Daïchi Saïto: Material Traces

Engram of Returning, by Daïchi Saïto

Los Angeles Filmforum and REDCAT present

Daïchi Saïto: Material Traces

Monday, February 12, 2017, 8:30 pm

At REDCAT, 631 W. 2^nd Street, Los Angeles CA 90012

In person: Daïchi Saïto

Filmforum welcomes filmmaker Daïchi Saïto from Montreal in the second of two programs.

Over the past fifteen years, Montreal-based film artist Daïchi Saïto has created a singular body of analog film work in which the rigor of his conceptualization and execution is matched only by the intense beauty and power of his images. Manipulating his film material by hand via chemistry and optics, Saïto's work gives material dimension to otherwise elusive notions of ephemerality, confusion, subjectivity, and memory. REDCAT is honored to partner with Los Angeles Filmforum, through support of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, to bring Daïchi Saïto to Los Angeles for his first retrospective program. The evening will feature films in Super 8, 35mm, and 16mm double-projection, encapsulating a body of work and an evening of filmmaking that promises to astonish. - Mark Toscano

"The films of Saïto explore the relation between the corporeal phenomena of vision and the material nature of the medium, fusing a formal investigation of frame and juxtaposition with sensual and poetic expressions." - Lumen Journal

Daïchi Saïto’s visit made possible by a generous grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Funded in part by the Ostrovsky Family Fund. Curated by Mark Toscano, Daïchi Saïto, Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud, as part of the Jack H. Skirball Series.

There will be a separate screening featuring films from the Double Negative filmmaking collective in Montreal at Filmforum on Sunday February 11, at 7:30 pm. See www.lafilmforum.org for more details.

INFO: https://www.redcat.org/event/da-chi-sa-material-traces or the REDCAT box office 213-237-2800.

Tickets: $12 general; $9 REDCAT Members & Students; $6 Filmforum Members, Cal Arts students/Faculty/Staff. Tickets available in advance at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/986187 or at the door.

CHIASMUS

(2003, 16mm, b&w, 8 min.)

An exploration into perceptual processes in the act of seeing and listening, Chiasmus takes film as a metaphor for the breathing body, through the intercrossing of the medium and fragmented images of the body in movement. The rhythm and tension created by the interplay between sound and image, and their disjunction and conjunction, aspire to an organic and sensual moment where inside becomes outside, and outside inside.

CHASMIC DANCE

(2004, 16mm, b&w, silent, 6 min.)

A visual metaphor for creative process as a sustained state of flux, whereby the deconstruction and reconfiguration of source material manifest themselves as a series of rapid abstract movements. Alluding to the cosmic dance of Shiva, the film is an expression of primal rhythmic energy, moving dialectically but without sublimation. Regeneration ignites destruction, and transformation invites mutation, through clashes of opposing modes such as video/film, surface/depth, and light/darkness.

BLIND ALLEY AUGURY

(2006, Super 8, color, silent, 3 min.)

Mile-End backstreet juxtaposed vision.

GREEN FUSE

(2008, Super 8, color, silent, 3 min.)

An impromptu visual poem portraying a space seen from different viewpoints.

ALL THAT RISES

(2007, 16mm, color, 7 min.)

Sound: Malcolm Goldstein

Juxtaposition of seeing and sounding, sky and stone and all that’s in between. A short walk in an alleyway, to hear vision sounding images, blessed with light and darkness.

TREES OF SYNTAX, LEAVES OF AXIS

(2009, 35mm 1.37:1, color, 10 min.)

Sound: Malcolm Goldstein

Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis is Saïto’s second collaboration, after All That Rises (2007), with composer/violinist Malcolm Goldstein, who composed and performed for the film the original structured improvisation score, Hues of the Spectrum. The film explores familiar landscape imagery Saïto and Goldstein share in their neighbourhood at the foot of Mount-Royal Park in Montréal, Canada. Using the images of maple trees in the park as main visual motif, Saïto creates a film in which the formations of the trees and their subtle interrelation with the space around them act as an agent to transform viewer’s sensorial perception of the space portrayed. Entirely hand-processed by the filmmaker, Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis, with the contrapuntal violin by Goldstein, is a poem of vision and sounding that seeks certain perceptual insight and revelation through a syntactical structure based on patterns, variations and repetition.

NEVER A FOOT TOO FAR, EVEN

(2012, dual 16mm, color, 14 min.)

Sound: Malcolm Goldstein

“There then all this time where never till then and so far as he could see in every direction when he raised his head and opened his eyes no danger or hope as the case might be of his ever getting out of it. Was he then now to press on regardless now in one direction and now in another or on the other hand stir no more as the case might be that is as that missing word might be which if to warn such as sad or bad for example then of course in spite of all the one and if the reverse then of course the other that is stir no more. Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.” – from Stirrings Still, Samuel Beckett

ENGRAM OF RETURNING

(2015, 35mm Scope, color, 19 min.)

Sound: Jason Sharp

“The figure of the jig-saw / that is of picture, / the representation of a world as ours / in a complex patterning of color in light and shadows, / masses with hints of densities and distances, / cut across by a second, discrete pattern / in which we perceive on qualities of fitting and not fitting / and suggestions of rhyme / in ways of fitting and not fitting – / this jig-saw conformation of patterns / of different orders, / of a pattern of apparent reality / in which the picture we are working to bring out appears / and of a pattern of loss and of finding / that so compels us that we are entirely engrossed in working it out, / this picture that must be put together / takes over mere seeing.” – from Kopoltus, Robert Duncan