Screening Short Experimental Films by Toshio Matsumoto

Thu 17 Nov 2011, 3 pm
DOCLAB

From DOCLAB:
Video Art Video welcomes you back to the experimental films series with a collection of experimental short by renowned Japanese filmmaker,  Toshio Matsumoto.

“what was important was how to inquire into the trilateral relationship between the artist, the real world, and film. Isn’t the extremely fascinating thing about cinema the fact that it instead dissolves the binary divisions between fact and fiction, between objective and subjective? If you ask me, fiction first of all is essentially an order created by cutting up and arranging an object from a certain point of view. In that sense, fictionality necessarily accompanies creation, and I think the documentary method possesses an actual meaning only in so far as it tries to formulate that order as an open reality. Classical genres may offer a standard for temporarily indexing perception, but they do begin to vacillate and change. That’s why I was against dividing cinema into completely different worlds through genres.” (Toshio Matsumoto).

A 1955 graduate of Tokyo University, Toshio Matsumoto is a pioneer of avant-garde experimental movies, multimedia, and video in his homeland and abroad. His first experimental short was _Song of the Stones (1963)_. His most famous work is 1969’s wildly experimental _Funeral Parade of Roses_, notorious in japan for its homosexual imagery. He has published several photo and art books, and is currently a professor and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. Matsumoto is also President of the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences.

The screening is non-profit and aims for studies and research only.

Following the screening is Q&A session.

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