Takashi Ito

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

Jidai-geki starring Kanjuro Arashi

"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

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.

"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

"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

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.

"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

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

"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."

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.

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

"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

A video short created in collaboration with Takashi Inagaki.

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.

"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

"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)

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

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

A film of the interactive video installation and performance art Double/Bunshin that Ito did in collaboration with Butoh dancer Setsuko Yamada in 2009.

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

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.

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