Distorted Movi Sion

“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

“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

“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

“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

Short by 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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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...

Experimental short 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’.

Directed by Yo Ota.