Jasper Sharp : Mixed Cinema Network

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20
Sep
Living Legend of Japanese Experimental Film Comes to Britain!

You might remember back in April I posted about an evening of films by the experimental filmmaker Takahiko Iimura organised by Close Up Video at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club in London, which ultimately was canceled when the volcanic eruption in Iceland saw its guest of honour stranded in Japan. Well, the screenings are back on again for this October, and the extra time has actually allowed the event to be expanded into something of a touring programme, with the director in attendance at a number of screenings across the country, in London, Leeds and Bristol.

If you’re not familiar with Iimura’s work, you can check out his website, and await the interview with the director which should be coming up on Midnight Eye sometime soon conducted by Julian Ross. Julian also had a hand in getting the screenings up to Leeds, in conjunction with the Cherry Kino exerimental filmmaking/screening group and the University of Leeds’s Centre For World Cinemas-Mixed Cinema Network, where I gave a talk on the Japanese New Wave back in February of this year. Not only that, but Julian is also the driving force behind the Breaking Boundaries: Alternative Approaches to Japanese Film conference I mentioned in my post a couple of months ago.

I mention all of this because not only is Zipangu Fest, the new Japanese film festival that I am programming, collaborating with Breaking Boundaries where we’ll be screening a print of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive, but Julian has also put together a programme of 1960s experimental work in collaboration with Close Up Video which will be screening at the Bethnal Green Working Man’s Club as part of Zipangu Fest on 23rd November. I’ll of course be announcing more details about this as they come, but suffice it to say for now, if you’re based in England and interested in 1960s experimental film from Japan, you’re going to be very well served this year!

Anyway, more details about the Iimura screenings below – note that the programme is different from venue to venue:

From Iimura's 'Talking Picture (The Structure of Film Viewing)', now available on DVD from the directors website

Dates in the UK:

October 5th: London, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club: Seeing/Hearing/Speaking – The Films of Takahiko Iimura + Live Performance

October 6th: London, Nowhere Lab (Workshop): no.w.here and Takahiko Iimura present: How To Make Time Visible In Film (without photography)

October 7th: London, Central St. Martins, University of Arts London

October 11th: Leeds, ICS Cinema in the University of Leeds more details on this particular screening below

October 13th: Bristol, Arnolfini: Takahiko Iimura: On Time in Film (Discussion and Screenings)

Observer-Observed: Takahiko Iimura

Here’s some more information for the Leeds event:

Cherry Kino and the CWC-MCN University of Leeds presents: Japanese Experimental Cinema: An Evening with Takahiko Iimura

Date: October 11th 2010

Time: 6:30-9pm

Venue: ICS Cinema, University of Leeds

Price: FREE

Takahiko Iimura is an experimental filmmaker, video artist and writer on experimental film who has been working with the moving image since the 1960s. His work explores the relationship between media, time and language and has strived to redefine the exhibition of cinema as a mode of performance. He has worked closely with members of the Hi-Red Centre and Fluxus, as well as Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, John Cage, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek and many others, bridging boundaries between film, art and performance. He moved to New York in 1966 and has since been a conduit of intercultural communication between Japan and America, introducing Japanese experimental cinema to the West and vice versa. He recently began self-releasing his work on DVD and continues to travel around the world to show his films.

“Although Taka was and continues to be an active part of the New York avant-garde scene, he always remained an enigmatic, mysterious presence, pursuing his own unique route through the very center of the avant-garde cinema. While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde film movement inspired him and attracted him, his Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema’s minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else.” – Jonas Mekas

“From early sixties, though Japanese, Iimura was well known as one of the first generation of the New York Underground … For many years, Japanese experimental film was Takahiko Iimura” – Malcolm Le Grice

Cherry Kino and the CWC-MCN University of Leeds have invited Takahiko Iimura to join our screening of a selection of his films, which will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker himself. Many thanks to WREAC who have helped us fund the event and the ICS for kindly offering their venue.

For more information on the event, please click here.

White Calligraphy

Films programmed for the event (16mm):

Ai (Love) (1962)

Iro (Colour) (1962-3)

Kuzu (Junk) (1962)

One Frame Duration (1977)

Cine-Dance: Anma (1963)

Ma: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-ji (1989)

Performance of White Calligraphy (2008)

Posted at 12:16 on 20 September 2010 Filed under news.
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25
Aug
Call For Papers: Symposium “Breaking Boundaries: Alternative Approaches to Japanese Film” 6th November 2010, University of Leeds

The first of a series of rare UK screenings of Hiroshi Shimizu's Children of the Beehive (1948) begins in Leeds, organised by Zipangu Fest

This posting is one of a number that are going to appear on this website over the near future related to Zipangu Fest, the new Japanese film festival I am putting together here in the UK for November of this year (and beyond…!) We’ve been leaking bits about the festival by way of our Facebook and Twitter groups for a while now, but be prepared for the information to start coming thick and fast from now on, on the festival’s own website, and of course on this one here.

Anyway, here’s an event that we’re partially involved with, one which fits within the Zipangu Fest mindset of spreading knowledge and appreciation of Japanese cinema as far and wide within the United Kingdom as possible. It’s a symposium that will be taking place at the University of Leeds on 6th November 2010, about 3 weeks before the festival begins properly in London – there’s going to be a few other events in London and Bristol as well in the run up to the main Zipangu Fest dates 23-28 November, so keep your eyes peeled for more info about these too.

The symposium itself is being put together by Julian Ross of the University of Leeds as part of the 24th Leeds International Film Festival, which this year runs 4-21 Nov, and has always had a really good Japanese film programme. The symposium organisers are looking for anyone who is interested to deliver papers on their subjects of research, whatever stage this research might be at. If you’re interested, please send a 400-word abstract and 150-word biography to: bbconf2010@googlemail.com. The deadline for application is September 20th 2010. Tony Rayns will be in attendance as the keynote speaker.

Hiroshi Shimizu's early classic of Japanese independent cinema, Children of the Beehive

I’ll be there delivering a paper myself, but Zipangu Fest’s main involvement is that we have organised the post-symposium screening of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive (Hachi no su no kodomo-tachi), his 1948 classic of Japanese independent cinema, and the first film he directed following his departure from Shochiku. Readers of Midnight Eye will know what a huge fan we all are of Shimizu, me in particular, so you might want to get scouring the various reviews and articles we’ve had about his work over the past 7 years since Tokyo FILMeX held their retrospective of his works in 2003: for example, Sayon’s Bell, Mr Thank you, The Introspection Tower and a selection of his silent films.

Children of the Beehive was the film that stuck out the most for me during the FILMeX retrospective, and I’ve been meaning to bring it to the UK ever since. It will also be screened again for the general public on another day during the Leeds Film Festival, separate from this symposium, and I don’t think it is giving too much away if I say that this will be one of the titles playing at the main Zipangu Fest festival in the Genesis Cinema in London between 23-28 November – it will also be playing in Bristol in December, but more of this closer to the time.

Children of the Beehive focuses on the plight of ten war orphans hailing from different cities across Japan. With nowhere to go, they scavenge around train stations, scratching out an existence by means of black market work for a one-legged tramp whilst avoiding being picked up by the police for vagrancy. Soon however, they find a more inspiring role model in the figure of a nameless soldier just repatriated after the war. An orphan himself, the soldier also has no home to return to, and so sets out across the country with the kids in tow in search of work before settling on the goal of leading them to the orphanage where he himself grew up.

Anyway, I’m going to reproduce the Call For Papers notice from Breaking Boundaries in full here, in the hope that some of you reading this will want to get involved.

Call for Papers

White Rose University Consortium Mixed Cinema Network: University of Leeds, University of Sheffield, University of York

University of Leeds Symposium – Breaking Boundaries: Alternative Approaches to Japanese Film.

6th November 2010, ICS Cinema, University of Leeds.

Symposium Convenor: Julian Ross

Keynote Speaker: Tony Rayns

Post-symposium Screening: ‘Children of the Beehive’ (Shimizu, 1948) courtesy of Zipangu Fest.

The event has been coordinated as part of the 24th Leeds International Film Festival (4-21 Nov 2010). For more information on Leeds International Film Festival, please visit www.leedsfilm.com.

Please note that selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, edited by David Desser and published by Intellect. For more information on the journal, please visit here.

No other region is expected to have a more profound impact on the future global system and society than East Asia, and accordingly, understanding the culture and arts of the countries in this region is becoming increasingly vital to the work of academics. Japanese cinema, in particular, has recently experienced a resurgence of interest within and beyond academic confines. In the UK, recent major retrospectives of directors such as Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa organized by the British Film Institute, among many other events across the country, have contributed to an increased awareness of this burgeoning subject area. The number of Hollywood remakes of Japanese texts and films and the recent trend of Western directors travelling to Tokyo to shoot their films are also indicative of an interest which cuts across theory and practice. It seems particularly timely to discuss the ways in which we can address Japanese cinema and its relevance to world cinema, film studies and other disciplines.

‘Breaking Boundaries’ is an inter‐institutional project organized by postgraduate students at the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York through the Mixed Cinema Network project and beyond. Our aim is to propose alternative approaches to Japanese cinema, moving beyond East-­West binary oppositions, thus encouraging the exploration of new and exciting critical avenues.

Although all proposals will be considered, we particularly welcome papers that explore the following themes we have set up as panels:

• Japanese Cinema Within and Beyond the Nation

• Interdisciplinarity and Intertextuality in Japanese Cinema

• Questions of Gender in Japanese Film

• Reception of Japanese Films Home and Abroad

We welcome proposals from researchers at any stage of their project, and we will accept proposals from those within and beyond the academic field of film studies.

Please send a 400‐word abstract and 150­‐word biography to: bbconf2010@googlemail.com

The deadline for application is September 20th 2010. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted at 15:58 on 25 August 2010 Filed under news.
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