Screening
Experiments in Flicker & Love
Part of Japanese Experimental Animation: Recent Restorations Project
Friday, February 25th, 7pm
Lightbox Film Center
CCJ is pleased to co-present with Lightbox Film Center three screening programs under the Japanese Experimental Animation project, curated by Go Hirasawa (2/19), Julian Ross (2/25), and Fusako Matsu (2/11). The final screening curated by Julian Ross features graphic designer Keiichi Tanaami, whose collection has been a focus of our research since 2018. The screening will include new digitizations of Tanaami’s She (1971) and Look at the Wood (1975), as well as Human Events (Ningen Moyō, 1975), which CCJ preserved in 2018. In the screening program, Ross places Tanaami’s works in conversation with contemporary works.
Experiments in Flicker & Love
Joshua Gen Solondz, Prisoner’s Cinema, 2012, 11 min, USA
Keiichi Tanaami, Flicker Love No. 1, 1971, 4 min, Japan
Sawako Kabuki, Summer’s Puke is Winter’s Delight, 2016, 3 min, Japan
Keiichi Tanaami, She, 1971, 8 min, Japan
Yoriko Mizushiri, Anxious Body, 2021, 6 min, Japan
Keiichi Tanaami, Human Events, 1975, 5 min, Japan
Sylvia Schedelbauer, Wishing Well, 2018, 13min, Germany
Keiichi Tanaami, Look at the Wood, 1975, 12min, Japan
Total: 72 min
Curated by Julian Ross
This program places recent CCJ-led restorations (and digitisations) of works by Japanese psychedelic animation master Keiichi Tanaami in dialogue with contemporary works by artists and filmmakers from Japan and of its diaspora. While known for his hand-drawn pop animations, Tanaami experimented with flicker and rephotography techniques that brought together his hand-drawn animations with found material to abstract effects. The body became a subject he regularly returned to as the porn magazines he encountered on his trips to the United States became the raw material for his visual experiments for his films, collages, and projections in discotheques. Rather than proposing these works are inspired by Tanaami, the program seeks to reexamine subjects he was interested in – the flicker and the body – from different vantage points.
Japanese Experimental Animation: Recent Restorations
2/11, Yōji Kuri: Art, Life and Opinions
2/19, Ryōhei Yanagihara and Hiroshi Manabe: Out of Three-Person Animation Circle
2/25, Experiments in Flicker & Love
Grants from the Toshiba International Foundation and Pola Art Foundation received in spring 2021 allowed CCJ to conduct research and preservation projects related to Japanese experimental animation works. Two teams were formed: one on the works by the graphic designer Keiichi Tanaami, led by Ann Adachi-Tasch, scholar Julian Ross and archivist John Klacsmann; and another on the film materials at Sōgetsu Art Center archive, led by scholar Go Hirasawa and archivist Nobukazu Suzuki.
The outcomes of these projects were the new digitizations of She (1971) and Look at the Wood (1975) by Keiichi Tanaami and Sea Battle (Kaisen, 1960) by Ryōhei Yanagihara. Screening programs organized by Julian Ross and Go Hirasawa feature these newly digitized works as well as CCJ’s previous preservation project, Tanaami’s Human Events (Ningen Moyō, 1975). Ross’ program places Tanaami’s works in conversation with contemporary works, while Hirasawa’s program highlights two artists of the Three-Person Animation Circle (Animation 3-nin no Kai), a group formed at Sōgetsu Art Center by Yōji Kuri, Ryōhei Yanagihara, and Hiroshi Manabe. In Hirasawa’s program, we are delighted to present the premiere of the digitally restored version of Ryōhei Yanagihara’s Sea Battle (Kaisen, 1960).
In addition, we are pleased to welcome curator Fusako Matsu and the Yōji Kuri studio for a special presentation of Kuri’s animation and recently digitized works. Completing the Three-Person Animation Circle group members, this program features Yōji Kuri’s works around the “Art, Life and Opinions” screening event and the interview series under the same title. In this screening event on February 11th, we are very pleased to welcome special guests, artist Ushio Shinohara who was interviewed by Kuri as part of the series. He will speak in conversation with art historian Reiko Tomii.
Japanese Experimental Animation project is supported by the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pola Art Foundation.
Image: Still Keiichi Tanaami, She, 1971, 8 min. ©Keiichi Tanaami.