Takahiko Iimura
Biography
Takahiko Iimura has been a pioneer artist of Japanese experimental film and video, working with film since l960 and with video since 1970 while residing in New York and Tokyo. He is a widely established international artist, having numerous solo exhibitions in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum, New York, Anthology Film Archives, New York, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo in addition to an artist residency at the German Academy of Arts, Berlin, and Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, Italy.
Known For & Full Filmography9 Titles
Movie - 1993, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
Experimental film involving letters.
Movie - 1997, 2h 15m • as Self
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Movie - 2013, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
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.
Movie - 1985, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
Movie - 1969, 2h 15m • as Himself
Iimura creates a short self-portrait as well as brief portraits of five of his peers: Brakhage, Vanderbeek, Smith, Mekas and Warhol. In each portrait, Iimura attempts to copy the styles and traits of each artist (Vanderbeek's constantly moving camera; Mekas' experiments with film speed; Warhol's use of flashes of white against a black background), while briefly commenting on the images being shown. The film serves effectively as an introduction to the film styles of these artists.
Movie - 1978, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne’s composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, a passage from William Wordworth’s autobiographical poem “The Prelude,” sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.
Movie - 2011, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
This is a film about a medium approaching extinction, an 8mm documentary film about a vanishing 8mm cinema. Blending two genres, the science film and the personal film, and benefiting from the participation of multiple generations of cineastes, it is a reflection upon the original cinematic experience.
Movie - 2002, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
Experimental short by Keiji Aiuchi.
Movie - 2012, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
8mm short by Kenji Onishi and Tohru Mabuchi.