Written in the late 1970s, this short text by the legendary experimental filmmaker and video artist turns to the Japanese term "eiga" to describe cinema not as “motion picture” but as a "reflected picture," an image projected on the screen by light. Linking his structural 16mm works to shadow-play and lantern shows with consideration of the material conditions of projection, Iimura sketches an ontology of cinema grounded in the relation between image, screen, and viewer as a single reflective field.1
In Japan, “movie” is called “eiga” which literally means “reflected picture.”2 This indicates how the person who adapted the word into Japanese regarded movie originally. In English, we say “motion picture” which literally means picture in motion. I prefer the word “eiga: reflected picture” to “motion picture.” It is because I am concerned in my films with “reflected cinema” rather than “motion picture.” “Reflected picture” emphasizes a state—not a motion—a state where a picture is reflected through light—not a picture which moves. In such a state, motion could be involved since it covers all situations including motion and non-motion: still.
Once when I talked on “reflected picture,” a person in the audience asked me if “reflected picture” meant a passive rather than an active one. I said that the term means neither passive nor active but a state where both are combined like a wave. You cannot separate a passive wave from an active wave.
I recall a lantern, which I saw at a village festival in Japan in my childhood. A lantern covered with screens on which shadows of paper fishes revolved. It was the first time I saw a “movie.” In fact, the word “reflected picture,” I believe, is deeply rooted in the traditional shadow-picture which had (and has) existed in the East long before movie was invented. In Chinese, “movie” is literally called “electric shadow picture.”3 That explains where movies came from for them. But in Japan, the term “reflected picture” seems to put more emphasis on a state.
Screen is a reflection where a film is projected and where it is viewed. The films in this program (Film Strips I and II, Cosmic Buddha, In the River, Shutter) were re-shot from the screen (either projected or from movie-scope).4 The shooting is a transformation of a projected image on a screen manipulated through time. Thus the films made from a screen have no “real” image but a-once-projected-one, in which I see the reality of movie. In other words, “reflected cinema” is projection art. It is in this way that movie exists as art.
My works are a state where film is reflected.
Takahiko Iimura’s “On Reflected Cinema” was written in the late 1970s. A French translation titled “Cinéma refété,” translated by Martine Bourdeau, was published in the Paris-based experimental film journal Cinéma différent, double issue no. 11–12 (May–June 1977). An English version appeared as a program note under the imprint "On Reflected Cinema, A Note on the Program" (New York: Japan Society, 1978), published by Japan Society in New York. The essay was later reprinted in the catalogue Film and Video: Takahiko Iimura (Anthology Film Archives, New York, 1990) and in its German-language adaptation Takahiko Iimura: Film und Video (Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, Berlin, 1992).
The Japanese word Iimura refers to is 映画 (eiga), written with the characters 映 (“to reflect / project”) and 画 (“picture”).
The Chinese term Iimura refers to is 電影/电影 (diànyǐng), the standard word for “film,” composed of 電/电 (“electric”) and 影 (“shadow”)
The four titles named here all refer to Takahiko Iimura’s own 16mm films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Film Strips I and II (1967-1970, black-and-white, silent) rework television news and documentary footage into dense, abstracted “strips” that hover between narrative and structural film. Cosmic Buddha (1970, color, sound) and In the River (1969–70, color, sound) were shot in and around Kathmandu: the former repeatedly re-films a looped image of a stone Buddha projected on a screen, while the latter extends a few seconds of a man bathing in a sacred river through repetition, superimposition, and re-photography to turn a brief document of ritual bathing into a durational, meditative study of motion and water. Shutter (1971, black-and-white, sound) records only the light from a projector with no film running through it; using different camera and projector speeds and then printing the footage first in positive and then in negative, Iimura generates complex flicker patterns that foreground the projection itself as the subject of the film.
