Mako Idemitsu is a pioneer of Japanese feminist art and visual expression. She studied in New York following her graduation from Waseda University in 1962, in order to escape the control of her father, the founder of the Idemitsu Kosan Co., Ltd. In 1965 she married the painter Sam Francis (1924–1994), moving to California and subsequently having two sons. However, due to the stress of being the wife of a famous painter, and the sense of isolation she felt as an Asian woman in American society, she began to feel that if she continued to do nothing, she would go utterly mad. Thus, she purchased an 8 mm film camera and began teaching herself to create video art. In 1970 she joined a ​​​​consciousness-​raising​ group tied to the then-flourishing Women’s Liberation Movement. With the encouragement of the groups’ members, she began using a more professional 16 mm camera.

In 1972, she filmed the feminist art installation and performance space Womanhouse, created by Judy Chicago (1939​–​), Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) and their students (Woman’s House). This work constitutes a valuable record of M. Idemitsu’s perspective on an ephemeral exhibition space created by women for women. From 1973 onward, M. Idemitsu regularly travelled between Japan and the United States, but following her divorce in 1981 she settled in Japan, remarrying in 1982. Since using the medium of video for the first time in 1973 to create What a Woman Made, she has employed both film and video, taking advantage of their individual characteristics. With 16 mm, she has captured not only the light-sensitive movement of trees, sky and wind in a poetic fashion (such as in the series “​​At Santa Monica,” “At Yukigawa,” and “At Any Place”), but also expressed the loneliness of the later years of her mother – and other women of the same generation – using her own narrative voice, contrasting it against a backdrop of beautiful images (Whispering Light, 1985). With video, she has shown the monotony of the lives of women who have been pushed into the roles of housewife and mother, their sense of entrapment and their extreme obsession with children, using an original technique called “Mako Style,” in which an additional monitor is inserted into the screen (as in the ​​​“​​Great Mother​​”​ series). Her works have been exhibited in the United States and Canada and at women’s film festivals in France and Germany, receiving numerous awards and garnering worldwide acclaim.

At the same time, M. Idemitsu has also experimented with video installation art, starting with Grandmother, Mother, Daughter in 1976, and continuing with Real? Motherhood (2000), which confronts the concept of motherhood as a curse, and The Past Ahead (2004), which visualises her own materially abundant childhood (in the 1940s) as being concurrent with Japan’s militarisation and invasion of Asia, using a double projection technique to simultaneously display photographs from her early childhood with historical footage. This work moves from the image of women as victims to an eye-opening view of history and society that confronts the viewer with the harsh reality that anyone can become a perpetrator through their own ignorance.

In addition to these many works, M. Idemitsu has also written and published ​​​​a ​novel and a ​number of essays, beginning with her own autobiography, What a Woman Made: Autobiography of a Filmmaker (2003).