Three Frames Create a Triangle when played at 24 FPS
Constant sideways, diagonal, and upside down images of buildings and windows simulate the feeling of falling. A flash of grass means you've hit the ground. The images of a city flash at you quickly in Apollo, like the confused depictions of life and surroundings before a suicide. It also simulates the hyper speed of driving down a highway and viewing the country side through a rear view mirror.
In Market Street, images of consumption overwhelm the senses, numbing and deranging them. Neon signs during the day time, in black and white, lose their ability to stun, when repeated over and over. Grates and images of textured sidewalks pass by as if you're actually walking along them. A montage of squares and then of circles. How long is Market Street? It feels neverending. A last shot slowly pans across a street and stops, giving us a brief glimpse into the lives of the walkers, then back to the grind of skyscrapers and decorative trees until we descend into black, into night.
Sketch Films (#1,2,3)
An arbitrary headline is given at the beginning of each film (each day). A repetion of just drain covers and man holes could potentially go on for minutes, each different from the last. A documentation of various public works and city structures. The curved necks of streetlights are compared to bent tree branches one frame to the next. A barrage of numbers on the next day. Signs and lines alternate. Pausing at any moment reveals a hidden world that could have been missed in the flurry of images. It reminds one of the sci-fi learning process: a barrage of seemingly meaningless images cut up and juxtaposed and flashed before the eyes as rapidly as possible. Sketch 3 reveals a sideways city of bricks and art deco. Buildings spin as they change positions each frame. All filmed on either 8 or 16 mm in black and white.
Nishikawa is a strong believer in the analog method of cutting and splicing, though he doesn't often edit anything he does. "I will be dead before film is dead".
Nishikawa is a strong believer in the analog method of cutting and splicing, though he doesn't often edit anything he does. "I will be dead before film is dead".
Protip: try to sync these up to music, they're all silent.
View Market Street through this website:
http://www.tomonarinishikawa.com/film.htm#MS
View Market Street through this website:
http://www.tomonarinishikawa.com/film.htm#MS
Actually, you can't view the movies on this website or anywhere else on the internet which kind of sucks, but I'm working on getting them up here.
ReplyDeleteRecently, I met Nishikawa, and he explained that his purpose in flashing so many images before the eyes is to create an optical illusion that tricks your eyes and your brain into seeing shapes where there are none.
He also explained his spaghetti technique and op-illusion technique in detail so that anyone could replicate it if they wanted, haha.
He was a pretty laid back guy who worked as a trucker for a few years before moving to the States and going to university for film. For someone who works in the art industry, he lacks pretension or even the desire to attribute meaning to any of his films.