SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Sunday, March 15, 2009

Observer Observed: Film/Video Works by Takahiko Iimura

Program Two: On Time in Film

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Working in film since the early 1960s and in video since the early 1970s (as well as significant forays into performance, installation and computer-based work), Takahiko Iimura has long been a pioneer artist of Japanese experimental media art. His body of work has deeply explored the material and conceptual foundations of each medium with robust intellectual rigor and flashes of playful humor. In the wake of a recent Microcinema International DVD release (the first volume of The Collected Films of Takahiko Iimura) and a related book (The Collected Writings from Wildside Press), this two-part mini-retrospective represents an overview of this artist’s rich and remarkable body of work.

Iimura is perhaps best known for his work exploring the temporality of cinema – the various ways the film viewer’s elemental sense of time can be “played” by the filmmaker. Frequently using the most basic of film elements – white light, black leader and the projection environment, Iimura’s work in this area is among the most abstract and elemental in all of cinema, postulating time and the interval as ground for deeply engaging cinematic experience.(Steve Polta)
Screening: 2 Minutes 46 Seconds 16 Frames and Timed 1, 2, 3 (both from the series Models, Reel 1), 24 Frames Per Second, One Frame Duration, + & – and the video I Am (Not) Seen.

Download program notes