Midi Onodera
2021Ten Cents a Dance: Parallax
Midi Onodera
Confusion, underlying meaning and unspoken truths are often associated with the dialectic of sexual communication. Mingled with the intensity and unpredictability of a “one night stand,” they generate unique sensations – mixed emotion, risk, and excitement. The film employs formal devices in a manner that is exceedingly simple, yet very effective. Its subject matter, sexuality and communication, gains depth and poignancy through the artist’s decision to shoot the film’s three scenes for projection in a “double screen” configuration.
Ten Cents a Dance: Parallax
Skin Deep
Midi Onodera
Natsuko Ohama, Melanie Nicholls-King
Alex is busy trying to make a film involving tattoos. She hires the androgynous Chris, who has a troubled past. Her assistant, Montana, breaks off their lesbian relationship after Montana warns Alex that Chris has a fixation on her.
Skin Deep
A Performance by Jack Smith
Midi Onodera
In October 1984, peformance artist/filmmaker extraordinaire, Jack Smith was coaxed out of his New York apartment for a five night run of performances held at the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre in Toronto, Canada. The performance, entitled: “Brassieres of Uranus” consisted of a number of local artists on stage creating brassieres out of plastic flowerpots. The event culminated on Halloween with the finale “Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application” performed to the music of the Seven Veils. This footage is one of the few remaining film documents of this memorable event.
A Performance by Jack Smith
The Displaced View
Midi Onodera
Suno Yamazaki, Martha Onodera
The Displaced View traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history, are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative, question documentary as truth.
The Displaced View
I have no memory of my direction
Midi Onodera
Ostensibly searching for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a surreal interpretation of a “Japan of the imagination.” This fictional landscape is peppered with invented Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination.
I have no memory of my direction
