This abstract work is composed of multiple images of light reflecting on a surface of the water. With acoustic noisy music, grains of light move like a swarm of microorganisms. This world of light, which gradually swells, stretching out as if trying to cover the screen, gives us the sense that the universe is moving from microscosmos to macrocosmos and stimulates the viewer's imagination.

“I think his soundtracks are critical to my work. He knows about the contrast between image and sound. For example, in On Generation and Corruption, I explained to him why I made the film and how I made it, and also wrote a sort of graphic score and explained what was happening in this abstraction and what kind of things I had shot. That’s it. I always get surprised, even though we have already collaborated in… seven films maybe? (Eight if we include the installation/performance). He uses a different approach every time, different instruments… In our first collaboration, No is E, he used a guitar and many electronic devices, and in our second collaboration he only used analog synthesizers, making a lot of noise. In the third he played the piano and cello and some percussion instruments that he created himself. In the fourth collaboration he played a very strong free jazz composition with Chris Corsano and Darin Gray. Then on the fifth time he used synthesizers again.”

Makino Takashi1

• 1. Makino Takashi, “Takashi Makino: ‘I have a big interest for the image of dreams and imagination’,” desistfilm, interview by Nicole Remy and José Sarmiento-Hinojosa, 1 July 2019.

From 2019, Makino and Knapp have launched a new project Axis of Aion. It uses two video projectors, each projecting live video and fusing them on a single screen. In addition, they perform live music. Makino's unique organic depth, produced by layering materials such as water and landscapes, and Knapp's imaginative monochrome line movement creates a new vision beyond the imaginations of the viewers.

Desistfilm: Can you talk about your collaboration with Manuel Knapp in At the horizon? How do you decide on the strategies to create this communion of techniques and methods? 

Takashi Makino: I collaborated with him in Japan many times in performances. I used my films and videos and he came as a guest musician. We collaborated twice in Tokyo and twice in Austria. We had an experience on working together and we both work with sounds and images. Then we started to talk about making a film together, about what we could create… When I saw Manuel films for the first time I realized that his sounds/images were sometimes quite similar to what I dreamt in the car accident as a kid. Very dark spaces, and horizons made with computer-animated lines. I really had an interest in his works with those dark spaces and strong sounds.

I explained to him my dream experience from the car accident so we decided to make a similar film. We started from the green horizon image and kept it changing like my dream… First I shot some images of water and organic materials, and Manuel used very different and artificial objects on computer. Our images were so different, that was the real collaboration. We used the same screen but separate computers, different parts of the images. We tried to create the transformation of the landscapes.

Manuel made an animation, and I made a film and we edited and recorded the music together. The idea was to recreate my dream from when I was five, and then it was more like… not an improvisation but trying very different things together. And now we’re talking about starting a new project, using one projector each and combine them in one screen and play music together. We will start this project this or next year. More like a performance.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on right now? You mentioned this possible performance with Manuel Knapp, is there anything else? 

We’re still thinking on the name for the project with Manuel. I like doing collaborations with a person who can create image and sound because since I do both we can understand each other. Our images are so different but never fight on the screen, and that is one important point. Last year I found out I can control the live video by computer, but only using materials from nature. Before I only used 16mm film and prepared video for the performances. But last year I got new software that lets me control the video on live mode, so I have new possibilities in collaborating with other musicians. I want to do that now, try to make more performance art and expanded cinema.

Desistfilm in conversation with Makino Takashi1

• 1. Makino Takashi, “Takashi Makino: ‘I have a big interest for the image of dreams and imagination’,” desistfilm, interview by Nicole Remy and José Sarmiento-Hinojosa, 1 July 2019.

Anti-cosmos means the power that breaks through the cosmos/order. Inspired by "Cosmos and Anti-cosmos" by Japanese philosopher Toshihiko Izutsu. The soundtrack, which was mainly produced in the range of frequencies below 1000hz, physically vibrates the viewer's body.

“I have a big interest in what each viewer creates from the movement of the images. I know it happens when we watch the TV noise. When I was five or six years old, I’d turn the TV on and if I tried to dive in to the image I could picture what I imagined, it was like deciding to which direction the image was moving even though it was pure visual noise.

I think this kind of things happen in my films, and I really try to make that kind of effect, that is a really interesting collaboration of the screen and image because we can approach it and sometimes the images reply. I really love that kind of conversation between my films and the viewers. I really don’t want to make propaganda images, one image/one answer/one direction. I want to do the opposite thing, each people imagining different things and stories. That is a very beautiful situation.”

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Desistfilm: This next question relates a lot to what you just said. Your images are composed by superimposition and multiple exposures, which create this moving abstraction of the way the universe and cosmos work. How did you find your way to this particular method, besides the collage… especially in your works from the early 2000’s? 

Takashi Makino: The first idea came from collage theory and I tried this the first time at… Actually I’m hiding many Super 8 experimental films from when I was 17 until I was 21 years old; in four years I really did a lot of experiments using only Super 8.  Then I tried to make multiple exposure films, shooting and rewinding, and shooting again… and that came from the same idea, through collage. I can still, beyond my imagination sometimes, be surprised with what happens in the same shoot, because I cannot comeback to those images: If I shoot, rewind and shoot, and do a mistake, I kill the footage. So that was really good training to develop my technique.

After I graduated school I had a clearer idea about how to make film using the technique of layering. Then I made a first film, Eve, a very short one-shot film I edited in camera by shooting and rewinding, with double exposure. The first exposure was of a very hard wire, of metal,  the second one was water. Two materials which were so different, one an artificial thing, and the other very flexible. So I tried to melt each one into the film, and create a new image with this friction of materials. After that I made many films, but every film was done using the layering technique. In every film I have a different concept.

Like in Memento Stella, where I shot everything with water. So my ideas came from collage theory, mixed layers. I don’t have so much interest to shoot something clearly and showing it on the screen. I’m thinking about the imagination in our brain: we say we have memory and we have images, but I don’t believe the images we have in our imagination and in our brain are so clear, it’s something very, very complicated… like dust, that sometimes looks like an image but it’s actually not one. I have a very big interest for the image of dreams and imagination itself. I think we have a very complicated set of beautiful images in our brain. So I’m trying to approach that kind of image. I make a lot of layers, but each layer still survives as a memory… and when we watch the image we can select how to watch it accordingly to our own imagination, our own relationship between the film and our brain. That’s why I use the technique of the layer and the abstract image.

Desistfilm in conversation with Makino Takashi2

• 1. Makino Takashi, “Takashi Makino: ‘I have a big interest for the image of dreams and imagination’,” desistfilm, interview by Nicole Remy and José Sarmiento-Hinojosa, 1 July 2019.
• 2. Makino Takashi, “Takashi Makino: ‘I have a big interest for the image of dreams and imagination’,” desistfilm, interview by Nicole Remy and José Sarmiento-Hinojosa, 1 July 2019.

Filmed entirely on location in Australia, Double Phase follows a discrete visual chronology captured by Takashi Makino. It considers how the complexity of ’natural world’ continues to be reductively framed within contemporary society. Pushing back against the simplistic and monocular sensing of the world, Makino responds with an intensely affective projection of lived experience. Moving far beyond the capacity of lived day to day experience, the film collides image after image into a cascade of almost-cosmic complexity. A reminder that we must always be reaching out and extending ourselves into the world that emerges before us.

“While the audience experiences the film’s visual and sonic display, nonetheless, they are free to dwell into their own imagination. What fascinates me most about film expression is the potential for what is presented on the screen to collide with each individual viewer’s emotional landscape, and the new ‘image’ created inside the viewer’s mind resulting from this collision.”

Makino Takashi1

• 1. Makino Takashi

Microcosmos is a non-narrative experimental documentary film that chronologically records 100 collages Makino made in 2021.

“In commercial films, the techniques of superimposition and multiple exposure are tired signifiers to indicate a transition between scenes or a departure into a dream state. However, I see new potentials in these techniques. I have developed an alternative technique for multiple exposure that practices the principles of the collages made by the Surrealists of 1920s Paris. I believe people do not come up with things out of the blue but, instead, combine different things in their own ways to arrive at something new – collages and multiple exposure as techniques, for me, artistically deal with this very notion. In the layering of existing matter, my filmmaking method is to take images into territory even I cannot foresee and allow for them to flourish in their newfound environment.”

Makino Takashi1

• 1. Makino Takashi