SPACY

1981/10min./16mm/tinted stock
Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

Collection: Centre Georges Pompidou

His films are like a roller-coaster. His way of throwing the act of seeing into utter confusion is an attack on the eyes in their corporeal function, and to attack the eyes is to take on tile body itself as your opponent. The film makes you break out in sweat only by shooting a safe, peaceful gymnasium in the dark. (Koharu Kisaragi)

ＢＯＸ

1982/8min./16mm/tinted stock
Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

I stuck landscape photographs on the faces of a cube and shot them frame-by-frame. It looks like the box is forever revolving, but in truth it only revolves 90 degrees. The trick to this sensation is fundamentally the same as the one used in SPACY. I was aiming at disturbing our awareness of space in the movement from the three-dimensional to a plane and back again. (T.I)

THUNDER

1982/5min./16mm/color

Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

We can think of this film as made based on the unified scheme produced by layering together a number of axes of semiotic systems. Because the frame is the basic unit and the film composed by designing an accumulation of symbols representing reactions to sight and programming them into the time of the film, we can call it a kind of film-as-game. (Shiroyasu Suzuki)

SCREW

1982/3min/16mm/color/silent

DRILL

1983/5min./16mm/b&w/silent

The filming of the entrance to the company dormitory in which the film-maker was living. Centering the film on one pillar, he warps the spaces to the left and right and creates an unstable space similar to painting that employs anamorphosis. Made as were SPACY and BOX with a large number of photographs, the film ends with a violent movement, but is poetic for this. (Takashi Nakajima)）

GHOST

1984/6min./16mm/color

Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

I made this work because I wanted to try out the idea of floating images in midair that had come to me when making THUNDER. The entire work was shot frame-by-frame with long exposures. I filmed this in the company dorm I was living in in the middle of the night after I had come home from work, and thought I might die from what had become my daily pattern of sleeping for two hours in the morning then going off to work. (T.I.)

DRILL 2

1985/3min./8mm film/color

Sound effects: Tatsuro Kondo

GRIM

1985/7min./16mm/color

Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

With this work, I developed/fleshed out the idea I had when making GHOST of peeling only the skin from various objects in the room, floating the skins in midair and then sticking them on different objects. This film was also shot entirely frame-by-frame with long-exposures. Along with GRIM, its meaning is “as if to do forever.”(T.I.)

SHASHIN KI / Photodiary

1986/3min./8 mm film/color/silent

The majority of my 8-mm works were made for the three-minute "Personal Focus" film special put on in Fukuoka. This film is an animation of photographs I had taken on a regular basis as a sort of diary, and was made to have a rough feel to it. (T.I.)

WALL

1987/7min./16mm/color
Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

The further developed and completed version of a 15-second advertisement for an interior design firm on which I had worked. It repeats over and over again the violent back-and-forth, half-revolving motions of a giant brick storehouse inside the frame of a hand-held photograph. I wanted to emphasis the flat nature of the photograph while creating a dynamic feeling of depth inside the photograph's frame. (T.I.)

SHASHIN KI 87 / Photodiary 87

1987/3 min./8 mm film/color/silent

I turned my gaze to the various events in daily life and made this filmic diary in a manner as if confessing my feelings. Of course, since I was making the film, I wanted to depict these feelings and events with tricky techniques. I used various methods to shoot photographs of a relative’s wedding, the landscape I see from window of my house, commemorative travel photographs and the like frame-by-frame. (T.1.)

AKUMA NO KAIROZU / Devil 's Circuit

1988/7 min./16mm/color
Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

A film in which the one 60-story skyscraper that soars in the spaces between roofs spins with incredible speed. I centered the circumference with its 400 or 500 meter radius on the skyscraper and divided it into 48 sections, then took photographs from those spots and shot the photographs frame by frame. At first I'd wanted to do this with Mount Fuji, then imagined the effort that would involve and gave up the idea. (T.I.)

MlIRA NO YUME / The Mummy’s Dream

1989/5min./16mm/b&w/silent

The filmic version of a city in which all surface beauty has rotted away. In order to find images of death like landscapes of the city from which people have vanished, and buildings from which the decorations have been stripped away and the inner organs exposed, I walked all over Tokyo taking photographs, then animated them. (T.I.)

VENUS

1990/4min./16mm/b&w/silent

In the early afternoon, a mother holding her child stands still in the park of a housing project. The kind of sight that is a symbol of beauty and love. Be as that may be, they have no face. The camera is aimed persistently at the spot from which they have vanished as if to find something. A work that began out of the search to understand the relation between the family and the self. (T.I.)

JU-Nl-GATSU NO KAKURENBO / December Hide-and-Go-Seek

1993/7 min. 30sec./video/color

Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his ioys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank. (T.I.)

THE MOON

1994/7min./16mm/color
Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

A long time ago, I would often dream of the uncanny and mystical landscape that appears in moonlight. Irrational landscapes and spaces filled with unspeakable pleasures like a black object that revolves slowly while flying over the scattered clouds that float in the night sky, their lumps illuminated by the light of the moon. (T.I.)

ZONE

1995/13min./16mm/color
Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki

Prizes: Main Prize: International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

A film about a man without a face. His arms and legs bound with ropes, a disabled man is still without even a quiver in a white room. This man, enwrapped in wild delusions, is also a reconstruction of myself. A series of unusual scenes in this room that expresses what lies inside me. I tried to create a connection between memories, nightmares and violent images. (T.I.)

Gl SOCHI M / Apparatus M

1996/6 min./16 mm/color/silent
Cast: Yasumasa Morimura

Created for Yasumasa Morimura's April 6~June 9, 1996 exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art. Filmed with Morimura in the guise of Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch" as model. An imaged version of what is evoked by the words “Morimura”, "Marilyn," "actress”, "disguise", "display", "sex" and "death”.

MONOCHROME HEAD

1997/10min/16mm/color

Sound effects: Takashi Inagaki
Cast: Ryuichi Yamanaka, Marika Abe, Kazunari Kodama

Without warning, the image of a girl wildly waving a baseball bat that slices through the air leaps to my mind. Such speed also reminds me of the rhythm of the filmmaker's previous works. Or is it a symbol of teenage madness? A ceremony to summon some creature from a legend? (Takashi Nakajima)

SHIZUKA NA ICHINICHI / A Silent Day

1999 / 15min /16mm / color+b&w / silent
Cast : Marika Abe Cooperation : Megumi Kubo, Minori Takenaka

This film describes the actions of a woman continually haunted by a vision of death and the world she sees on her last day of life. it was strongly inspired by the late Ryunosuke Akutagawa short story HAGURUMA in which a man is deeply moved by the quiet and insane landscapes on the 'despairing road to death. This is the world I wanted to film. (T.I.)

MEMAI / Dizziness

2001/16mm/color/11min.
Sound Effects: Hiroshi Kizu Paintings: Tatsuya Sumiyama
Cooperation: Hiroaki Yuasa Cast: Minori Takenaka, Megumi Kubo

In the final scene of my last work, A SILENT DAY, a girl was filming herself with an 8mm camera on a railway bridge. Although the film doesn’t depict the incident, she later jumped off the bridge in an attempt to kill herself. Two girls witnessed her attempted suicide, and in this film I am attempting to depict the broken state of their psyches. In this piece, various images have been generated as a result of my professional interaction with a number of young people with mental illnesses, and the unstable state of mind which I have often experienced in recent days. (T.I.)

SHIZUKANA ICHINICHI/A Silent Day

2002/video/color/20min.
Sound Effects: Takashi Inagaki
Cooperation: Minori Takenaka, Megumi Kubo, Monno Kazue
Cast: Marika Abe

The piece I made in 1999, A SILENT DAY, depicts a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death. This piece reflects my own unstable spiritual state at the time. Three years have passed, and as I looked at this work with calm, I came up with an idea: “What if I make a story of a girl who is trying to make a film, A Silent Day?” By creating a new ending in which it is ambiguous if her jumping to kill herself is real or just an incident in the film she is making, I want to express my recent theme, that is, melting of fiction and reality and ambiguities of the world we live in. (T.I.)

UNBALANCE ( A piece of the omnibus animation TOKYO LOOP )

2006 /5min / video / b&w
Music: Seiichi Yamamoto Cast: Masaru Sakamoto

I cannot help feeling that some mysterious force is upsetting our emotional balance. The theme of my work over the last few years has been the portrayal of this sense of unease. In this work I seized on a very negative image of Tokyo and tried to portray the emotional state of people struggling and suffering in this very superficial world.(T.I.)