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Community of Images: Akiko Iimura's Notebook at OCS

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Meander is a space for documentation and experimentation within our website, a place to reflect on our projects and artists, as well as a way to explore intersections between those works, artists, and themes we study under our mission (Japanese experimental moving image works made in 1950s-1980s), and those that fall outside of our mission’s specific framework of timeframe, genres, and nationality.

Meander may take multiple forms including essays, introductions to artists and their work, online screening programs, or special digital projects. Offerings in Meander may suggest oblique angles from which to see CCJ’s mission-specific works, artists, histories, or practices.

Community of Images: Akiko Iimura's Notebook at OCS

Ann Adachi-Tasch

Akiko Iimura is best known for her role as an independent journalist, partner to Takahiko Iimura, and translator of filmmaker Jonas Mekas’ books, but she was also the editor-in-chief of New York's Japanese-language newspaper OCS News from 1982-1995. I had the pleasure of getting to know her in my visits to the Iimuras’ apartment in the East Village in New York City. According to artist Shigeko Kubota, she was the one who introduced the couple — Shigeko brought Akiko in the car that Takahiko was driving.

In the Community of Images exhibition we are presenting Mon Petit Album (1974) , Akiko’s original film work, and Taka and Ako (1966), a collaborative film the Akiko and Takahiko made by filming each other and using album photographs.

Akiko was a strong supporter of the underground film scene in New York and often wrote on it during her time at OCS. She recalls first meeting Mekas outside the Anthology Film Archives in SoHo while waiting for a film to start. Someone handed her a red rose and she looked up to find that it was Mekas!

As part of the research for this exhibition, we looked into Akiko Iimura’s writing during her tenure at OCS. As the editor-in-chief, she had a column called Akiko Iimura’s Notebook. Below are some of her articles.

“Making movies that gush out blood when cut: film-poet Jonas Mekas” (January 19, 1996)

“Downtown Arts Festival and the history of SoHo in memory” (September 12, 1997)

tags community of images