‘Sudden Outbreaks #4’

Experimental filmmaker and video artist, Takahiko Iimura is a pivotal figure in the history of the underground film who pioneered the first experimental film festival in Japan. Over the last fifty years he has achieved an international reputation, with numerous exhibitions and performances in Japan, the US, and Europe. In the era of the explosion of Underground Film in the United States, Iimura began making experimental film in Tokyo that resulted from reading the news from abroad, without actually seeing the films these news items were referring to. Iiumura's work explores a wide range of fields, from poetic cinema with Dadaist and Surrealist influences in the 1960s to a more structural approach through the 1970s, evoking parallels with the work of artists such as Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits. In the 1960s Iimura was associated with such avant-garde artists as Yoko Ono or the painter Genpei Akasegawa.