On Duration in Film1972

Includes:

2 Minutes 46 Seconds 16 Frames (100 feet) (1972/2010) 16mm/dvd, 8min. 33sec.
1 To 60 Seconds (1973/2010) 16mm/dvd, 30min. 30sec.

I asked John Cage about his piece 4 Minutes 33 seconds(1952),discussing the conceptual title of the piece. Time itself becomes the title of the piece. John said that it's not just the time but also a space, and I responded by discussing the Japanese concept of ma, which is a concept that construes time and space as inextricably linked. I also made a piece called 2 Minutes 46 Seconds 16 Frames (100 feet), made in 1972, which was inspired by his piece.

In the beginning, I chronologically wrote down the numbers one to twenty-four on each frame for 100 feet of film. Then I chronologically wrote down the numbers one to sixty, but this time every second (every 24 frames), and did this twice. It was an attempt to show that time is also distance, especially with film. - Takahiko Iimura, from the interview by Julian Ross, 2010

A screening of 1 To 60 Seconds at Utica college in 1976 is a case in point...After a few seconds many members of the audience had recognized that the numbers were in some definite order and that the passages of dark leader which separated the frames with the numbers had some specific relationship to numbers themselves.....everyone I talked with or saw was intensely experiencing the film by remaining acutely conscious of the passage of time and of the stately progression of Iimura's film in the theater. - Scott MacDonald, Afterimage, April 1978

In 1 To 60 Seconds Iimura does an extraordinary thing: he abstracts time from any concrete associations, seems to put it on the screen and there you sit looking at (or for) it, experiencing it. The film is all black leader except for the numbers 1 to 60 that appear individually in sequence to indicate the amount of time in seconds that each of them followed one second letter by a number or numbers indicating the total amount of time that has thus far transpired. So at each juncture you know beforehand how much time awaits you before the next and how much is behind you, and then it's just you and the black screen. - Paul Poggiali, The Soho Weekly News, New York, May 9 1974