Takashi Ito (director)

Takashi Ito was born in 1956 in Fukuoka, Japan, as the second son of his mother, a nurse, and his father, a journalist and fan of film. As a child, Ito watched anime produced by Toei Animation, as well as Disney animated films, but was disallowed by his father from seeing kaiju films like those in the Godzilla series. After being repeatedly asked by Ito, his father eventually acquiesced to letting him attend a double feature of the kaiju films Daimajin and Gamera vs. Barugon; he later recalled that his resulting elation worried his parents. Ito also enjoyed drawing manga, both copying and creating original stories based on works by such artists as Shotaro Ishinomori, Osamu Tezuka, and Mitsuteru Yokoyama. Between 6th grade and junior high school, Ito created a monster-themed manga titled Battle. At age 18, Ito experienced a stomach rupture and was sent to a hospital to undergo an emergency operation. Following the procedure, one of the doctors reportedly told him that, had he arrived three hours later than he did, he would have died. Two years after graduating from senior high school, Ito enrolled at the Kyushu Institute of Design. There, he joined the film research club, photography club, and basketball club, and borrowed an 8 mm film camera from his relatives, which he began using to create short films. He attended an exhibition showcasing works by filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto; upon viewing Matsumoto's 1975 experimental short Ātman at the exhibition, Ito thought, "I want to make a movie like this." When he learned that Matsumoto was coming to work at the university, Ito abandoned plans to get an immediate job and decided to stay enrolled in the school. ==Career==

1977–1981: Noh, Movement trilogy, and Spacy One of Ito's earliest film works is Noh (1977), which was shot on 8 mm and features photographs of Noh masks against different landscapes; Noh was particularly inspired by Ātman. In 1982, Spacy screened at the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in France. Following a later screening at the University of Würzburg, Kawanaka recalled, a hat was passed around the audience that eventually filled with a "mountain" of banknotes and coins. time-lapse, and long exposure photography. Thunder, Ghost, and Grim have been particularly noted for their ominous atmospheres and imagery, using light, sound design, and long-exposure and time-lapse photography to invoke the feeling of spaces haunted by ghostly presences. Thunder screened at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival in 1984, and was later shown at the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art in 1996. 1990s–present: Later shorts, retrospectives and Toward Zero Ito continued to make experimental shorts into the 1990s and 2000s, with his output including The Moon (1994), Zone (1995), Monochrome Head (1997), Dizziness (2001), and A Silent Day (2002). In January 2009, Ito exhibited a video installation he created titled The Dead Dance in Kyoto. In 2010, Ito was an arts professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design. == Filmography ==

Short films • Noh (1977) • Movement (1978) • Movement 2 (1979) • Movement 3 (1980) • Spacy (1981) • Box (1982) • Thunder (1982) • Screw (1982) • Drill (1983) • Ghost (1984) • Grim (1985) • Photodiary (1986) • Wall (1987) • ''Photodiary '87'' (1987) • ''Devil's Circuit'' (1988) • ''The Mummy's Dream'' (1989) • Venus (1990) • December Hide-and-Go-Seek (1993) • The Moon (1994) • Zone (1995) • Apparatus M (1996) • Monochrome Head (1997) • Dizziness (2001) • Double (2001) • A Silent Day (2002) • Unbalance (2006) • Tokyo Loop (2006) Feature films • Toward Zero (2021) == References ==