Thursday, April 13, 2006, 6pm
Tatsu Aoki in person!
In celebration of acclaimed Chicago musician and filmmaker (and School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty member) Tatsu Aoki’s 25th year making films, CATE and the 11th Annual Chicago Asian American Showcase present a two-part retrospective of his extraordinary short diary films. Aoki began keeping a daily film diary of his life in the mid 1970s. “I carried Super 8 cameras everywhere I went and my house was surrounded by 13 different cameras. Some cameras were on tripods, some with time-exposure, time-lapse, broken cameras, hand cranked cameras… My life was on the roll and on the reel.” Today, this body of work archives hundreds of hours, stretches thousands upon thousands of feet (on Super 8, 16mm, and DV), and constitutes over a dozen films. Tonight’s screening is the second half of the retrospective (part one screens earlier this week as part of the Showcase) and features the premiere of Aoki’s latest work Traveling Spirits (2006) along with: Decades Passed (2003); Shape (1996); and Discovery (1991). 1991-2006, Tatsu Aoki, USA, ca. 76 min, various formats.