To mark the final weeks of Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination, we present an online screening and virtual book launch featuring artistic and critical voices essential to viewing Gulliver’s immersive slide installation in context. In late-1960s Japan, debates around artistic innovation, politics, and technology found expression in pioneering modes of filmmaking and critical writing alike, making this dual focus on theory and practice all the more appropriate.

A selection of short films, organized by scholar Go Hirasawa, charts experimentation in multiple projection and performance across poetic and political registers, and is accompanied by a live virtual book launch for Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s (edited by Hirasawa, Julian Ross, and Ann Adachi-Tasch). These programs are presented in celebration of Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the Philadelphia-based organization whose mission of scholarship and preservation has nurtured new audiences and an international community of researchers around some the most daring—and most ephemeral—forms of moving image to come out of Japan.

February 11, 2021 – February 25, 2021

The Museum of Modern Art

Organized by scholar Go Hirasawa and Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator, Department of Film.

Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.

Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black and by Steven Tisch, with major contributions from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, ans the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation.

Mieko Shiomi. Disappearing Music for Face (Fluxfilm no. 4). 1965. 16mm film (black and white, silent), 12:07 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. © 2021 Mieko Shiomi
Shadow. 1968. Japan. Directed by Rikuro Miyai. 16mm preservation, dual-projection. Courtesy the artist and Collaborative Cataloging Japan

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