Introduction by guest programmer, writer, and independent filmmaker Chris Kennedy.

Tomonari Nishikawa, who passed away in 2025 at the early age of 56, was a central figure in the generation of experimental filmmakers that emerged in the early part of the 21st century. A wrong turn on his way to a conventional filmmaking career landed him at Binghamton University, a fabled hotbed of the avant-garde, where he reluctantly embraced a new way of filmmaking that he made deeply his own. Key inquiries for him were the elements of the film material itself — he created films where the images became the soundtrack; shot frame-by-frame sketch films that became compact city symphonies; and used multiple exposures to build up a larger image from separate spaces and times. His twenty years of filmmaking were too short but impactful, creating simple models of possibility through art and personal example, challenging our expectations of how cinema could be made, and providing us pleasure in both the directness and profoundness of his ideas.

CHRIS KENNEDY

Light Noise Smoke: The Films of Tomonari Nishikawa is co-presented by TIFF Wavelengths and Images Festival

Program:

Apollo (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2003, 6m, No dialogue)
16mm print!
Nishikawa’s senior thesis film was created with rayograms (placing objects on the film in a darkroom) and a still 35mm film camera that extended the image into the soundtrack area. The result is a film where the projector reads the image as sound, creating a frenetic aural counterpoint to the graphical images he chose.

Market Street (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2005, 5m, No dialogue)
16mm print!
A series of frame-by-frame Super 8mm Sketch Films, made in graduate school in San Francisco, paved the way for this commissioned film, which celebrated the 1906 film A Trip Down Market Street through a vertiginous reinterpretation. Matching disparate shapes from one frame to the next, Nishikawa uses the shapes of the city to create a stunning visual propulsion down San Francisco’s main drag.

Clear Blue Sky (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2006, 4m, No dialogue)
For this rare video work, Nishikawa replaced the camera lens in front of the sensor with a slit-like opening, mimicking a camera obscura effect and turning the summer frolickers of San Francisco’s Washington Square into streaks of light and shadow.

16-18-4 (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2008, 3m, No dialogue)
35mm print!
Nishikawa used a 35mm toy photo still camera, which has sixteen lenses, to shoot the Japanese Derby horse races. Shown as a 35mm film, the image is made up of a grid of four shots, repeated across four frames, creating a unique visual rhythm to this portrait of a racecourse.

Lumphini 2552 (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2009, 3m, No dialogue)
35mm print!
Another film shot on a 35mm still camera, allowing the image to again create the soundtrack. This time, Nishikawa shoots in the Lumphini Park in Bangkok, Thailand, and the organic structures of the fauna soften his grid structures, even as his interest in internal image rhythms still comes to the fore.

Tokyo-Ebisu (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2010, 5m, No dialogue)
16mm print!
The intricate interwoven train lines of Tokyo were an inspiration to shoot a clockwise trip around the JR Yamanote Line. Nishikawa captures the platforms of the first ten stations, re-exposing the film multiple times. Each take exposed a different section of the platform at a different moment in time, the combined image amplifying the visual energy of commuting.

Shibuya-Tokyo (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2010, 10m, No dialogue)
16mm print!
A broken camera and a zealous station manager caused Nishikawa to finish his filmic circumnavigation of the JR Yamanote Line a couple of days later. While using the same grid as the previous film, this time he shot the exits of the final twenty stations from morning to night, capturing the incessant activity surrounding the train lines.

45 7 Broadway (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2013, 5m, No dialogue)
16mm print!
The hustle and bustle of Times Square is reinterpreted by Nishikawa through a “three-strip” colour separation technique akin to Technicolor. He filmed each shot three times through red, green, and blue colour filters on black-and-white film and then recomposed the shot on an optical printer. When objects overlap, they reach “full-colour,” but the constant movement makes sure the colour never truly resolves.

sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2014, 2m, No dialogue)
35mm print!
The Fukushima Reactor Meltdown that followed the Tōhoku earthquake inspired Nishikawa to bury film in the ground within a few miles of the accident site, to see if he could create a visual record of the radiation that had spread across the land. The film is a print of the resulting negative — each scratch a physical trace of interference and decay.

Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2016, 10m, No dialogue)
16mm print!
Nishikawa grew up along the Yahagi River, whose bridges are the focus of this film. Each of the bridges is filmed six times during dawn and dusk. As in his previous train films, he masks and re-exposes the film, compositing the final image in-camera from the six takes to make a beautiful portrait of the passing of time in rural Japan.

Amusement Ride (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2019, 6m, No dialogue)
16mm print!
Flattening the image of a Ferris Wheel ride using a telephoto lens, Nishikawa turns another common public celebration into a surreal, abstract, cinematic adventure.

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2023, 6m, No Dialogue)
16mm print!
Another return to the idea of creating sound from the physical image that he first explored in Apollo, Nishikawa filmed fireworks at a summer festival with a Super 16mm camera that extended the image into the soundtrack. Following a strict editing structure of 26 frames, Nishikawa created a rhythmic exploration of a technique that always drew him to new discoveries.

Content advisory: strobing effects