61. Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen - Ito Takashi

Last weekend, the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen took place for the 61st time. In this case it had clearly a central figure: Ito Takashi was featured not only as a special guest presenting a long retrospective of his masterpieces; he was also included in the special program about 3d film and space, and even participated in the competition with his new film "Saigo no Tenshi". He also won two major prizes. This first post, therefore, will be mainly about his work. I hope to get to write about the many other amazing experiences of the festivals in a later entry.

A frame is a frame is a frame: The works of Takashi Ito 1977-1985

It is hard to believe that a movie can be so shocking without anything happening in it: Flashes, intersected pictures, a wildly, frantically moving camera - is the camera moving, or is movement but a composition of static, separate images? All of Ito's works are clearly modern art in the sense of Ortega y Gasset's dehumanization: they don't represent anything but themselves, merely self-referentially bringing their means of representation to their limits. His early works are entirely dehumanized, also in the sense that there is not a single human being visible in them, only large rooms, empty streets, the sky, drawings that reveal their flatness in being painted.
In films like "Spacy", is space the protagonist, or is it rather the film itself? The staggering fast movement created by photography animation seizes the possibilities of a film constructed frame by frame; or a film conscious that it is constructed, made out of frames. Only thus do viewers realize how fast in fact every film moves, how vertiginously the eye is bombarded with changing images. The filming of projected film on flat surfaces stretches this even further, questioning both sequence and volume. Now I realize what the festival text means by the uncanny of film: film that deconstructs itself in its construction. Film in which frames are revealed as masks, as ghosts, insubstantial in their flatness, as the grand illusion.



(Interlude) Space & Bodies: A 3d program featuring Ito

Contrasting with Ito's "Box" which enhances the flatness of virtual filmic space, the theme section entitled "Space Scan" also features various pieces focused on dance rather than empty locations. Furthermore, the background of both featured dance videos is entirely black, removing architectural or geographic boundaries and leaving bodie on their own to define space. Are bodies necesary to define space? Ito and other artists featured in the segment prove the contrary. To them, it is perspective that (un)creates the depth. But space is not only "in the eye of the beholder". Space, as time, amplifies by events, by movement, and only the moving eye of the film camera can enhance it in a way comparable to what the presence of the body does.
Bodies themselves are also interestingly enhanced by visual effects in these shorts. Andristyák Marcell's "Skizm" multiplies a single dancer, but the choreography creates intersections rather than paralells. The dancer Ida Szücs Dóra appears to be disputing space with her own replicas, as bold spins are either closely dodged by each other or explode into flowering shapes with a common axis.
Philippe Baylaucq's "ORA", on the other hand, features several dancers reproduced as digital characters and merging into each other. The initial scene even shows them as cells, as blots of light that generate each other. Even after being diferentiated as bodies, they move as a coordinated unity after José Navas's choreography. The space is not only enhanced by their movement, it is also literally iluminated, since the animation allows to turn the virtual bodies into glowing lamps, thus expressly creating their surroundings in the darkness. The mutual creation and coordinated reproduction of the bodies continues, as space finally shapes into mirrors in different directions, thus creating reflections and inversions, seemingly infinite loops and towers of bodies that make space abysmal.

ORA by Philippe Baylaucq, National Film Board of Canada

Film is dead: The works of Takashi Ito 1997-2014

From a certain point on, human beings do integrate into Ito's images. The natural movement of the human body does call for a slightly more continuous mode of capture, and thus he starts working not only with photographed, but also with filmed images. Still, most of the films show the combination of both forms of capture, and the filmed sequences are not precisely fluid or continuous, but a composition of several short takes that force the strangeness of stop motion animation onto human movement.

Film does not only remain a protagonist of itself by calling attention to its createdness: the second image in "Monochrome head" is a camera in the mirror, which turns to find another cameraman behind itself. The eye thus starts to search its own intraceability, the impossible representation of representation. "Memai" shows two girls secretly taking pictures of each other, in a cycle of mutual voyeurism. "Shizuka na Ichinichi" contains photographies and a storyboard that remixes the images of the film and end up becoming a film within a film. One might say that the camera uses the presence of the cameraman to become its own subject.
But film goes further: it not only transcends the human presence but destroys it. Especially the character of "Shizuka na Ichinichi" uses (or is used by film) to constantly represent herself in thanatic situations. She scratches herself out of photographies, photographs her own drowning in the bathtub, stages a film in which she and her reflection stab each other. Could this be what Roland Barthes called the death of the author, the punctum of photogtaphy? A further unacnnyness of film: ghostly images of absent people, a medium that separates people from their image; but in itself, film is just flat image, just mater, only lifeless celuloid that takes its life from our baffled eyes.

Behind the mask of film: Ito on Ito

Ito himself was kind enough to give us a short interview.* There and also in various Q&A sections, he talked about film as a means of personal expression, more precisely as a therapeutic process of reflecting on the darker sides of his life. In fact his life is not as dark as his films (although even his wife sometimes worries). His life is not as dark precisely because through film he can externalize crises, representing their worst possible turn and thereby preventing it. If it wasn't for film, he might be a violent person, but nowadays, he claims, he's a pretty calm guy. It is also for that reason that he prefers to use female characters in his human pictures, to gain certain distance from the action.


*The interview was filmed, but the film of it is lost. The dying of the film prevents the dead replica of Ito's presence, talking about film and death. I offer you his patent absence.

References:
Barthes, Roland. "La mort de l'auteur". 1967.
Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire. 1980.
Ortega y Gasset, José. La deshumanización del arte. 1925.