Movies: Takahiko Iimura

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...

‘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....

Cameras once again observing each other....

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

"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 ...

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. ...

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...

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 o...

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

'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...

Consisting of four parts: Between the Frames; Seeing Nothing; The Privilege to See; I Am A Viewer / You Are A Viewer. The film demonstrates and discusses the structure of film viewing as an institution: playing/talking myself in the double role of th...

"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...

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...

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....

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

8mm short by Kenji Onishi and Tohru Mabuchi....

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

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 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...