Inner Man

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In this personal film made during when Idemitsu went back and forth between Japan and USA, the subjective gaze is depicted in the abstract images with high contrast.

In Kae, Act Like A Girl, Idemitsu continues her experimental narrative exploration of women's roles in contemporary Japan with a tale of women's liberationist awakening. Here she presents a young female artist's conflict with the traditional, patriarchal expectations of women in Japanese culture, in which men are privileged and women are groomed to be wives and mothers. Within Idemitsu's narrative, video screens and images represent the protagonist's inner struggle — memories, conscience, familial pressure — as she subordinates and then ultimately achieves her personal and artistic desires.

This film was made for a 3 minutes film festival held in Japan. A cup noodle is ready in 3 minutes.

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.

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.

This film is composed of different images of a girl, clouds, and trees.