Relative Time-table

Relative Time-table

2001 · 6 min

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.

Directed by Yo Ota

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Distorted "Tele" Vision

Distorted "Tele" Vision · 1997

Distorted "Tele" Vision

“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

Distorted Movi Sion

Distorted Movi Sion · 1998

Distorted Movi Sion

“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

Städel

Städel · 1986

“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

Discrepant Sight

Discrepant Sight · 2003

Discrepant Sight

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.

Inclined Horizon

Inclined Horizon · 2007

Inclined Horizon

“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

Incorrect Continuity

Incorrect Continuity · 1999

Incorrect Continuity

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

Installation Time

Installation Time · 1989

Installation Time

“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

Entomologist

Entomologist · 1995

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.

Chaise Plus

Chaise Plus · 1987

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.

Incorrect Intermittence

Incorrect Intermittence · 2000

Incorrect Intermittence

“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

Speed Trap

Speed Trap · 2004

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

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).

Snail Dance

Snail Dance · 2004

Short by Yo Ota.

Don’t Dare to Stop Love

Don’t Dare to Stop Love · 2012

Don’t Dare to Stop Love

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...

Le Mur (wall) - 2

Le Mur (wall) - 2 · 2021

Le Mur (wall) - 2

Directed by Yo Ota.

Antonym of Concord(e)

Antonym of Concord(e) · 2005

Antonym of Concord(e)

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’.

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