The Marriage of Yasushi

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

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

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.

At Any Place 1, 1975, film, 16 min, color. Casted over the sky, images of people are suggested as shapes of clouds

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.

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.

Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen.

A mindscape in Santa Monica, where Idemitsu lived for 8 years.

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.

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

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.

As a shadow appears when a human body is lit up, there is a certain dark part like a shadow in the mind of a man. This is an aspect of a man’s personality which he usually is hesitant to admit. C.G.Jung, Swiss psychologist, called this dark aspect a shadow because it appears in personified forms when one dreams. In my work Shadows, there is another monitor in the images of the main monitor. The inside monitor shows the mind of the outside characters, that is, the inside monitor’s characters are shadows, psychological projections of the outside characters. Since the issue of shadows is so complicated and hard to understand, I selected examples that are specific and understandable, as well as familiar to women in their daily life. These are also the feeling I have toward my routine life.

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.

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.

When Yoji announces to his mother that he wants her to meet a new girlfriend, the mother's jealousy destroys the relationship. Yoji's mother fastens onto her son, unable to leave his mother or experience love for any other woman.