."

In "I Am A Viewer, You Are A Viewer" the performer plays the double role of the performer and the audience simultaneously, talking to his own shadow. At the end, the performer suggests the audience members move into the light to see themselves in shadow.

Like constellations wheeling round, a double chain of four image segments and four sound segments wheel past each other in sixteen combinations (a family of Gibbon apes, a landscape measured, a shadowed diagram after Paul Cézanne, a wintry urban scene, a text by William Wordsworth, a climactic scene from Claude Debussy's opera "Pelleas et Melisande").

The films concerns the "duration" (or non-duration) of one frame, as the title indicates, the minimum unit of film in space (dark and light) with sound (or silent) and their various combinations.

In the general classification, this was a complete abstract film and a kind of experimental movie as well, only black film, which blocks light, and clear film, which is totally transparent, were used as the basic materials.

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

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 video: the camera, the monitor, and the frame, focusing on the role of each within a system of video as analogous to the functions of vision and speech.

Cameras once again observing each other.

Cameras once again observing each other.

This film, and in particular the function of sound within it will vary freely from moment to moment, viewer to viewer.

Cameras observing each other.

Cameras observing each other.

"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 to 60 that appear individually in sequence to indicate t he amount of time in seconds that each of them followed one second letter by a number or numbers indicate the total amount of time that has thus far transpired. So at each juncture you know beforehand how much time awaits you be fore the next and how much is behind you, and then it's just you and the black screen. And thereafter many things happen: you attempt to experience, say, twenty one seconds so accurately you will be ready for the 22, or you become impatient and bored, or you just feel time, fell the ongoingness. The film's as varied as time (for you) is and can be." – Paul Poggiali, The Soho Weekly News, New York, May 9, 1974

"Of the new foreign work I saw, (at the Avantgarde Film Festival in London) that of Taka Iimura interested me most – His film + & -, using scratched signs, displayed how perception can be molded by the concept. By postulating negative duration – a length of black, say six seconds, minus a length of white, say three seconds, equals a length of black three seconds – the gradually emerging experience of 'backward running duration, through a long series of these visual sums, was very surprising." Malcolm Le Grice, Studio International, Nov. 1973

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.

Short work.

Shot on 8mm on the 12-day boat journey between Yokohama and San Francisco, Iimura's The Pacific Ocean consumes the anticipation and uncertainties of a voyage on waves with an obsessive attention on the ripples. (Julian Ross)

An attempt at time travel in a very conceptual sense.

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

'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 looks into the light which acts like an eye.'(T.I.)

Originally filmed in 8mm a little stone-made Buddha in a temple of Katmandu, the film strip in ten seconds was projected as a loop, and then the screen w as refilmed many times in 16mm at different speeds (frames per second). The original 8mm footage has been greatly expanded through refilming in 16mm. The rhythmic manipulation of "flying Buddha" in the air is realized.

Shot on 8mm on a mountain in Japan, the abrasive winds that drift the fog in Iimura's Kiri are so fierce we almost believe it to have grazed the filmstrip. The scratches, however, emerge as dust particles that submerge in and out of the mist. A comparative piece to Larry Gottheim's Fog Line (1970), Kiri shows rare patience in such a situation. (Julian Ross)

When I came to the USA in the mid 1960s, it was the high point of the Hippie movement and the black riots. I lived in the East village in New York, which was a center of the former, and watched TV news of the latter often. These two films, Film Strips I and II, were taken from the scenes respectively, not as a documentary but as an inner report of mine, abstracted yet chaotic. (T.I.)

When I came to the USA in the mid 1960s, it was the high point of the Hippie movement and the black riots. I lived in the East village in New York, which was a center of the former, and watched TV news of the latter often. These two films, Film Strips I and II, were taken from the scenes respectively, not as a documentary but as an inner report of mine, abstracted yet chaotic. (T.I.)

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 MacDonald (Afterimage, April, 1978, N.Y.)

One of the earliest minimalist video with flicker effects was produced in Tokyo in early 1970s. A flickering video with eyes, which super-impose the positive over the negative, open and close rapidly. At the same time the "blind" effects of video fast-forwarding accelerates/decelerates the picture synchronized with the sound.

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 Chair is conceptually challenging in its simplicity and its demand that the audience zero in on, of all things, a simple chair. - Tom Fritsche

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 a woman repeated from a loop-tape. What I try to realize in this film is the question of gender through the facial expression in sex between woman and tranvestized man, and the image in detail between the ac ting and the real life. When these factors are mixed, one can hardly distinguish one from the other.

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 super-impositions of flowers over the performance, more as a film poem than a documentary, since flowers was the symbol of the hippie movement as given the name "flower children."

Iimura creates a short self-portrait as well as brief portraits of five of his peers: Brakhage, Vanderbeek, Smith, Mekas and Warhol. In each portrait, Iimura attempts to copy the styles and traits of each artist (Vanderbeek's constantly moving camera; Mekas' experiments with film speed; Warhol's use of flashes of white against a black background), while briefly commenting on the images being shown. The film serves effectively as an introduction to the film styles of these artists.

Iimura creates a short self-portrait as well as brief portraits of five of his peers: Brakhage, Vanderbeek, Smith, Mekas and Warhol. In each portrait, Iimura attempts to copy the styles and traits of each artist (Vanderbeek's constantly moving camera; Mekas' experiments with film speed; Warhol's use of flashes of white against a black background), while briefly commenting on the images being shown. The film serves effectively as an introduction to the film styles of these artists.

A program of five films on love and sex from the Japanese underground of the experimental cinema, assembled by avant-garde cineaste Takahiko Iimura, and shown at the American Cinematheque from January 19 to 25, 1967.

A collection of films in various styles which concern with New York as the subject compiled by the request of the Donnel Library in New York. ‘New York Scene’ (1967) is sketches of certain scenes and portraits in New York including, ‘Linda with a lens’, ‘Fire hydront on Broadway’, ‘Jack Smith with his ‘Flaming Creatures’, ‘Akiko on the roof’, and ‘A hippie at the Central Park’.

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

A precedent to Iimura's video work where he becomes his own subject, I Saw the Shadow sees Iimura follow his own shadow in and out of vision as he roams around streets, steps and fields. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly unclear whether it is his shadow or camera that is guiding his steps. (Julian Ross)

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)

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 intruder breaks up the whole scene abruptly. The film is worth seeing, even if just to see a memorable gay duet of Hijikata and Ohno. Overexposed, washed out images are sandwiched among normal ones.

Short film for the "A Commercial for Myself" programme.

Short film for the "A Commercial for Myself" programme.

Film installation by Japanese experimental filmmaker Takahiko Iimura.

A super-real comedy with Sho Kazakura. The film is divided in to a number of very short scenes or chapters, each with a title "A,B,C" at random. we see him lame in a crowd, see him running up stairs, see him absolutely naked, watch him urinate, etc. An anthology of discontinuous happenings and events.

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 meant to be a choreography of film. The filmmaker "performed" with a camera on the stage in front of the audience. With the main performers: Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the film has the highlights such as Butohs of a soldier by Hijikata & a mad woman by Ohno. There is a story of the mad woman, first outcast and ignored, at the end joins to the community through her dance. Inserted descriptions of Anma (The Masseurs) are made for the film by the filmmaker, but were not in the original Butoh. The film, the only document taken of the performance, must be seen for the understanding of Hijikata Butoh and the foundation of Butoh.

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 meant to be a choreography of film. The filmmaker "performed" with a camera on the stage in front of the audience. With the main performers: Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the film has the highlights such as Butohs of a soldier by Hijikata & a mad woman by Ohno. There is a story of the mad woman, first outcast and ignored, at the end joins to the community through her dance. Inserted descriptions of Anma (The Masseurs) are made for the film by the filmmaker, but were not in the original Butoh. The film, the only document taken of the performance, must be seen for the understanding of Hijikata Butoh and the foundation of Butoh.

“ONAN is a work about desire (masturbation) which has no object but itself. The appearance of the large egg objectifies the man's desires. After colliding with the other (a girl), the hero falls down while still holding the egg, thus caricaturing the desire of the hero.” —Takahiko Iimura (takaiimura.com)

“ONAN is a work about desire (masturbation) which has no object but itself. The appearance of the large egg objectifies the man's desires. After colliding with the other (a girl), the hero falls down while still holding the egg, thus caricaturing the desire of the hero.” —Takahiko Iimura (takaiimura.com)

“ONAN is a work about desire (masturbation) which has no object but itself. The appearance of the large egg objectifies the man's desires. After colliding with the other (a girl), the hero falls down while still holding the egg, thus caricaturing the desire of the hero.” —Takahiko Iimura (takaiimura.com)

From the collector of Marquis de Sade in the early 1960s, still a 'dark age ' of erotic picture, even his novels were forbidden to publish in Tokyo, I burrowed the copies of the engraving taken from the 18th century edition of "The story of Juliette" and of "The story of Justine." and rearranged along a story made from of the pictures not from the novels. An exercise out of the curiosity. It was the same year I made Ai (Love) in 1962 which consists of mostly extreme close-ups of love making. I have kept DeSade for many years in my closet without looking at it myself and have forgotten about it. By a chance I re-found the film 50 years later that there is something worth to see. (T.I, 2012)

Yomiuri Independent was an annual show between 1949-1963 that exhibited all art that was submitted. Artists in the early 60s began to take advantage of the challenge by provoking the organisers with their submissions that cast a question on the framework of art within the gallery space. The objet d'art and performances we see in Dada 62 are fragments of what was shown in its 1962 version with pieces by Genpei Akasegawa, Jiro Takamatsu and Shinmei Kojima making an appearance. (Julian Ross)

First projected onto Jiro Takamatsu's naked back at the legendary Sogetsu Art Center for the performance Screen Play, Colors is an experiment in concoction. Iimura drops paint into oil and water and melts wax as he films the colors take shape whilst simultaneously dissolving into one another. An eerie soundtrack by Yasunao Tone of Group Ongaku and Fluxus creates an impression of music being the witch behind the craft. (Julian Ross)

"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

"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."

"10 minutes of the act of creation itself run through close up and magnifying lenses. " -T.I.