THE FOCUS

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.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

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.

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.

Rei Hayama collaborated with Takashi Makino's "Space Noise", and there this "Space Noise Calling" was made. Hayama introduced an old rotary phone to the performance, which is disconnected and the microphone is built-in. Whilst the bells of the disconnected phone is ringing, image of penguins which walking on the artificial ice at zoo, which is visible through the glass, appears and it mixed with Makino's original image of "Space Noise".

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.

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.

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.

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 about human who visits a forest. Observing the existence of human who has to go back to their home, through the experience of the pretend game of being a bird.

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.

Artificial flowers and plants are kept changing its composition. An imitation of shapes of life, water drops, light from rechargeable hand light, endless accompaniment (climb every mountain.) The scenery reminds tiny grave or a small funeral for dead animals and other small creatures. However, this state of scenery gradually changes by the endless composition.

2021/video/16:9/sound/12 min