"Ito Takashi’s second period, which begins with the short film Thunder (1982), adds many of these elements to the experiments of the first: light painting, superimpositions, mystical demons, ghostly voices. Although the number of techniques employed is multiplied, the principle resembles that of his previous films. Thunder is limited to a single space (what seems to be a university building), and a single gesture (the ghostly image of a woman veering and uncovering her face), and through a mathematical and arbitrary series of possibilities the film builds up expectations, disappointing them, bringing them to paroxysm and surprise each time the viewer believes the film has exhausted its systemic possibilities. A gesture of shame, of timidity thus inhabits a building like an monomaniacal ghost projected upon its walls, captured in a photograph, re-animated through stop motion, granted a half-life between the perceptible world and the imagined one.
"Thunder and the other films in this style—Ghost (1984), Grim (1985)—all portray retinal echoes of ghosts and televisions and lights, remnants of abandoned images, accompanied by insidious electronic soundtrack. And the temporal regularity of the stop-motion process in combination with the insistent sound creates a cinematic vortex through the repetition of its mantra-like image and sound.
- Yaron Dahan, Ghosts of Time and Light: The Experimental Cinema of Ito Takashi (a report from the Japanese artist's in-depth profile at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2015).
"Ito is one of the leading experimental filmmakers in Japan. He graduated from Art and Technology Department of Kyushu Institute of Design in 1983 during which he made a debut with the film SPACY in 1981 (Inagaki who created sound effects for the film was also a filmmaker and his classmate at the institute). He was rather a premature virtuoso.
"SPACY is consisted of 700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame according to a strict rule where movements go from rectilinear motion to circular and parabola motion, then from horizontal to vertical.
"The technique itself of reconstructing sequential photographs was already seen in the earlier Japanese experimental films during the 70s such as ĀTMAN (1975) by Toshio Matsumoto (he was Ito's teacher at Kyushu Institute of Design) and DUTCH PHOTOS (Orandajin no Shashin,1976) by Isao Kota whose influence is apparent in Ito's works. However, one finds Ito's style more complex and sophisticated, and utterly new.
" For example, in ĀTMAN the subject is a human being disguised with Japanese Noh-mask whereas in SPACY the subject is photograph itself. This, together with the last shot where the camera and the filmmaker (self-portrait) come into the same frame indicates the self-reflexive characteristic of his work. Compared to the two-dimensional "flip-book" style illusion of DUTCH PHOTOS, SPACY has vast spaciousness and dramatic sensation of movement and when it's accompanied by the sound, the film reveals the side of a fantastic film.
""Film is capable of presenting unrealistic world as a vivid reality and creating a strange space peculiar to the media. My major intention is to change the ordinary every day life scenes and draw the audience (myself) into a vortex of supernatural illusion by exercising the magic of films." (Takashi Ito, in Image Forum, Oct.1984)
" We were also enchanted with the fast speed of "automatic" camera as if it was computerized. The ecstasy of auto-machines which move beyond man's logic and sensation. And the filmmaker's desire to "get into" the film instead of possessing it. This ecstasy and the desire are common to all of his films including sequential photograph works as well as his other series such as THUNDER (1982) GHOST (1984) and, GRIM (1985) which are occult experimental "horror" films featuring the technique of bulb shutters and time-lapse photography. In his most recent works THE MOON (1994) and ZONE ( 1995), two styles are integrated under the motif of "dreams and memories".
More from Ito
"Artists by nature tend to despise their earlier works, not so much because they fail, but because these films, like adolescent loves, tend to reveal their motivations too plainly. Ito Takashi’s three earliest works shown in this retrospective—Noh (1977), Movement 2 (1979), and Movement 3 (1980)—are no exception. These early experiments reveal a desire to dissect time and space into their most basic cinematic unit—the frame—recomposing their space-time into the artifice of motion: the facets of a Noh mask, the spaces of temples, the distances between shrines…
"As these initial experiments develop, Ito Takashi’s films grow in complexity. This first architectural stage of film experiments comes to a head in Spacy (1981): the camera is placed in the center of a basketball court and progresses through its space-time at first along the four walls, the four cardinal directions of its axis. Near each wall stands an easel, and upon the easel is an animated image of the same basketball court through which the camera slides. Ito Takashi’s camera travels time and again through the reflexive image of itself through the sealed cinematic continuum, accompanied by the electronic spasms of a synth soundtrack. As the camera travels from screen to screen, from wall to wall, each moving image functions both as a screen and a portal. Ito’s animatronic camera animates the basketball court into jittery stop-motion impulses traveling joyous and playful across the court from image to image creating motion though photographic stillness.
"Play is the exact word to define Ito Takashi’s game on the court, for as in every game, this film posits its arbitrary constraints (the limited space of the basketball court, right angle turns, animated stop motions in black and white). Ito Takashi’s game begins following the filmic rules, before evolving quickly into one of inventiveness and surprise. The camera moves along invisible geometric patterns (not unlike the lines which define the game of basketball), and the spectacle of space is reinvented.
"Once these cinematic-temporal playgrounds are constructed, Ito begins to haunt them with phantom females, child-demons, light-ghosts, and plaster-mannequins. Bodies inhabit these re-constructed space-times, moving within them in skittish stop-motion spasms; animated dolls with blurry faces and limbs akimbo marking their presence as retinal imprints or analog superpositions. Throughout the rest of his oeuvre Ito returns to his animated iteration and variation in space-time as the foundation for his later experimentation, which grows in both breadth and complexity: adding variations first of rhythm and angle, then color, then frame size or shape, then adding characters and symbols, and finally dramaturgical elements woven into the formalist experiments. As his films develop, bodies find their ways into the frame, as do television screens, photographs, lights, hands, flowers always pushing Ito Takashi’s experiments into unexplored areas, however always motivated by the same obsessions.
- Yaron Dahan, Ghosts of Time and Light: The Experimental Cinema of Ito Takashi (a report from the Japanese artist's in-depth profile at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2015).
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