Their Bird

Takashi Makino’s source of inspiration, our place in the world and the universe, never seems to dry up in view of the never-ending flow of immersive films. Generator may well be the earthiest of his films so far, made as a reaction to the Fukushima disaster. A reality check, but in the world that Makino shows, this can never be achieved without looking inwards too.

Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.

Takashi Makino's collaboration with Derek Jarman regular Simon Fisher Turner. Taking its starting point as Jarman's blindness after the completion of BLUE.

The origin and the end of the world is portrayed by weaving fictitious landscapes of diorama set and the lighting effects into the actual landscapes of 2012 Tokyo. The film is like an old diary.

A single take of a model of a Japanese home burning down, captured on hand-cranked 16mm film that was processed in coffee instead of traditional chemicals.

Film THE FOCUS is constructed from rephotographed images collected from old pictorial books of volcano, nomad's culture, war , mountains, some texts and simple color screens that are inserted between images. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Earth’s Holocaust” is there as a background of this film.

The film inspired by the landscape of Friesland, the north part of Netherlands. The flatness of horizon, the history of fought with water suggests us a sense of "Wall" between human and nature.

The expansiveness of empty landscapes that call attention to their subtle forms in a dynamic macro-perspective, and densely built urban ensembles combined with fragments of dry instructions and inconspicuously urgent communications to create a reserved fictional meditation on the relationship between man and machine.

Dormant Soil / Concrete Reflections is the answer to a poem by Kim Hyesoon entitled “Haeundae Texas Queen Kong”. Produced at the start of the pandemic, Zai and Rei explore the personal effects and thematic resonance of the poem as they travel around their neighborhood.

The essence of "The Pearl of Tailorbird" lies in the fortuitous poetry generated through the process of multiple translations – avian to human, phonetic to semantic, textual to visual – in which the latent porosity of language helps give birth to multi-layered resonances. For Hayama, this kind of whimsical linguistic deconstruction underscores the central role of language in the process of anthropocentric world-building – and offers a method for transforming hegemonic modes of knowing into ones perhaps more sensitively attuned to our own origins in the natural world. Coaxing a depth of associative meaning from the rhythmic interplay of sound, text, and imagery, The Pearl of Tailorbird perhaps most resembles lyric poetry – or a hermeneutic puzzle – given spatial form. (www.emptygallery.com)

The film was shot in a actual scenery left in the urban life. The leading character, one human (a girl), picks up a small package and opens it. She finds another package inside, so she opens it again. There is bigger package inside.... She opens it again and again and again. Soon, the package becomes bigger than human and this small human turns to drawing of a stone. Story is ritualistic throughout the film, and its soundtrack was made by Japanese onomatopoeia. There a cinema is insisted as an artificial thing of time and story.

Comparing the number of photoreceptor cells in eyes of human and hawk, hawk has about 8 times more photoreceptor cells than human. The title of the film is about human eyes. Figure of flying bird in sky as a small black dot is the intimation of things that human can not see. Human has been following the black dot by the desire to fly. On the other hand, bird has been distorted by human as an image or a sign.

One day, one moment, there the forest has its own time. The place without meridian. The empty place. The place without human. The place has been thought as "forest" in our memory. This suspense film of forest was shot in the small forest which gets even smaller and forgotten in urban life in Japan. The graphical details, the dark, humid shadows of forest and the digital sound are overlapped.

The story flowing under this film has certain parallels to the theory of bird's hibernation and transformation advocated by Aristotle which is already dated today. In the land, ash snow is falling. The land's flag is fluttering in the blowing wind. And the quail slowly transforms into some other species. When listening to the voice of soil, there is no border in the land.

The filmmaker talks about what she sees while she's staring at the projected image of a face of the caged Emu (bird), which is one of a filmmaker's own archive shot by herself at the zoo. In one moment, there's a drop of tear falls from the eye of emu. Even if this one drop of tear has been merely a physiological phenomena to removing dust from its eye, yet the tear touches human mind. The eye of Emu and the tear are not only to make us perceive a human figure in the reflection, but it shows something farther beyond.

Footsteps of horses and sheep. I run to the forest in a hurry. But I never reach to the forest of my destination. I'm remain in the original place, the place before the tale. After the destination (forest) disappears gradually, aimless footsteps are left on the stage. "Being on the way to somewhere" becomes a story of film in itself. The white light placed in the center of picture is continuously changing its role and prolongs the tail of the tale.