Exotic Nippon, 1963
My Sight is Lined with Visions~Package Collection
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8m 16s
EXOTIC NIPPON. A travelogue. A postcard lost in the mail for decades. A found film
bought for five dollars at a swap meet of the movie drive in parking lot on a
sweltering Sunday afternoon. An 8mm document of the schizophrenic post-modern
condition – post industrial, post war, post identity. Spilling over whilst remaining
mute.
An early more punk poster for SOME DIVINE WIND had its logline as “CLASH – CITY
– CULTURE” and when I transferred EXOTIC NIPPON to video to watch, it had
everything in it that was circling around within my film. Strangely enough, years
before moving east from California, I bought another 8mm at the same swap meet –
NEW YORK – that filmed Greenwich Village with the same wonder and scrutiny as
Tokyo and I fantasized about an army of Lumière-type camera crews dispatched
around the world with rolls of Kodachrome. Whenever I could, I would insist on
EXOTIC NIPPON being screened without introduction before SOME DIVINE WIND as
if mysteriously re-attached to my film and in interviews at the time, I would often be
asked who influenced my filmmaking and I’d reply "Donald Judd!" as I was curious at
the time of linking blocks of material and information one after the other as some
wall construction. And so, you have it here as once intended. It’s not my film but I
wish it was.
-- Roddy Bogawa, Honolulu, Hi, January 2021
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