Devil's Circuit (1988)
By Ito Takashi
Up jumped the devil, in this case an imposing skyscraper somewhere in Tokyo, Kyoto, or any given Japanese metropolis. Maybe Takashi Ito decided to demonise the building for its brute ugliness, or maybe for deeper symbolic reasons. But the fact is that the filmmaker pays homage to this devil, performing a riveting circumambulation around its concrete body without ever losing sight of it; and, indeed, Ito's original idea was to honour not an anonymous skyscraper, but Mount Fuji itself - a massive physical body with strong religious resonances in Japanese culture. The idea is as simple as its execution is brilliant: having identified the object of worship, Ito elected it as the centre of an imaginary radius of about 500 metres which was then divided in 48 sections; Ito then photographed the building from these 48 spots, on different occasions, and edited the photos, frame by frame, into a hypnotic, accelerated cityscape carrousel. The result is not only a beautiful study on the overarching presence of this building across the city, but also a richly detailed map in which the evil skyscraper is consistently contrasted with and contextualized against different or similar forms of urb…
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