"Cinema has been put to diverse uses over the years. But something has been happening in Japan that seems so fundamentally different from (previous) possibilities as to call them into question. Each year a Chicago-based group called Innocent Eyes and Lenses presents group shows of recent Japanese work. This year's programs offer an excellent introduction to the unique direction some Japanese filmmakers are taking. For most of them, film is first of all a machine. One makes a film much as one would construct a mechanical apparatus. In the best of the films, technique becomes a series of metaphors within metaphors for both the film medium and, more generally, our machine age. In the Japanese films, the notion of autonomous self, which in one way or another haunts virtually every American avant-garde film, hardly ever arises. One is born inside a grand mechanism, and one's existence consists of the variety of smaller mechanisms found along life's journey. While the dialectic between man and nature and machine and nature provides much of the content of American avant-garde film, nature is rarely an autonomous entity in these Japanese films. (Nor does) erotic imagery make its usual direct appeal to the viewer. (As in Mokoto Tezuka's Model), the use of split screen and vertically moving frame lines for alternating images places the spectator squarely inside the machine of cinema itself." Fred Camper, excerpted and condensed from an article in The Chicago Reader, 5/6/88