Zone (film)

Zone
Directed byTakashi Ito
Release date
  • 1995 (1995)
Running time
13 minutes
CountryJapan

Zone is a 1995 Japanese experimental short film directed by Takashi Ito. It features a headless figure restrained to a chair, surrounded by a ghostly, masked figure, a model train, and other imagery.[1]

In 1996, Zone won a Main Prize at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany.[2][3]

In 2024, Ito adapted his film in truncated form to a music video for the British post-punk band Squid.[4][5][6]

Themes and interpretations

Ito described Zone thus:[2]

A film about a man without a face. His arms and legs bound with ropes, a disabled man is still without even a quiver in a white room. This man, enwrapped in wild delusions, is also a reconstruction of myself. A series of unusual scenes in this room that expresses what lies inside me. I tried to create a connection between memories, nightmares and violent images.

Chihiro Minato, curator of the 2000 arts exhibition Serendipity: Photography, Video, Experimental Film and Multimedia Installation from Asia, wrote that Zone displays "the subject as an insubstantial surface" that is "suffused within ... [and] ... turns into a rapidly changing game of speed and afterimages."[7] Chihiro likened the film to a séance, a parallel he argues is reflected in its setting: "a bleak, artificial environment surrounded by steel-reinforced concrete walls."[7]

In 2015, following its screening at the 61st International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Yaron Dahan of Mubi described Zone as a culmination of the experimentation Ito exhibited in his previous films Thunder (1982), Ghost (1984), and Grim (1985).[1] In Zone, Dahan writes, a "headless plaster-man is bound to a chair surrounded by recognizable images from his previous work. A ghost inhabits this imagined space: a Noh-masked, light-draped child-demon haunting the artist's passage into the life stage of fatherhood, necessitating a re-evaluation if not reinvention of the self."[1]

Home media

In 2009, Zone was released on DVD along with 19 other films by Ito as part of the Takashi Ito Film Anthology.[8] The DVD includes behind-the-scenes images of construction plans used in the production of Zone.[9]

References

  1. ^ a b c Dahan, Yaron (4 June 2015). "Ghosts of Time and Light: The Experimental Cinema of Ito Takashi". MUBI. Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  2. ^ a b "伊藤高志《フィルモグラフィー》" [Takashi Ito Filmography]. ImageForum.co.jp (in Japanese). Archived from the original on 16 January 2023. Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  3. ^ Boyce, Laurence (14 March 2015). "Oberhausen Announces New Programme Focusing on Ito Takashi". Cineuropa. Archived from the original on 19 April 2021. Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  4. ^ Monroe, Jazz (12 November 2024). "Squid Announce New Album Cowards, Share Video for New Song "Crispy Skin"". Pitchfork.
  5. ^ "Squid announce their third studio album, Cowards". The Line of Best Fit.
  6. ^ "Squid Announce New Album 'Cowards': Hear "Crispy Skin"". Stereogum. 12 November 2024.
  7. ^ a b Magnan-Park, Aaron Han Joon; Marchetti, Gina; Tan, See Kam, eds. (2018). The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 142–143. ISBN 978-1349958214.
  8. ^ "Takashi Ito Film Anthology (DVD)". British Film Institute (BFI). Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  9. ^ "Takashi Ito's Film Works". Midnight Eye. 10 August 2010. Retrieved 17 January 2023.


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