Please note that the bar will be open from 7.30pm, but we won't start the screening until 8.30pm

Pleased to present the debut public screening of 'Archive', a feature length film, directed by Tori Kudo (Mahar Shalal Hash Baz).

"His group’s roots in free jazz and glam rock are both relevant: in Archive’s non-logical but self-generating logic of imagery, its flickering sense of past moments riffled into a single continuous entity. It’s a demanding watch, the very opposite of single-take dogmatic realism, but it insists on complete attention. As in his music, Kudo creates hypnotic effects not by repetition but by full attention to the next thing.

Weirdly, it made me think of Cecil Taylor’s piano playing, where the juxtaposition of functionally unrelated notes affects each and all. Placing a rhododendron next to a jumping dog, or a twilit sky next to a face seems to turn each into something else and to propose a new common nature, the way kids’ puzzles used to spell out words in pictures. In its studied artlessness, it’s a deeply humane film. Mortality, mutability, vulnerability: they’re all there." - Brian Morton (The Wire)

This film is made by digital images from the early 00s to 2019, when I started taking pictures with cellular phones. You can see that upgrades in resolution have drastically changed "l'imaginaire" , as we move to smartphones.

Most of the images are taken by myself, but my portraits are taken by others. I can't name all of them exactly. But if I had to name who, among them, are working as photographers in their honor, it would be Seiichi Sugita and Maki Abe.
- Tori Kudo

The cover of this release was selected from one of six images sent to us by Tori of a sculpture incorporating layered photographs made by his mother. Tori wrote to us saying:

"These six photographs are almost like my mother’s posthumous work. The photographs show a Mobius ring of sheet iron onto which she sticked old photographs on top of each other.

My mother’s father, my grandfather, was a painter who lived in Paris before the war. His style of painting was that he would layer paint very thickly. Georges Rouault scraped off layers of paint so he could create flat paintings. My grandfather’s paintings have 1cm thickness but they seemed more like 3D works rather than the perspective paintings.

My mother piles up photographs on top of each other. So in a way her style resembles my grandfather’s technique from that point of view.

It is quite interesting that I was doing something similar to my mother with the film I made for TakuRoku during lockdown. However in my case I displayed my photos side by side not on top of each other. All is shown, no layering, nothing hidden underneath. It may mean that I still have an attachment to this life.

Archiving seems to be a theme of this time. The thing is what do we archive from history.

“You could see the movement of power in the erased history “- I think Jacques Derrida was talking about something like that…

Freud on the other hand, hated the idea of archiving…he said “it’s the end of one’s life once one started making their own autobiographical anthology.. that kind of wrapping up one’s life while you are still alive.” Yet recently I had an idea of looking into archiving from the perspective of a dead person looking back at their life. And this could fit into this time of pandemic as everyone is facing more or less this issue so I made this film.

The first half of this year since the lock down I had done nothing as I received a state grant but the offer from TakuRoku label encouraged me to finish this work. It has been a good practice for me."