An evening around Toshio Matsumoto

A documentary that captures the process of traditional textile manufacture in Nishijin.

I wasn’t trying to depict the place called Nishijin or show people weaving but to give shape to the thick silent unvoiced voices lurking beneath Nishijin. I eliminated so-called ​“unusual” subjects or decisive moments and opted for the form of a cine poem that persistently piled up exacting images. Opinion was divided over the results but the fact it won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Documentary Film Festival helped clear the way for my next steps. (Toshio Matsumoto)

Toshio Matsumoto creates a surreal world by combining fragments of fantasies and delusions of a single woman. The mysterious color tones, which are far removed from the actual color palette, are due to the use of color infrared film.

Everything Visible is Empty depicts and copies the Heart Sutra, a well-known text about emptiness (sunyata) in Mahayana Buddhism. The calligraphy in the film is by Matsumoto himself.

Gintautė Skvernytė (1994) developed an interest in celluloid film as an extension of her work with paraffin. Corolla is her first 16mm film, a material which, like wax, is a sensitive membrane capable of supporting ephemeral images. The Latin title ​‘Corolla’ refers to the crown of a flower. The film consists of seven close-ups of eyelids on which a different petal is placed each time. The poetry of the images varies: sometimes the eye blinks so much that the flower seems like a moving butterfly; sometimes the applied leaf is so thin that the gentlest wind seems enough to make it curl up. The physical support of the film is part of the viewing experience, highlighting it’s tactile and sculptural qualities. The focus is how the vegetable and the human touch each other, and how a subtle intertwining occurs on the border of those two worlds.