Takashi Ito

Story about a poor Japanese woman living near an American army base who resorts to prostitution.

Jidai-geki starring Kanjuro Arashi

Haunting light and haunted spaces, otherworldly movement and abstracted time. A ghost visits an apartment complex.

A woman’s face disappearing behind, and emerging from, a pair of hands. Flashing lights. An empty building full of dark hallways. Designs drawn in the air with light and long-exposure cinematography.

This is a film about a man without a face. His arms and legs, bound with ropes, the disabled man is still without even a shudder in a white room. A series of unusual scenes in this room expresses what lies between memories, nightmares, and violent images.

A series of 16 "short stories" created by the creator's group Images Forum.

Haunting light and haunted spaces, otherworldly movement and abstracted time. A ghost visits an apartment complex.

A woman’s face disappearing behind, and emerging from, a pair of hands. Flashing lights. An empty building full of dark hallways. Designs drawn in the air with light and long-exposure cinematography.

This is a film about a man without a face. His arms and legs, bound with ropes, the disabled man is still without even a shudder in a white room. A series of unusual scenes in this room expresses what lies between memories, nightmares, and violent images.

A series of 16 "short stories" created by the creator's group Images Forum.

Fragmentary stories of two students with a video camera and an old butoh dancer who finds himself followed by a woman are interwoven.

Fragmentary stories of two students with a video camera and an old butoh dancer who finds himself followed by a woman are interwoven.

"I stuck landscape photographs on the faces of a cube and shot them frame-by-frame. It looks like the box is forever revolving, but in truth it only revolves 90 degrees. The trick to this sensation is fundamentally the same as the one used in SPACY. I was aiming at disturbing our awareness of space in the movement from the three-dimensional to a plane and back again." Takashi Ito

Without warning, the image of a girl wildly waving a baseball bat that slices through the air leaps to my mind. Such speed also reminds me of the rhythm of the filmmaker's previous works. Or is it a symbol of teenage madness? A ceremony to summon some creature from a legend? -Takashi Nakajima

"With this work, I developed/fleshed out the idea I had when making GHOST of peeling only the skin from various objects in the room, floating the skins in midair and then sticking them on different objects. This film was also shot entirely frame-by-frame with long-exposures. Along with GRIM, its meaning is 'as if to do forever.'" - Takashi Ito

A depiction of a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death.

"Three Women, is an ambitious work designed to be shown on multiple screens in a movie theater. Moving a step forward from the use of multiple screens as an expansion of cinema as exemplified by Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), it presents what is literally a conceptual expansion of cinema in the form of a filmic work experienced in a theater in which the 15-channel, surround-sound audio constructed by Araki Masamitsu and Ito’s visuals organically intertwine."

"A long time ago, I would often dream of the uncanny and mystical landscape that appears in moonlight. Irrational landscapes and spaces filled with unspeakable pleasures like a black object that revolves slowly while flying over the scattered clouds that float in the night sky, their lumps illuminated by the light of the moon." - Takashi Ito

The film follows the common sense storytelling of a dramatic film in which people meet other people and create relationships, but instead of converging into a single narrative, the aim was to create a film that diffuses and throws us into a sea of chaotic images. two couples in an uneasy relationship. Is she my fantasy, or am I her fantasy? The boundaries blur, and the anxiety about existence gradually grows.

The film follows the common sense storytelling of a dramatic film in which people meet other people and create relationships, but instead of converging into a single narrative, the aim was to create a film that diffuses and throws us into a sea of chaotic images. two couples in an uneasy relationship. Is she my fantasy, or am I her fantasy? The boundaries blur, and the anxiety about existence gradually grows.

A 44-sec test reel for Spacy, which Ito just found back in his apartment back in 2025

"The further developed and completed version of a 15-second advertisement for an interior design firm on which I had worked. It repeats over and over again the violent back-and-forth, half-revolving motions of a giant brick storehouse inside the frame of a hand-held photograph. I wanted to emphasis the flat nature of the photograph while creating a dynamic feeling of depth inside the photograph's frame." - Takashi Ito

Takashi Ito's first film. Little information exists other than specifying it as a "collaboration."

Ito is one of the leading experimental filmmakers in Japan. He graduated from Art and Technology Department of Kyushu Institute of Design in 1983 during which he made a debut with the film SPACY in 1981 (Inagaki who created sound effects for the film was also a filmmaker and his classmate at the institute). He was rather a premature virtuoso.

A film of the interactive video installation and performance art Double/Bunshin that Ito did in collaboration with Butoh dancer Setsuko Yamada in 2001.

Made when I was simply beside myself with excitement from seeing Toshio Matsumoto's ATMAN. I placed photographs of Noh masks in a variety of backgrounds and pulled the camera aimed at the photographs towards them and away from them, circled it around them and into them as if the camera had gone mad. I wanted to express my weird, eerie feelings towards Noh masks with brutal images. (Takashi Ito)

A film in which the one 60-story skyscraper that soars in the spaces between roofs spins with incredible speed. I centered the circumference with its 400 or 500 meter radius on the skyscraper and divided it into 48 sections, then took photographs from those spots and shot the photographs frame by frame.

In the final scene of my last work, A SILENT DAY, a girl was filming herself with an 8mm camera on a railway bridge. Although the film doesn’t depict the incident, she later jumped off the bridge in an attempt to kill herself. Two girls witnessed her attempted suicide, and in this film I am attempting to depict the broken state of their psyches. In this piece, various images have been generated as a result of my professional interaction with a number of young people with mental illnesses, and the unstable state of mind which I have often experienced in recent days - Takashi Ito

A test work for SPACY. I had a mad interest in the kind of sensation of visual movement gained from subsequent rushings into the mise-en-abyme space created in the space between two mirrors facing each other, and was totally absorbed in this when I made the film. These images of hurtling entrances born at last out of repeated failure excited even myself. (Takashi Ito)

8mm short film, presumably an expansion of Drill.

A field of wilted sunflowers, a group of public housing units turned into ruins. Two girls who are like alter egos of each other. They wander around with a camera, one pointing it at mysterious things and at herself, the other hanging a black dress in various places and taking pictures of it.

"Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his joys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank." - Takashi Ito

Looking for a place to die? This work depicts the interwining, melding and chaotic coming together of a story of a woman in black wandering trough a city and a story of a girl engaging in destructive activities. Is the girl the woman’s nightmare?

Looking for a place to die? This work depicts the interwining, melding and chaotic coming together of a story of a woman in black wandering trough a city and a story of a girl engaging in destructive activities. Is the girl the woman’s nightmare?

A work produced for the Morimura Yasumasa Exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, (April 6 to June, 1996). It was shown in an old-style theater constructed within the exhibit space that featured photographs of Morimura playing famous foreign and Japanese actresses.

A video short created in collaboration with Takashi Inagaki.

Early 8mm short film, first of three works in the Movement series.

"His films are like a roller-coaster. His way of throwing the act of seeing into utter confusion is an attack on the eyes in their corporeal function, and to attack the eyes is to take on tile body itself as your opponent. The film makes you break out in sweat only by shooting a safe, peaceful gymnasium in the dark." (Koharu Kisaragi)

"The majority of my 8-mm works were made for the three-minute "Personal Focus" film special put on in Fukuoka. This film is an animation of photographs I had taken on a regular basis as a sort of diary, and was made to have a rough feel to it." - Takashi Ito

8mm short film.

"In the early afternoon, a mother holding her child stands still in the park of a housing project. The kind of sight that is a symbol of beauty and love. Be as that may be, they have no face. The camera is aimed persistently at the spot from which they have vanished as if to find something. A work that began out of the search to understand the relation between the family and the self." - Takashi Ito

"The filming of the entrance to the company dormitory in which the film-maker was living. Centering the film on one pillar, he warps the spaces to the left and right and creates an unstable space similar to painting that employs anamorphosis. Made as were SPACY and BOX with a large number of photographs, the film ends with a violent movement, but is poetic for this." - Takashi Nakajima

There are three works in the MOVEMENT series. At the time, I was fascinated by the ability of an 8-mm camera to shoot frame-by-frame. I enjoyed visual experiences that left the everyday and the feeling of speed spun out by compressed or chopped-up time. (Takashi Ito)

The filmic version of a city in which all surface beauty has rotted away. In order to find images of death like landscapes of the city from which people have vanished, and buildings from which the decorations have been stripped away and the inner organs exposed, I walked all over Tokyo taking photographs, then animated them. (T.I.)

I turned my gaze to the various events in daily life and made this filmic diary in a manner as if confessing my feelings. Of course, since I was making the film, I wanted to depict these feelings and events with tricky techniques. I used various methods to shoot photographs of a relative's wedding, the landscape I see from window of my house, commemorative travel photographs and the like frame-by-frame.

A video installation that Takashi Ito exhibited in January 2009 in Kyoto.