Movies: Michio Okabe

Correlated with Susan Sontag's theorization of kitsch as well as employing the queer lingo of "camp," this film's relentless equal opportunity pop-art montage shattered the foundations of conventional cinema, making it a true document of the Shinjuku...

Borrowing the title from John Huston’s The Bible: in the Beginning (1966) (Tenchi Sozo in Japanese), Okabe aimed to paint the zeitgeist of the period by collecting and exposing the world around him and himself....

The title is a phonetical arrangement in kanji Chinese characters of camp, a concept synonymous with Michio Okabe. Okabe radically explores his distinct, Japanese camp aesthetic in the enclosed space of the film world. As written in the kanji, “preci...

A unique road movie that took two years to make, based on the concept of "filming the changing seasons like a haiku poem". The men's journey, consisting of four parts - The Wandering Vampire, Yuugyo, The Lonely Journey and Habodashi Yakusha Hoboki - ...

Michio Okabe's only 8mm film, which was miraculously discovered in 2021 at the back of a closet in his room, after being unaccounted for and thought lost for a long time. He tied an 8mm camera around the neck of his dog Shiro and recorded the world a...

Michio Okabe, considered an icon of 1960s Japanese underground cinema, pursued the principle of subjective cinema by combining images that interested him cinematically and roles that he wanted to play himself. In MEMOIR the artist’s fantasies of the ...

In an esoteric temple, grown men return to their boyhood and play innocently. Model aeroplanes, paper butterflies, vehicles, tin toys... the things that boys like emerge from the darkness. A short film that visualises dreams of a distant boyhood with...