Mako Idemitsu

This film shows the images of a dancing woman who is wearing Kimono overlapping another image which a naked man is dancing. This is one of the original psychological concepts of C.G. Jung. For women, Animus is an image of a man by projection of her mental energy.

HIDEO, It's Me, Mama is a psychological melodrama that introduces narrative and structural devices that are integral to Idemitsu's work. Exploring the flawed universe of the contemporary Japanese family, she focuses on a woman's identity as mother through mother-child and husband-wife relationships. Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. In a cogent metaphor for familial relations in the media-saturated culture of contemporary Japan, Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen. Idemitsu's poignant irony is embodied in the scene in which Mama, blind to her husband's needs, caresses Hideo's video image. (Electronic Arts Intermix)

The film shows vivid close-ups of a liver with the background music of “My Baby” by Janice Joplin.

In Idemitsu's experiment using a video camera and monitor, the reflexive exercise looking into a mirror is swapped with the monitor, suggesting a reflection on the history of women's relationship with makeup.

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.

A film made using a work of Cindy Sherman, expresses Idemitsu's free and easy sense of humor.

Today, Japan is envied by the world for her economic prosperity, which however, has resulted in producing this sort of average family. Its contains a wife who has to serve her husband, a preoccupied businessman, and who showers all her attention on her child who is also left behind at home with the mother. The child, especially a son, becomes a replacement for her husband. Mother and son share an intimate life like lovers at home without the husband. It seems that this is such a common occurrence that Japanese society ignores this video work. Those that are envious of the Japanese economic success will become less so if they see this work and realize what this real phenomena in Japanese society is like.

The relationship between the mother and daughter is psychologically very tight. The isolated husband is irritated and becomes violent whenever he drinks but the two women cannot understand the reason of his violence. The mother lets the daughter marry for appearance's sake although in reality she hangs onto the daughter forever.

This work portrays 'Animus,' a Jungian concept representing the masculine aspect within women. The Animus embodies both positive and negative dimensions; however, its destructive sides - namely prejudice and rigid attitudes - are demonstrated here through female dialogue and behavior.

Whispering Light, 1985, film, 10:50 min, color In this emblematic personal film, light and shadow of plants is successfully constructed over the subjective gaze of the narrator who is working through her mother’s death.

This film is composed of different images of a girl, clouds, and trees.

Housewives who find faults in other women that they refuse to admit in themselves, gossiping about them as if it were none of their business. This work visualizes the concept of the 'shadow' as it manifests within everyday occurrences.

A woman’s image as a mind-scape, after she had plastic surgery.

Kiyoko's Situation articulates the deeply embedded cultural roles of Japanese women through the parallel stories of two female artists, Kiyoko and Tani. In Idemitsu's narrative-within-a-narrative, "Kiyoko's situation" is played out on a television monitor within Tani's drama. Tani is paralyzed in her attempts to paint by her feeling that, as a single woman, she has failed in society's eyes. Kiyoko, a young mother viciously criticized by her husband and family for her fierce determination to paint, eventually compromises her art for "maternal duty." As Kiyoko complies with the family, Tani, isolated and despairing, is driven to suicide. Idemitsu's chillingly omniscient television monitor, which acts as the psychological "other," metaphorically and literally condemns Tani to death. In the final cruel irony, she hangs herself, using the television monitor as a jumping-off point.

The second part of a trilogy, Great Mother (YUMIKO) is a domestic melodrama that examines the cultural and familial role of Japanese women by tracing the psychology of a turbulent mother-daughter relationship. Yumiko, a rebellious young woman from an affluent family, encounters resistance from her mother, a successful career woman, when she becomes pregnant and marries. The mother is an icy, assured presence, seen only on a television screen as a superego who monitors Yumiko's behavior. The television becomes a powerful metaphorical device, underlining the disunity of the familial structure and acting as a psychological presence. As Yumiko's marriage deteriorates, her pain is juxtaposed with the banal rituals of her mother's life (instructing her subordinates at work, scrubbing the floor at home), an irony ultimately heightened by the viewer's awareness of the reflexivity of this drama-within-a-drama.

At Yukigaya 1, 1974, film, 3 min, color. A comical mindscape, the film stars Sam Francis who was Idemitsu’s ex-husband.

The shadows render the state of mind of al mother whose children have grown and left the home.

What is America to her? Idemitsu, who lived in America for eight years, looks introspectively at herself and her strange connection with America.

A woman performs domestic chores, watched by a television displaying the image of her own eye. The home is recast as a space of surveillance, control and repetitive labor.

One of a series of Idemitsu’s works which deal with housewives buried in everyday life. Idemitsu overlapped a 16 mm work that had Yoneyama Mamako pantomiming in her “Tango of a Hosewife” for the Commemoration of the International Women’s year, 1975. Behind Mamako pantomiming as a housewife, there are clouds, sunsets and bonfires.

In Kae, Act Like A Girl, Idemitsu continues her experimental narrative exploration of women's roles in contemporary Japan with a tale of women's liberationist awakening. Here she presents a young female artist's conflict with the traditional, patriarchal expectations of women in Japanese culture, in which men are privileged and women are groomed to be wives and mothers. Within Idemitsu's narrative, video screens and images represent the protagonist's inner struggle — memories, conscience, familial pressure — as she subordinates and then ultimately achieves her personal and artistic desires.

Taking place during the women’s liberation movement, Idemitsu filmed the Womanhouse which became her first 16mm film work. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly organized the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in 1971. The Cal Arts Feminist Art Program group performed for the audience at Womanhouse in 1972. They transformed an old run-down mansion in Los Angeles into Womanhouse. In the kitchen a progression of sculptured breasts gradually turned into fried eggs; one bathroom contained a mass of Tampax, and if you opened the linen closet you found a trapped mannequin.

In this personal film made during when Idemitsu went back and forth between Japan and USA, the subjective gaze is depicted in the abstract images with high contrast.

A plan of a house that is reminiscent of a miniature garden used as a psychological treatment to assist in self-confirmation at a middle-class housewive’s tea party.