Love (“AI”)

“This is one of the most beautiful and most introspective films ever made……. Iimura has managed in this film to show us also the ugly that we are not aware of, while at the same time bringing to us an acceptance of it. Sometimes he even transforms it to beauty.” – Peter Gidal (Ark, Spring, 1970, London)’.. in Ai[LOVE] we become strongly aware of the separation between the physical and the semiotic – the perception and the recognition. We understand from this work how creating meaning, at even the most basic level – in the process of recognising a lip, a breast, a wisp of hair – there is a more primitive stage of pre-differentiated sensation. The film, through its form, becomes an arena where we relive that visual learning process, the transitions from raw perception of light and dark, its structuring into coherent pattern, to the projection onto the pattern of a set of associations which make these abstract images stand for a body or a face. This is sexuality embedded deeply in the perceptual and semiotic process.’ –Malcolm Le Grice