CINEMATIC EFFECTS

シネマティック エフェクト

His background of the war and his encounter with kamishibai are both deeply connected to his birth as Tanaami the artist. Another factor that greatly influenced Tanaami was film. In Meguro, where Tanaami grew up, there was a "horribly pathetic movie theater that was basically a shack made out of plywood" called the Meguro Palace where Tanaami spent almost every day watching American B movies.

"Well, when you are watching over 500 movies a year, the line between fiction and reality gets blurred, and you end up in a state of confusion where truth and falsehood are all mixed up, as though you are glimpsing out at reality from a loophole in the dream world. I even seriously considered whether I could just live in that cozy darkness." What grabbed Tanaami's attention were many of the popular entertainment flicks of the time: monster movies such as Freaks by Tod Browning and Creature from the Black Lagoon by Jack Arnold; films that starred seductive, glamorous actresses such as Jane Russell in The Outlaw, Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, and Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can't Help It and the list goes on.

Tanaami reminisces about his "madman-like games played behind closed doors" in connection with his passion for movies. Once the young Tanaami caught a black stray dog with a lame leg, smeared white paint over its entire body, then let it loose on a dark field, "It is a black and strong memory for me".

映写機

In another instance, Tanaami set up a handmade snare and captured a sparrow. He came up with a savage idea using his uncle's film projector.

"I switched off all of the light bulbs, then groped about to take the cover off of the light source. I then took out the sparrow, which I had put into a box ahead of time, and placed it in the space next to the light bulb, and quietly put the cover back on. There was no sign of motion from the sparrow, but perhaps that was because of the pitch darkness.

With my heat pounding in my chest, I switched the film projector on. The stark black silhouette of the sparrow, its black outline trembling, was projected onto the bright white screen. Its tiny tremors continued for some time, until finally, no longer able to endure the heat of the bulb, the sparrow began to flap its wings.

It seemed about to break out into a momentous rampage, its movements crisply mirrored on the white screen. I couldn't move, I was so stunned by that great aggression, and I just sat there staring at the screen. "Tanaami's abnormal obsession with moving things" carried on into the animations and experimental films he would later produce.