After directing Kami Eiga (Paper Movie in 1972, which used paper film), I ended up with a dead track with Kanko Eiga (Sightseeing Movie of 1973). Ideas no longer arose. I realized that I needed a fresh start to make films, and I thought that carefully studying the object that is a second, the most basic unit of time, would allow me to do things again, to find a new way of living. That's why it can be called an exercise. It's a film in which I say to myself: it's a film; that's how the second is, that's what happens when a photogram is over. When the twenty-four photograms are passed, the film is finished. I had fun making this movie. It is a film for which nothing knows anything about the cinema or begins to study it. It tells us what the film is, and how it is done.
