Movies: Mako Idemitsu

Video began as a medium that inspired discovery. This art documentary traces the expressive roots of “media art” in Japan — works of video, performances, and installations created using video technology that allowed for free and creative visual expre...

The psychosexual drama Yoji, What's Wrong With You? examines the identity of women as mothers in Japanese culture, through an Oedipal narrative of a skewed "family romance." When Yoji announces to his mother that he wants her to meet a new girlfriend...

1983 art piece by Mako Idemitsu...

In Kae, Act Like A Girl, Idemitsu continues her experimental narrative exploration of women's roles in contemporary Japan with a tale of women's liberationist awakening. Here she presents a young female artist's conflict with the traditional, patriar...

One of a series of Idemitsu’s works which deal with housewives buried in everyday life. Idemitsu overlapped a 16 mm work that had Yoneyama Mamako pantomiming in her “Tango of a Hosewife” for the Commemoration of the International Women’s year, 1975. ...

In Idemitsu's seminal women's liberationist video, the image of a tampon swirling in a toilet bowl slowly appears, as the artist speaks about the troubling roles, responsibilities and expectations of women in a clinical tone. Minimal in composition, ...

A plan of a house that is reminiscent of a miniature garden used as a psychological treatment to assist in self-confirmation at a middle-class housewive’s tea party....

A woman’s image as a mind-scape, after she had plastic surgery....

This film shows the images of a dancing woman who is wearing Kimono overlapping another image which a naked man is dancing. This is one of the original psychological concepts of C.G. Jung. For women, Animus is an image of a man by projection of her m...

Kiyoko's Situation articulates the deeply embedded cultural roles of Japanese women through the parallel stories of two female artists, Kiyoko and Tani. In Idemitsu's narrative-within-a-narrative, "Kiyoko's situation" is played out on a television mo...

The second part of a trilogy, Great Mother (YUMIKO) is a domestic melodrama that examines the cultural and familial role of Japanese women by tracing the psychology of a turbulent mother-daughter relationship. Yumiko, a rebellious young woman from an...

At Any Place 1, 1975, film, 16 min, color. Casted over the sky, images of people are suggested as shapes of clouds...

A woman performs domestic chores, watched by a television displaying the image of her own eye. The home is recast as a space of surveillance, control and repetitive labor....

Taking place during the women’s liberation movement, Idemitsu filmed the Womanhouse which became her first 16mm film work. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly organized the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) ...

Whispering Light, 1985, film, 10:50 min, color In this emblematic personal film, light and shadow of plants is successfully constructed over the subjective gaze of the narrator who is working through her mother’s death....

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At Yukigaya 1, 1974, film, 3 min, color. A comical mindscape, the film stars Sam Francis who was Idemitsu’s ex-husband....

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 th...

Today, Japan is envied by the world for her economic prosperity, which however, has resulted in producing this sort of average family. Its contains a wife who has to serve her husband, a preoccupied businessman, and who showers all her attention on h...

This film was made for a 3 minutes film festival held in Japan. A cup noodle is ready in 3 minutes....