On Time in Film

Since the 1960s, Takahiko iimura’s explorations of the moving image have probed the relationship between media, time and language and have strived to redefine the exhibition of cinema as a mode of performance. He has worked closely with the giants of experimental film such as members of the Hi-Red Centre and Fluxus, Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, John Cage, Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek. His uncompromising work, here presented on DVD, bridges boundaries between film and performance art.

"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 the 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

"In concentrating on this set of problems, often wrongly seen as 'minimalist', Iimura went much, much further than any other film artist in exploring a kind of art-science. This concern with the experience of time, its measured passage and the analogy between time and space, has been the main recurring theme at the centre of his work."
- Malcolm Le Grice（The author of "Abstract Film and Beyond", MIT Press)

"Both in terms of its examination of time and space, of light and darkness, of visuals and sounds; and in terms of its demands and potential rewards for an audience, 24 Frames Per second is a quintessential Iimura film. The film alternates between one-second passages during which the viewer sees one of a series of fractions and [with] one-second segments of black and clear leader. As the film progress, the fractions grow from 1/24 to 24/24. "1/24," for example, is followed by one second of film in which one frame is clear and 23 are black or[then] one is black, 23 clear." - Scott MacDonald

"My favorite section of Models - "Timed 1, 2, 3" - is a particularly effective interweaving of visuals and sounds. Visually, each section of the film is composed of 10-second spans of clear and dark leader, arranged in a progressive fashion so that at first there is more and more light and less darkness, then vice versa. During "Timed 1" a sound "bip" scratched directly onto the soundtrack is audible each second; in "Timed 2" the sounds are audible every 10 seconds; and in "Timed 3" we hear them every 100 seconds, or at the halfway point and at the end. ..All in all, the number of interesting filmic explorations in the eight section of Models makes it one of Iimura's most impressive films." - Scott MacDonald