Reseñas (1)
Takashi Ito is the video poet of alienation in hyperreality, the true "horror" of today. The real face of a girl is hidden from view - and when the viewer finally sees her, they realize in hindsight that it was only on the surface of artificial media. This is because this constant game of concealing and revealing the movement of the girl's face, this game of secrecy and its revelation, promise, and fulfillment, is just a phantasm, a simulacrum of a television or computer screen, on which our desire is estranged today. The person seeking the true face, in a futile frantic search, transforms into an immaterial, abstract discharge, mindlessly and futilely circling in the "desert of the Real," perpetually orbiting the girl's image. Ito will later use the motif of an electric discharge as a metaphor for the modern human in the thematically and methodically related Ghost (but only in Thunder can we observe and understand its genesis), and Ghost adds another layer to the relationship between reality, desire, and image: the male protagonist, and not just an object of his desire as presented here, is trapped by the screen, fragmenting him into a series of partial objects (eyes, hands, ...). This is because only the constant circulation around partial objects, promises, and repeating loops (compare computer games and their jerky repeating loops of programmed actions), is left to the viewer before Ito reveals in the end that the girl's face is unknowable in reality. God used to be sought in it, but Ito's films show (notice the gradual purification of the mise-en-scène, culminating in the bare walls of a concrete building serving only for the projection of the girl's image) that bare emptiness is found where we looked... for anything and everything.
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