This historical DVD is a collection of short films made by members of the group Film Independents, whose activities in the 1960s constitute an important foundation of the Japanese avant-garde. The group's first event took place in 1964, when its members screened a collection of subversive two-minute films that took the television advertisement as their model. The program's title, A Commercial for Myself, comes from Norman Mailer's essay collection of the same name.

Here, nothing is being advertised but the filmmaker.

This is the first time in the history of Japanese experimental film such a collection has ever been assembled. Film Independents was an eclectic group, that included filmmakers (Takahiko Iimura, Nobuhiko Obayashi), visual and performance artists (Ryu Koike, Yoshiyuki Oka, and Genpei Akasegawa, who was a founding member of the Hi-Red Center), a musician (Yasunao Tone of Group Ongaku), and a critic (Donald Richie). Many of the Independents had no formal involvement with the film industry.

As the Film Independent manifesto declared in 1964,

This "Film Independents" event is the only place that exists today where we can ignore [commercial and political] prerequisites. We will have free cinema that opposes industrial filmmaking; we will have personal films that oppose 35mm feature-length films made for the cinema. Our proposal, and the reason we exist, is to return to the 'personal' as a point of departure and hand back filmmaking to the individual.

published by Takahiko Iimura Film and Video Laboratory (http://www.takaiimura.com) + REF (www.ref-lab.com)

titles include:
Genpei Akasegawa : HOMOLOGY / Hiroshi Sakurabayashi : JIKEN (An Incident) / Yasunao Tone : 2,880K=120" / Yoshiyuki Oka: SOUGON (An Important Statement) / Takahiko iimura : URA TO OMOTE (Inside & Outside) / Sho Kazakura : MUDAI (Untitled) / Ryu Koike : TORUMARUKIYO NO KYO-EN (Banquet of Torumarukiyo) / Toshiaki Suzuki : NAGARERU (Flow) / Takahiko iimura : MY DOCUMENTARY / Hideko Nagaoka : SEI-UCHU (Sexual Space) / Ryu Koike : RINNE (Samsara) / Sakio Hirata : KATORAN -4GYOSHI- NO KENKYU (A Study of Katoran - 4 Lines Poem) / Nobuhiko Ohbayashi : COMPLEXE -trailer- / Katsuhiro Tomita : Untitled / Donald Richie: JINSEI(Life)/ Mary Evans : GOMI (Garbage)