Takashi Nakajima

Biography

Takashi Nakajima is one of the major figures of Japanese experimental cinema from the 1970s. Although Nakajima had already encountered the 8mm camera during his high school years, his effective debut work was Nangan’en (1971). In the early 1970s, experimental films that re-photographed still images and film frames one by one in order to analyze the mechanisms of cinema were highly popular. Nakajima’s Cessna became one of the representative works of this structural approach to filmmaking. However, beginning in the 1980s, Nakajima’s experimental films gradually adopted a stronger narrative tendency. Even so, one can recognize a continuity with his earlier works in the reflective way he approaches the structure of storytelling itself. Focusing mainly on his 8mm works from the 1970s, this program aims to trace the evolution of Nakajima’s experimental cinema.