[Frameworks] Taka Iimura 1937-2022

[FrameWorks Admin]

Friends, I just learned that Taka Iimura passed away on July 31 in Tokyo at the age of 85.
I am trying to find out more information and will keep you posted.

Taka was a great friend but also a prolific and important filmmaker and video artist whose works spanned six decades and ranged from the pictorial to found footage to scratching to conceptual and performance art and could even be considered part-Fluxus. He was also an educator and a publisher of his own writings and films and videos. In 2016 he received a Life Achievement award from the National Art Center in Tokyo. Many of you know him as a member of FrameWorks and of film cooperatives including New York Film-Makers’, CJC and Light Cone in Paris and Lux in London. He distributed his DVDs through Re:Voir and did performances and exhibitions at Microscope Gallery in New York.

He and his wife Akiko lived for many years in New York but moved permanently back to Tokyo in recent years, into a house in the Koenji district of Tokyo that had been his father’s business and workshop in the 1930s. This house was more adapted to be a working studio then a home, and it is full of his rambling archives of films and tapes and books. On several visits I remarked that he needed a student intern to help him organize everything but he would laugh and reassure me that he knew where everything was. However in the past five years he had serious memory lapses, and I am hoping we can find people to help Akiko organize and preserve his archive and legacy.

- Pip Chodorov