Microcosmos(2021) by Makino Takashi
Thursday, April 24, 2025, 7:30 pm
Matter/Anti-Matter
Recent Work by Makino Takashi
Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
I don’t have much interest in shooting something clearly and showing it on screen. I’m thinking about the imagination in our brain: we say we have memory and we have images, but I don’t believe the images we have in our imagination and in our brain are so clear, it’s something very, very complicated… like dust, that sometimes looks like an image but it’s actually not one. I have a very big interest for the image of dreams and imagination itself. I think we have a very complicated set of beautiful images in our brain. So I’m trying to approach that kind of image. I make a lot of layers, but each layer still survives as a memory… and when we watch the image we can select how to watch it accordingly to our own imagination, our own relationship between the film and our brain. That’s why I use the technique of the layer and the abstract image. (Makino Takashi interviewed by Nicole Remy and José Sarmiento-Hinojosa; Desistfilm September 1, 2019)
In work spanning nearly twenty-five years, film/video artist Makino Takashi has mastered the art of superimposition and amorphous abstraction, creating infinitely layered walls of light, immersively oceanic experiences situated at indeterminate points between screen the mind’s eye. Microcosmos, Anti-Cosmos and Untitled are a trio of pandemic-era pieces (which include forays into surrealist-inspired graphic collage and spoken word) and the slow-rolling and stirringly emotional 2024 work Constellation, to be presented by live electronics.
Hallucinatory and experiential, Makino creates abstract cinematic worlds immersing the viewer like a grain of emulsion free falling in the corporeality of image forming materials. (Unconscious Archives, London)
SCREENING:
Microcosmos (2021) by Makino Takashi; digital video, color, sound, 12 minutes. Exhibition file from the maker.
Untitled (March 2020–June 2020) (2020) by Makino Takashi; digital video, color, sound, 21 minutes. Exhibition file from the maker.
Anti-cosmos (2022) by Makino Takashi; digital video, color, sound, 16 minutes. Exhibition file from the maker.
Constellation (2024) by Makino Takashi; digital video, color, sound, 21 minutes. Exhibition file from the maker.
TRT: 70 minutes
Microcosmos (2021) by Makino Takashi
A non-narrative experimental documentary film that records 100 collages produced 2021 in chronological order. (Makino Takashi)
A sparkling surface of water appears and disappears behind a collage rendered semi-transparent. Freed from materiality, the collage flies dynamically in the zero-gravity space of film. (Gen Umezu: Visions)
Untitled (March 2020–June 2020) (2020) by Makino Takashi
Untitled is a collage film that combines image and sound by Takashi Makino, music by Lawrence English (with sound material from Lasse Marhaug) and automatic writing/text by Esperanza Collado, produced between March and June 2020 when the first attack of Coronavirus began to hit the world. For the first time in my work, a clear “language” is used. The image projected on the screen, the image imagined inside the viewer and the memory evoked by words repeat reflections with reality and organically connect us and this real world’s situation. (Makino Takashi, 25 July 2020)
Anti-cosmos (2022) by Makino Takashi
Anti-cosmos means similar with Noise, the power that breaks through the cosmos/order. Inspired by Cosmos and Anti-cosmos by Japanese philosopher Toshihiko Izutsu. The soundtrack, which was mainly produced in the range of frequencies below 1000 hz, physically vibrates the viewer’s body. (Makino Takashi)
Constellation (2024) by Makino Takashi
This work is a sequel to 2022’s Microcosmos, created using paper collages created in 2024 and 8K scanned film noise. It is a meditative and creative film, like finding a star chart among stardust, but it is also a political work that deeply reflects the world situation. A collection of the collages used in this work with the same title is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2024. (Makino Takashi)