Projection 33


STOM SOGO
Films by the Japanese moving-image artist Stom Sogo (1975-2012)

6:30pm / Monday 29 July 2013  
Irish Film Institute, 6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin
Tickets 


In this month’s programme we celebrate the life and work of Japanese artist and filmmaker ‘Stom Sogo’. Stom Sogo was born in Osaka in 1975 and moved to the United States in 1992. He quickly became a seminal figure in the community of experimental filmmakers that evolved around Anthology Film Archives in New York – befriending and working with contemporary filmmakers like Moira Tierney, Dónal O’Céilleachair, Julius Ziz, Masha Godovannaya, Andy Lampert, to name but a few – and the grand old master Jonas Mekas. He was a poetic, passionate and prolific moving-image artist whose potential was cut short by his untimely death in Japan in July 2012.

For more than a decade he created films and videos with a distinctive, often aggressive, but beautiful vocabulary of looping, re-shooting and overlaying primal imagery of bodies, faces and intimate moments – but with expressionistic, jolting editing rhythms blended with a simultaneously impressionistic colour palette and sound-scape.



SILVERPLAY 2002

“[A] movie’s reality should be as nasty and fucked up as possible, so we want to get fuck out of the theater and hope for something better in life…. I try not to have a message or even word in my movie. But I usually have some sick stories behind each of the movies. Those are just mental eye candy that it taste sweet first, seizure second.” –Stom Sogo


His work was a highlight of MoMA’s ‘Big As Life’ 8mm survey, the 2002 Whitney Biennial and many editions of the New York Underground Film Festival.


PERIODICAL EFFECT 2001

I myself had been in communication with Stom many times via e-mails and letters and he had sent me his films to add to our collective programmes. But by spring 2011 we had never actually met. After the earthquake in March 2011 I realized that the frequent trips I had been making to Japan were coming to an end and Stom and I were determined to meet. He had already been in Ireland to take part in one of the screenings at Vivienne Dick’s ‘Live@8’ Club in Galway in 2008, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it to that event at the time.

If I may reflect here for a moment on the one valued meeting I had with Stom.


LIGHT WITHOUT COLOURS

We met one evening in Tokyo in late spring 2011. Over a mountain of rice and beer we explored the world we had in common but had never physically shared - Anthology. We then realized, with excitement, that we had not yet explored the same territory in Japan and determined that the next day we would scour Shibuya for small venues to host experimental screenings.

We spent the next afternoon slowly working our way towards Shibuya. The closer we got the more galleries and potential screening venues would crop up and we would pop in somewhere and have a quick chat with a programmer or manager. We were forming a plan. The plan also got more ambitious as we started taking in the occasional bar aswell. Shooting, negotiating, drinking, shooting, negotiating, drinking - we were getting up a good rhythm.

One of the clearest memories I now have of that weekend is sharing a taxi with Stom back to Ebisu. It was about 2 or 3am and we were just pulling away from the Shibuya club and Stom slumped back in the back seat of the cab, exhausted but with a big smile on his face and he said 'Oh great! After so many years we never met, and now we have 3 whole days in Tokyo!'

I arrived back in Ireland a few days later with a pouch of fliers and contact details to follow up on from our ‘reconnaissance’. I sent a few e-mails to make sure he had got home to Osaka in one piece, but given how sporadic communication had always been with him I was not alarmed at receiving no reply.

One morning late last year I heard the news that just over a year after I saw him he passed away in his apartment in Osaka. Although the news took a while to reach his wider filmmaking community, once it was circulating it traveled like wildfire and everybody expressed a need for his work to be ‘collected and saved’, so to speak.


SLOW DEATH 2000

In the year since his passing he has had retrospectives and screenings in Anthology Film Archives itself, Rotterdam Film Festival, Galleries in New York and St. Petersburg and now, thanks to his friends and collaborators Moira Tierney and Andy Lampert, who has facilitated many of the screenings and is currently archiving his work, we are proud to be able to present him in the Experimental Film Club.

There will be a Super8 projector set up in the auditorium for the event. Moira Tierney will be acting as projectionist. We will be screening Super8 films provided by Moira and Anthology.



Alan Lambert, July 2013




SILVERPLAY 2002

Total anarchy, pushing the limits, going out/within further and further, marveling at all the beauties and laughing at all the absurdities. To me this is what Stom was all about at all times.“ - Raha Raissnia

Stom was both cunning and tender, even now I use him to measure imposters. He certainly laughed at the solemnity with which the courtiers behave. He always wanted more, again.” – Albert Herter

FILM INFO:

IMITATION OF SOUTH, 16 MINS, 2002, BLACK & WHITE, SUPER-8MM
SLOW DEATH, 15 MINS, 2000, BLACK & WHITE SUPER-8MM
GUIDED BY VOICES, 10 MINS, 2000, COLOUR, DVD
TTT (TRY THIS TABLET), 16 MINS, 2004, COLOUR, DVD
C FOR CIAS, 11 MINS, 2008, COLOUR, DVD