Yo Ota

“Peter Kubelka…was teaching at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule (Städel) at the time. His classes, filmmaking and cooking, were very unique, and this film was made around the time I was studying with him at Städel… This is a single-shot film, moving along the passageway using a handmade dolly. I used an Arriflex 16ST camera, and I changed the filming speed from 48fps to 4-6 fps while shooting.” - Yo Ota

How well can movies reproduce the reality we see? Cinema used to record and reproduce the movements of the scene using a camera (photograph), a device that records the scene in terms of perspective. Is it true? Isn't it possible that our way of seeing things, on the contrary, was created by photographs and movies, or by paintings based on perspective that existed before then? This film provokes the way of viewing films cultivated in this way.

“My attempt at a filmic interpretation of Haraguchi Noriyuki’s ‘Inclined Horizon,’ a three-dimensional physical work featured in the ‘Dance Hakushu 2006’ exhibition held in the Hakushu district of Hokuto City, Yamanashi Prefecture. Haraguchi’s work was modeled out of earth that will return to its original form after about a month, and my aim was to resurrect the concept of this work on film.” - Yo Ota

“Sequences of space-time manipulation that raise the problem of continuity in the shot.” - Yo Ota

“Mr. Tsuguö Yanaï makes paper objects. He installs these objects in a gallery in Tokyo. The camera was also installed in the gallery. It filmed all of the time of installation and its preparation…. Yet the film is not the documentary of an installation, but of installation time.” - Yo Ota

In this work, no matter which scene or cut you look at, basically a different amount of time will pass than it did during the shooting. This is true not only inside the screen of individual cuts, but also in the direction of the entire time axis. The time that flows here is a cinematic time that was newly created using the time that flowed when Mr. Kazufumi Kobayashi created a stag pattern out of paper. If we say that time is a function of motion and space, then this can be rephrased as cinematic motion and cinematic space generated by the film.

In this work, the Lumière-like technique of photographic reproduction of reality is combined with the animation-like technique of photographing each frame while shifting it to make non-moving objects look like they are moving. However, if there is a slight difference from what we normally think of animation, it is that the person being animated is a human being who can move by himself.

“This film offers a metacinematic study of tempo and change and a figure of velocity. […] Ota recorded [three different locations in Tokyo] at the interval of hours, and sometimes even days, by using different filters and by alternating the camera speed. The result…represents an inquiry into the abstract space-time of cinema where Ota plays with the physical fact that time is a ‘function of movement in space.’” –Malin Wahlberg

Yo Ota goes on working on « the space of the unreal movement » on the film medium and on showing time development in non narrative cinema. This film has nothing to do with the English meaning of «Speed trap», that is speed control by police radars. To obtain objects in movement, he set his 16mm camera on the verge of a road. During film shoot, some drivers thought his camera was a speed trap and briskly slow down in front of the camera.

Flotte is French slang for rain or downpour. This work was taken on a rainy day at the Abt Gallery in Waseda, Tokyo, a few days before his solo exhibition. If I can't shoot that day, I have to give up on the new work, and I can't help but worry about the rain. Before I saw the rush, I was worried about whether the picture would come out properly, but the rain came out beautifully, so I gave it the title "FLOTTE". It is constructed so that the speed changes intermittently in one cut (actually, it is meant to appear that way).

Short by Yo Ota.

A woman believes she hears the voice of God in her mind and lives according to God's word. Her 16-year-old daughter, Sakurako, looks at her mother with a cold, cynical gaze. One day, the woman witnesses a young man being beaten and kicked in a bar, receives a kind of revelation, and brings him home. The woman, who also believes she is dying of cancer, sees this as a fated encounter, but her balanced life doesn't last long. The man, who had seemed like an intangible presence, takes concrete action for the first time, and the story abruptly collapses...

Directed by Yo Ota.

A work whose title is the idea. Shot at the famous Place de la Concorde in Paris. The square owes its discord neither to its Egyptian obelisk nor to the fact that it was the site of the execution of King Louis by guillotine. The film was shot with Super8, Kodacrome 80 film and has been re-shot with an optical printer during editing. The mixing of stills with 24 frames/second film creates visuals with a ‘discordant passage of time’.

“The visual harmony of the landscape is disturbed by a screen that allows us to see into the distance (television). The film is composed of six scenes that feature a television in the landscape. The speed of the television (in NTSC) is 30 frames per second, and never changes in this film. But the landscape views pass at different speeds.” - Yo Ota

“The structure of human vision is the visual knowledge of the world. Individuals do not visually understand the world through the eyes, but through the brain. That is to say, human vision has been formed by knowledge and experience. The film can show a new vision, provided that the cinema is also a kind of visual experience and visual knowledge.” - Yo Ota

Even if you watch it all day long, the human eye cannot see the movement of the clouds. In that sense, it can be said that interval shooting in movies has expanded human vision itself. Just as the invention of photography captures momentary movement, cinema presents a world that seems to compress real time. Interval shooting is normally used only in science films and the like. In this work, such changes were captured at intervals of a few seconds, rather than frame-by-frame. Without a timer or anything, I set the camera on a tripod in my room, sat down on a chair beside me, and pressed the release bit by bit, entirely manually from before dawn until the sun went down.

The moon in the night sky chases us wherever we go. The moon is in fact moving, but it is too far away and its movement is too slow for the human eye to see its movement. It is almost the same as saying that it is not moving in our consciousness.

A work I made when I was attending the film department of the University of Paris 8. At the time, I was living in a downtown area in the northwest of Paris, close to the Place de la Bastille, which was associated with the French Revolution. Building construction sites were scattered around the area due to redevelopment. The shooting location was a building with only walls and floors, whether it was under construction or being demolished. I decided on the composition so that the wall and floor exactly intersect in the center of the screen. In order to capture 1/4 of the screen, 3/4 of the screen must be covered with a mask. Then, while rewinding the film, I took four shots at different frame speeds. One cut, one scene, a fixed screen with no camera work. The same man is walking in each part of the continuous screen, which is divided into four parts. The movement of the same man, who was just walking at the same speed, has four different speeds on the screen.

The same moment and composition were captured using two Super 8 cameras with a simple setup employing a half-mirror. These films, one in color and the other in black and white, were developed in-house and blown up to 16mm. The screen alternates between "images" of the same moment and composition. The color portion is 24 frames per second, and the black and white portion is 1 frame per 2 seconds. Even though we say it's the same moment and the same composition, this is only conceivable based on the assumption that film records and reproduces reality in time and space. When you directly handle film as a sculptural material, you see just how ambiguous that is.

Experimental short by Yo Ota.