KIKAIDE MIRUKOTO = Eye Machine / To See by Chance –The Pioneers of Japanese Video Arts–
02013HD
Video began as a medium that inspired discovery. This art documentary traces the expressive roots of “media art” in Japan — works of video, performances, and installations created using video technology that allowed for free and creative visual expression.
Engram is a three-part piece revolving around a few good old ideas such as photos inside of photos, movies inside of movies, photos inside of movies, movies inside of photos, and (even) a film director inside a TV set.
An early experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto. Produced as part of the student riots in Japan at the start of the 1960s, Matsumoto uses collage, archival footage, and impassioned narration to create an expressive, visceral criticism of the US-Japan Security Treaty.
Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.
A paranoid girl is haunted by the frightening manifestations of her hypnophobia. She is at odds with the waking world as she attempts to get away from the decaying figure in black.
In Connection, a static shot of the sky with moving clouds is subdivided into regular geometrical regions, which are then individually (and rhythmically) manipulated.
Writes Matsumoto, "I used the Erekutoro Karapurosesu (Electro Color Processor), which is mainly used in the field of medicine and engineering, to create moving image textures Metastasis, I was interested in layering images of a simple object and its electronically processed abstraction. The...
A documentary on sixties counterculture in Japan featuring Donald Richie, Tadanori Yokoo, Masao Adachi, Koji Wakamatsu, Toshio Matsumoto and Akaji Maro among others.
Matsumoto's last video was produced by Sano Gallery. Matsumoto set the common theme as “Seeing” in 2009, six co-writers participated to directing the omnibus film, "Seeing". Initially, there were no plans to expand it into trilogy, and Matsumoto was also limitedly involved in the work. Later,...
"A flicker film made using only intense shock-zooms, Vibration is one of a series of films Matsumoto made in the 1980s that explored proprioception through a mixture of minimalist effects and modernist architecture." - filmlinc.org
A previously unseen short by the Japanese avant-garde titan, Toshio Matsumoto's 1986 Summer locates faces and bodies within superimpositions, zooms, a lightning-fast montage of brick structures and verdant trees.
The film is a promotional film, recording the construction of a pressurized lockbox at the Hachinohe power plant in Aomori. Matsumoto's official first directorial debut at the Shinriken Motion Picture, the film found a 16mm film print stored in a civil library and digitized. His official credit is...
