mmm (2023)
Director: Chiemi Shimada
Runtime: 7 mins
Language: Japanese with English subtitles

Synopsis

mmm is an eclectic collection of the clouds captured in Japanese cinema from the 1920s to the present. Drawing inspiration from the 35mm film materials of Japanese physicist and cloud expert Masanao Abe (1891–1966) and scientist Tapio Schneider’s apprehension of a future with cloudless skies, mmm looks at formlessness as an essential actor in the history of cinema.

About the Director

Chiemi Shimada is an artist filmmaker currently based in London. Working with both analogue and digital materials, her films explore themes of intimacy, domesticity, emptiness, and modernity while utilising documentary, fiction, and experimental approaches. Her films have been screened at ICA London, LUX, New Art Exchange, Nunnery Gallery, Close-up, Wolf Kino, Cineteca Nacional México, Museum of Modern Art Gunma, and Image Forum, among others. Her work was nominated for Best UK Short Film Award at the Open City Documentary Festival in 2019 and she received the Primary Residency Prize at NAE Open in 2022.

About Monographs 2023

Monographs is a series of video and text essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive (AFA). Monographs offers a critical platform for writers and thinkers to discourse upon the moving image beyond the walls of the cinema. Responding to changing geological and socio-political landscapes, Monographs 2023 explores the tensions between form and formlessness, sound and silence, as landscapes are continually sinking, shifting, stirring.

Learn more.

You can view the video essays part of Monographs 2023 as part of an exhibition at the Oldham Theatre foyer from 26 October – 8 December 2023.