Jasper Sharp : Zipangu Fest

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24
Sep
Experimental Japanese Film at Zipangu Fest in November

ZIPANGU FEST TO HOST FILMS BY STAR OF JAPAN’S CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTAL SCENE TAKASHI MAKINO, AND OTHERS

Takashi Makino's Still in Cosmos (2009, screened as part of the earthquake benefit night at Cafe Oto on 22 November

November screenings at London’s ICA and Café Oto of Takashi Makino’s films, featuring soundtracks by Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek

Four films by the leading light of Japan’s contemporary experimental scene, Takashi Makino, will be screened at this year’s Zipangu Fest (18-24 November 2011). Three of Makino’s abstract visual odysseys – with soundtracks by avant garde musicians Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek – will be shown at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on Saturday 19 November as part of a programme entitled Enter the Cosmos, while the fourth will be screened at Zipangu Fest’s benefit night for the Japan disaster fund to be held at Café Oto in Dalston on 22 November.

Come and enjoy a fine spectrum of experimental moving image works from Japan, for a good cause! The benefit night at Café Oto in Dalston (18-22 Ashwin St, London E8 3DL) – Nippon Re-read Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I and II – will also include experimental works from the late 1960s by Takahiko Iimura and Toshio Matsumoto, as well as recent films by Tomonari Nishikawa and Shiho Kano. Organised by Zipangu Fest’s Julian Ross, the programme was curated by Aily Nash and Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson of Kinema Nippon.

The films in this two-part programme range from late 60s to contemporary works. Although varying greatly in their formal and aesthetic concerns, the works all rigorously reexamine the everyday through their respective experiments and innovations in their medium.

Abstractions of the mundane are seen in the graphic films in Programme I, which deal directly with the materiality of their medium rather than focusing on a visual referent. In White Calligraphy Re-Read (1967), Takahiko Iimura activates the Japanese characters of the Kojiki, the earliest Japanese historical chronicle, by deconstructing text into its constitutive graphic ciphers. These works, including Lika (2007) by Stom Sogo, and Still in Cosmos (2009) by Takashi Makino, direct the attention of the viewer to the pictorial, emphasizing more painterly concerns, digital and celluloid textures, the visceral correlation of sound and image, and of flatness versus representational depth.

Sixties split-screen psychedia in Toshio Matsumoto's For the Damaged Right Eye (1969)

The works in Programme II offer a poetic investigation into the fragmentary experience of the quotidian by eschewing narrative and rendering cultural images and references to unveil the uncanny within the familiar. Tomonari Nishikawa’s in-camera manipulation of bustling metro hubs in Shibuya-Tokyo and Tokyo-Ebisu (2010), as well as Shiho Kano’s pensive meditations on quintessential Japanese subjects form a counterpoint to Toshio Matsumoto’s split-screen filmic hallucination of the late-60s underground, For the Damaged Right Eye (1969).

Tomonari Nishikawa's Tokyo-Ebisu (2010)

Doors open at 7.30pm. An admission fee of £5 will be charged on the door, and all proceeds the benefit night will go towards Japan disaster relief, via Japanisch-Deutsches Zentrum Berlin.

More details of the event can be found at http://zipangufest.com/events/2011/nippon-re-read-radical-fragments-and-abstractions-from-japan-i-ii.

*** We hope to have an added something extra special for the night, to be announced shortly ***

Posted at 16:32 on 24 September 2011 Filed under news.
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07
Sep
Zipangu Fest at ICA in London, 18-24 November 2011

SECOND ZIPANGU FEST TO KICK OFF AT LONDON’S ICA

This year’s celebration of cutting edge Japanese cinema will get under way from November 18th to 24th in London

Following the success of last year’s inaugural festival, the second Zipangu Fest – celebrating the best of cutting edge and avant garde Japanese cinema – will be held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts from November 18th to 24th, before moving to venues around the UK.

Showcasing a selection of Japan’s finest features, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental films, this year’s Zipangu Fest will include a retrospective screening of two rarely seen gems that have never been shown in the UK. One of these – a pre-war horror title – has been subtitled especially for the festival.

Festival director and head programmer, Jasper Sharp, comments: ‘After the runaway success of last year’s festival, we are very excited about Zipangu Fest 2011. Our aim is to showcase the wealth of talent in the independent and experimental filmmaking scene in Japan by showing the sort of films that other festivals barely seem to be aware of. The beauty of Japanese film is that you know you’re always going to see something different, and this year we’ve got another exciting and diverse range of titles to challenge, provoke and entertain. We’re particularly thrilled that the ICA is hosting this year’s event, as it is the perfect venue for us, and with last year’s programme touring to cities including Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle and Tallinn in Estonia, we hope to continue with our goal of bringing these films to as wide an audience as possible.’

To make sure you are kept up to date with Zipangu Fest news, please subscribe to our press list: http://zipangufest.com/press/2011

For further press information please contact: Sarah Macdonald: sarah@zipangufest.com

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Posted at 14:55 on 07 September 2011 Filed under news.
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06
Sep
EVA- East via Asia recap

I’ve been back from Tallinn for about a week now, and am still basking in the memories of an absolutely wonderful long weekend at the first EVA – East via Asia! Japanese film festival in the city’s majestic-looking Kinomaja cinema. You don’t need to scroll too far down this page for some background on this event. Basically I worked on the programme while the wonderful organisers Helen Merila and Piret Mägi were at the coal face, sorting out the venue, the publicity, the concerts, the catering… basically all the difficult stuff! And this meant a pretty relaxing but thoroughly enjoyable couple of days while the event unfolded, a long weekend blessed with bright blue skies and sunshine away from a damp and drizzly London.

Against the beautiful backdrop of Tallinn

This was my first time in Tallinn, and I absolutely fell head-over-heals with the city. It must be one of Europe’s best kept secrets, and I hesitate to sing its praises too loudly lest it become totally overwhelmed by tourists. It’s already suffering to some extent from the usual curse of jeering drunken idiots on organised stag parties that Britain seems to have a predilection for inflicting on Eastern Europe, something I’d already just encountered in Wroclaw the month before. Fortunately these are largely confined to the overpriced tourist and titty bars in the Old Town area, and it’s not difficult to wander off the beaten track and find quieter spaces to explore.

Cultural rivals - the Stalker Film Festival was going on simultaneously in the 2011 European Capital of Culture where parts of the film were shot

Tallinn is Europe’s 2011 City of Culture, and there were a whole host of events going on over the weekend that threatened to overshadow EVA. One of these was the Stalker film festival celebrating Tarkovsky’s classic Soviet sci-fi, parts of which were shot in the city, and featuring a number of examples of films of the type that it has now become acceptable to refer to as “slow cinema” – Bela Tarr, Sergei Paradjanov, you know the type. Luckily, it didn’t seem to draw too many, if any, potential viewers away from our festival, which was amazingly well-attended and well-received. Nothing is too far apart in Tallinn, it seems, and on one of the mornings before the screenings I managed to wander down to the film’s locations, and onwards down to the dockland/beach area, along with my old friend Yoshihiro Ito, whose Vortex and Others surreal shorts programme we screened. The last time we’d met was about 18 months ago in Tokyo, and before that, he was there with his films and disarming grin at the first ever Shinsedai, one of the first ever events I documented on this website in this post from 2009.

Drunken yobs in Tallinn: Saturday night ended in tequila, with Yolanda, Tim Grabham and Yoshihiro Ito, and me staying sensibly behind the camera

Another guest from rather less further afield (i.e. London) was Tim Grabham, one of the directors of the beautiful documentary KanZeOn, accompanied by his charming companion Yolanda. While this film was included in the programme for this year’s Shinsedai, this was the first time Tim had actually been present at one of its screenings, which was effectively the European premiere. It went well, incredibly well… as did Yoshihiro’s films, and that night, we celebrated with an extended tequila session before winding up down at the port area again, at an open air gig by local punk outfit Chungin & The Strap-On Faggots, one of the bands at the festival’s opening night punk concert, along with J.M.K.E., local legends with a fanbase that stretches as far as Finland. Apparently punk is to the Estonians what rockerbilly is to the Finns, the ultimate anti-authoritarian musical stance during the twilight of the Soviet era and still going strong – the fact that I managed to catch Chungin & The Strap-On Faggots twice during my brief stay merely highlighted this fact. You can read Tim’s account of his screening and beyond on the KanZeon website.

Again, I’ll end by saying a huge thanks to our wonderful hosts in Tallinn, Helen and Piret. It’s looking like we’re going to do the event again next year, so I can’t wait to head back, who knows… maybe even before the next fest…

Posted at 15:47 on 06 September 2011 Filed under news.
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