Last month Los Angeles was treated to a pair of singularly outstanding screenings of experimental cinema.
Tomonari Nishikawa, a Japanese filmmaker who is currently on faculty in the cinema department at Binghampton University, presented a program of his work at the Los Angeles Filmforum. Nishikawa’s practice is grounded in the physicality of film itself, and his works show an array of formal and technical investigations that are both playful and probing, each one addressing in direct ways alternate possibilities in the use of film.
The Super 8 series of Sketch Films for instance represent for Nishikawa a way of using film as a sketchbook, exploring visual ideas in time. Each of the films expands in radical ways the fundamental principle of how film works, ie: a collection of still images that, when shown at a certain speed, begin to create an illusion of unity. Exploiting that isn’t in itself a groundbreaking idea, but the way that Nishikawa extracts with an almost unbelievable precision all variety of abstract animation in color, texture, depth and shape out of accretions left behind in the viewer’s mind from commonplace representational images made on the street is breathtaking.
In his more recent pair of films Tokyo–Ebisu and Shibuya–Tokyo Nishikawa collapses half hour periods of time into the length of a single wind on a Bolex, creating mosaic images of train stations on Tokyo’s busiest train line. The shimmering images are accompanied by a soundtrack made in very much the same way, by layering 30 nearly equivalent durations of sound recording made in the same place over a period of time.
While in town, Nishikawa also brought a program of recent 8 mm films (Super 8 and Fujifilm’s Single 
made by emerging and established Japanese artists and presented it at the Echo Park Film Center. It was a rare opportunity to see extremely new work (the oldest film on the program was from 2006, with the majority of the films made since 2009) all projected from the camera originals. Most of the films could be considered to fall into the personal/poetic tradition of much of Brakhage’s work, in the best sense.
Films like Hajime Kawaguchi’s Aurora on the Palm and Hiromi Idei’s Yoru no Kimochi (Feelings of A Night) utilize vastly disparate sources of material, masterfully edited together to create an ambiguous whole that does precisely what film is capable of doing at its best—expressing ideas that cannot be said in words, but can only be shared through moving images. Chiori Morioka’s Rinse in Shampie and Rei Hayama’s Kodomo ga Mushi no Shigai wo Umeni Iku (A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects) both displayed a command of the physical material, the former being a joyous hand-processed, hand-painted collage, and the later utilizing numerous layers of contact printing to obliterate the image over the course of the piece.
Images of strips of film from the Sketch Films by Tomonari Nishikawa.
Still from Tokyo–Ebisu by Tomonari Nishikawa.
Still from Aurora on the Palm by Hajime Kawaguchi