November 1–30, 2024
For the November 2024 edition of our online series Staff Picks, e-flux Film is pleased to present three films from the Relation Series by Toshio Matsumoto. Read more and watch here.
Toshio Matsumoto began his creative career in avant-garde documentary and transitioned to making experimental films in the late 1960s, viewing them as a means of expressing the pre-logical unconscious. In the 1980s, influenced by the field of semiotics, he began to explore methods for disturbing perceptual unity. In these works, existing forms are deconstructed and different configurations of moving-image emerge. Matsumoto called this the Relation Series. In the mid-1980s, this theme was elevated from a perceptual to a narrative level, culminating in the feature film Dogra Magra (1988). Our November Staff Picks features the following films from the “Relation” series, courtesy of Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive.
Connection (1981, 9 minutes) splices 16-mm footage of clouds across time and space in a reconstruction using optical masks. It is structured in three parts: the first part introduces temporal disruption, the second focuses on color disruption, and the third presents a combination of the two. As a result, variations in the cloud’s appearance become increasingly pronounced. The film marks the start of Matsumoto’s overt interest in “relation” between forms.
Whereas Connection was shot on 16-mm film, Relation (Kankei) (1982, 8 minutes) was created using video. The footage of the sea-horizon is intricately edited using various early digital techniques. The edited tape was then transferred onto 16-mm film.
In Shift (Danso) (1982, 8 minutes), video footage of continuous pans and zooms over concrete architecture is split across six horizontal sections so that each section progresses with a time lag. Time-space seems to cascade on the screen. As with Relation (Kankei), the edited tape was transferred onto 16-mm film.
Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017) was a Japanese film director and video artist. In the late 1950s, Matsumoto began making works that fused avant-garde and documentary elements, as well as writing essays on film theory. In 1963, he published The Discovery of Film: The Avant-Garde and Documentary (Eizō no hakken: Avangyarudo to dokyumentarii, Sanichi-Shobo), which exerted a strong influence on the Japanese film movement. In the late ’60s, Matsumoto began to devote himself to experimental films and expanded cinema with For the Damaged Right Eye (Tsuburekakatta migime no tame ni, 1968). In 1969, he directed Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no sōretsu, 1969), a commercial narrative film that exemplified gay culture and the turmoil of the era. In 1970, he served as general director of the Textile Pavilion at the EXPO’70 in Osaka, where he presented Space Projection Ako (1970), a huge multi-projection film work. Matsumoto subsequently expanded his activities, producing countless cross-genre works including commercial narrative films such as Shura (1971) and Dogra Magra (1988), experimental films such as Atman (1975) and Engram (Kioku konseki, 1987), and video artworks such as Metastasis (Shinchintaisha, 1971) and Shift (Shift: Dansō, 1982). His most recent work, Tōrō Axe (2009–2012), was released in 2012.
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.