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Hideo, It’s Me, Mama​

Mako Idemitsu

This video is no longer available

Takeover: III. Mind Takeover Hideo, It’s Me, Mama​
Mako Idemitsu
1983

26 Minutes

Date
Repeat: Dec 15-16 ET

Hideo, It’s Me, Mama is a psychological melodrama that introduces narrative and structural devices that are integral to Idemitsu’s work. Exploring the flawed universe of the contemporary Japanese family, she focuses on a woman’s identity as mother through mother-child and husband-wife relationships. Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. In a cogent metaphor for familial relations in the media-saturated culture of contemporary Japan, Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen. Idemitsu’s poignant irony is embodied in the scene in which Mama, blind to her husband’s needs, caresses Hideo’s video image.

This screening is part of Mind Takeover, the third chapter of the online program Takeover curated by Julian Ross for e-flux Video & Film, and unfolding in six chapters between September 22 and December 15, 2022, with the films and videos of each chapter streaming for two weeks.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Category
Film, Gender, Psychology & Psychoanalysis
Subject
Video Art, Family, Japan, Mass Media & Entertainment
Return to III. Mind Takeover

Mako Idemitsu (b. Tokyo, 1940) creates domestic narratives that examine female identity within the context of the contemporary Japanese family. Echoing and subverting the popular melodramas of Japanese television, she applies a feminist critique to her fictions of the psychological “family romance.” Dramatizing the strict gender roles that shape mother-child and husband-wife relationships, she explores the role of women in a patriarchal, mediated culture. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Fukuyama Museum, Tokyo, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Idemitsu has exhibited her works widely throughout Japan and internationally at festivals and institutions including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Ottawa National Gallery, Canada; the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Venice Biennale; Asian-American International Video Festival, New York; Festival du Nouveau Cinema et de la Video, Montreal; Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany; and the Academy of Art, Honolulu. She lives in Tokyo.

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