Summer, Happenings, U. S. A.1968

I lived in the East village of New York in the mid sixties, a high time of the hippie movement. I had been involved myself in the environment of the subculture and the political climate of the time and worked with the camera and tape recorder almost everyday. The result is a political/social collage of the time: Vietnam war, black riots on the TV screen, the anti-war movement, hippies sit-in, homeless people on the street. These images are juxtaposed and interwoven with the sounds of TV war reports, black power agitation, antiwar slogans, Hare Krishna chanting, and dog howling. The repeated phrase of a popular song is heard: "There is something going on, and you don't know what it is, Mr Jones." Shot with out-dated army supply raw stock, which often has uneven quality, and developed by myself, who failed to properly handle the stock, and I got 'strange' effects such as overexposed night scenes turned into day scenes. An experimental processing. One of the few politically motivated films I have ever made. "Seeing the film, one should imagine how Iimura himself has been liberated in a foreign country. Of course, the liberation was spiritual as well as phisical. For him at that time the rule and the convention of the established movie seemed too strict and boring. Right! Iimura is singing a kind of freedom in this film." – Kenji Harada, On Takahiko iimura, Kore ga Eigada(This is Movie)