Circle (1967)

Rapidly flickering circles flash and flutter across the screen, accompanied by various sound effects produced by Yamamoto Satoshi. The movement of the circles was produced as a result of Imai’s action of directly punching a hole in each frame of the film strip and projecting it at the spend of twenty-four frames a second. As each hole was punched randomly without exact measurement, the circles appear and disappear in different parts of the screen, which creates the sensation of a flicker film. This work was screened at the first Sōgetsu Experimental Film Festival in 1967 held at the Sōgetsu Art Center in Tokyo. En demonstrates Imai’s interest in foregrounding the materiality of the film celluloid as the source for moving image, as well as the impact of various sounds on the viewer’s perception of the images.