Between Fantasy and the Everyday: The Films of Utako Koguchi

Join us on Monday, June 15 at 7pm for Between Fantasy and the Everyday, a program of films by Utako Koguchi, guest-curated and introduced by Cici Peng.

The early 1990s saw a significant surge of women filmmakers entering the Japanese experimental film scene, bringing a shift in focus away from the abstract structuralism of earlier periods and toward the materiality of the body and its relationship to the city, with a renewed attention to lived experience and emerging forms of performance. Trained in theatre at Waseda University before turning to 8mm film, Utako Koguchi became a key figure in this feminist movement and an important figure in queer film history.

Koguchi has made numerous works that turn toward the personal, including her seminal, diaristic O-DE-KA-KE Diary (1988), which follows a woman on an odyssey through Tokyo’s urban and natural landscapes, and her intimate portrait of her grandmother in The Sleeping Flower (1991), which negotiates mortality through performance. The ambiguities and fluidity of queer identities are playfully rendered in her stop-motion film A Dandelion, Rosaceae (1990) and in Ophelia’s Favorite Book 3 (1995), which takes the form of an imaginary girls’ magazine to tease out questions of girlhood and female authorship.
Program

Utako Koguchi, O-DE-KA-KE Diary (1988, 47 minutes)
Shot on 8mm with a handheld camera, Koguchi performs as a wandering figure who traverses the urban and natural landscapes of Tokyo. A diary-film in which the distance between filmmaker, performer, and subject collapses entirely, this film won Koguchi the Grand Prize at Image Forum Festival in 1989.

Utako Koguchi, The Sleeping Flower (1991, 7 minutes)
An intimate portrait of Koguchi’s grandmother and a tender, oblique meditation on mortality through performance, this film won the Special Jury Prize at Image Forum Festival in 1992.

Utako Koguchi, A Dandelion, Rosaceae (1990, 8 minutes)
Using stop-motion animation, what Koguchi called 無理矢理アニメ (forced animation), twin sisters Lulu and Lala go through enchanting bodily transformations. The film is a playful and disorienting exploration of sexuality, gender ambiguity, and the chaos of desire, made in the shadow of the AIDS crisis.

Utako Koguchi, Ophelia’s Favorite Books (1995, 30 minutes)
This three-part series seeks to trace the origin of the imagery evoked by the word shōjo (girl) within the girls’ magazines and novels published in rapid succession at the end of the Meiji era. Each chapter of the film opens onto the literary worlds of three fictional women writers born in 1896: Yoshiya Nobuko, Ozaki Midori, and Sayo Sakurako.

Biographies:

Utako Koguchi (b. 1961) is a Japanese filmmaker, visual artist, and professor whose career spans experimental film, documentary, animation, television, and independent media production. Alongside her own artistic practice, she has played a major role in mentoring emerging filmmakers. She currently serves as a professor in the Department of Moving Image at Musashino Art University.

Cici Peng is a writer and film curator based in London. Her work often explores marginal experimental film histories with a focus on East and South East Asian artists. Her writing has appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Screen Slate, Film Comment, Another Gaze, and e-flux, among other publications.

Many thanks to Mia Parnall for the English translations and subtitles for this program.

For more information, contact [email protected].
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave, a garage door, leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.