Isao Yamada
飾画 Les illuminations
March 24th - May 27th, 2023
Isao Yamada
飾画 LES ILLUMINATIONS
Opening with Isao Yamada : March, 24th 7pm-10pm - Music performances by Terra 86 + 16mm screening of Fragmentation of Night, Isao Yamada, 1996
飾画 LES ILLUMINATIONS is a solo exhibition by Japanese artist and filmmaker, Isao Yamada, featuring a film installation and photographic works based on his ongoing 81-reel Super-8mm work of the same title. Yamada has been working on this film project consistently since 2015, editing everything by hand without digital processing, as he has done since 1977. Yamada created the 5-minute clip for the installation at The Film Gallery as a brief glimpse of the 5-hour-long film.
Each piece of the graphical work, made as a poster or a postcard, includes quotes by Arthur Rimbaud in Japanese, all hand-written by Yamada,
who describes himself as a time and space traveler. Yamada’s work emphasizes the materiality of film through Rimbaud’s poetry in order to reinterpret the origins of cinema. They are all written in Yamada’s calligraphy “飾画” - meaning “colored plates,” the literal Japanese translation of ‘Les Illuminations’.
Events program :
April 14th, 8pm SOUND PERFORMANCE by Simon Fisher Turner - @The Film Gallery - 43 rue du fb St-Martin Paris 10ème
April 15th, 8pm SCREENING - @Cinéma L’Archipel - 17 bd de Strasbourg Paris 10ème Isao Yamada, I’ve Heard the Ammonite Murmur, 1992, 1h10min
Yamada began his artistic career at Shuji Terayama’s Tenjousajiki theatre company. His filmography
includes “I’ve Heard the Ammonite’s Murmur” (1992), “The Soul Odyssey” (2003), and “Sturm und Drang”
(2014). He has been making experimental films since 1977 and has over a hundred films to his credit. His
short experimental films have been selected and screened at film festivals in Japan and abroad, including
Cannes, Oberhausen, Stockholm and Nancy. He still works in Super-8mm and edits by hand. His films are
distinguished by their emphasis on bleary non-digital optical sensations, shimmering moments, and a
sense of disorientation. His films frequently float between reality and dream due to the sensually aesthetic
treatment of subtlety and tranquility, which is mostly done without dialogue. Yamada also works in manga,
painting and graphic design, using his distinctive calligraphic font known as “yamavica-moji” which he
always incorporates into his film work.
“Yamada Isao’s films are recurrently linked in a logic of recollection and inspiration, as if mimicking the
episodic nature of dreams and memories. Film cuts are broken up as if to leave something unsaid. There is
a sense of dream that can almost be touched but cannot. All of his individual works transcend their
differences in content and invite the viewer to a common horizon - a place that could be called the ‘field of
dreams’.... When Yamada runs the camera, the ‘I’ becomes the camera’s gaze and wanders out into
another field of dreams – the screen. He is a flâneur who navigates this uncertain and unpredictable world
of filmic images.”
Nishijima Norio (film critic)