Organised in dialogue with The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop, the season showcases film works related to pop by artists featured in the exhibition including Keiichi Tanaami and Toshio Matsumoto as well as the first solo presentations in Europe of the films and performances of Jun’ichi Okuyama and Rikuro Miyai.
The title Throwing Shadows is a literal translation of the two kanji characters that constitute the word projection (tōei), which came into popular usage in the 1960s to emphasise film’s propensity for action that could break cinema out of its assumed stasis. By the time ‘expanded cinema’ was introduced as a term in Japan the mid-1960s largely for multi-projection film works, alternative approaches to moving image were also being explored in response to the changing media landscape and emergence of new technologies that proposed the concept of ‘intermedia.’ In the riveting time of pop, Japanese expanded cinema staged a playful collision between light and shadow for visual and aural stimulation.
Curated by Go Hirasawa, Julian Ross and George Clark.
Throwing Shadows: Japanese Expanded Cinema in the Time of Pop is a collaboration between Tate Modern and International Film Festival Rotterdam.