the experimental image world of shuji terayama

The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama

Name: The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama

Original name:

Status: Completed

Country: Japanese

Genre: Drama

List Episode

The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama Episode 4

The experimental image world of shuji terayama episode 3, the experimental image world of shuji terayama episode 2, the experimental image world of shuji terayama episode 1.

Confession (2024)

Status: Ep 1

Release year: 2024

Kyrie no Uta (2023)

Release year: 2013

Onmyoji 0 (2024)

Buzzy Noise (2024)

A Girl Named Ann (2024)

Grand Guignol (2022)

Release year: 2022

Missing (2024)

Happiness (2024)

Undead Lovers (2024)

Silent Love (2024)

My Merry Marriage (2024)

Status: Ep 26

Romance in the Alley (2024)

Status: Ep 15

Release year: 0

High School Frenemy (2024)

Status: Ep 9

Scandal (2024)

Status: Ep 88

The Brave Yong Soo Jung (2024)

Status: Ep 120

Past Life, Present Love (2024)

Brewing Love (2024)

Status: Ep 3

The Backpacker Chef Season 2 (2024)

Status: Ep 24

Smile Code (2024)

Status: Ep 10

Watashitachi ga Koisuru Riyu (2024)

Status: Ep 4

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『トマトケチャップ皇帝(短縮版)』

『ジャンケン戦争』, 特典：『檻囚』／『ローラ』オーディオコメンタリー, 『青少年のための映画入門』, 特典『審判』オーディオコメンタリー, 『消しゴム』, 『マルドロールの歌』, 『一寸法師を記述する試み』, 『二頭女─影の映画』, 特典『二頭女─影の映画』オーディオコメンタリー, 『トマトケチャップ皇帝 オリジナル完全版 』, 特典映像『記憶のカタログ』, ＊boxセットは限定数完売につき、販売を終了いたしました。vol.1〜4の各単品は引き続き販売しております。.

TERAYAMA Shuji [1935-1983]

TERAYAMA Shuji was born in 1935 in Hirosaki City. After graduating from Aomori Prefectural Aomori High School, he enrolled in the Department of Japanese Language and Literature, part of the School of Education, at Waseda University in 1954. Despite developing nephrosis in 1955 and remaining hospitalized until 1958, he published his first poetry anthology, “A Book in the Sky” (Matoba Publishing), in that year and began to draw attention as a talented literary figure. Starting with haiku and tanka poems, he went on to become a multimedia artist freely traversing such diverse genres as radio, television, film, photography, and even horse-racing and sports commentary. In 1967, Terayama founded the independent theater troupe Tenjo Sajiki (Ceiling Gallery) with others including the graphic artist YOKOO Tadanori, the playwright HIGASHI Yutaka, and the actress KUJO Eiko. The 1960s and ‘70s were the height of the angura (underground) theater movement in Japan. Even though the nation had modernized at a rapid pace thanks to booming economic growth, strain had emerged between social structures and the human psyche. As if to expose these contradictions of modern capitalist society, there was a flourishing of activity criticizing authority and the establishment and rejecting traditional values. Amid this social climate, Terayama showed an exceptional talent for seizing the public’s interest and attention. His activities spanned all genres with a literary basis, but his theatrical and film works in particular portray limitless worlds of imagination. Rejecting every convention of theater and film, Terayama’s varied works are filled with images that stimulate the viewer’s emotions and desires, continuing to captivate many audiences today. Although Terayama was based in Tokyo, he produced many works incorporating the dialect and topography of his native Aomori. In 1974, his second feature-length film “Pastoral: To Die in the Country,” which he both wrote and directed, won the New Artist Award at the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs National Arts Festival. With alternating images of Mount Osore and Shinjuku, it is a work that blends opposing concepts—reality and fiction, urban and rural, the past and the present, inward and outward, creation and destruction, and life and death—as symbolized by the mysterious final scene, in which the walls of a house in Aomori collapse to suddenly reveal Shinjuku. It is the allure of this very ambiguity that could be considered a defining feature of Terayama’s art. By refuting established common knowledge and values and capturing the world from different angles, Terayama keenly portrayed conditions such as social constraints and restrictions in a quest to free the human spirit from all restraints. His 1983 essay “How Many Miles to the Graveyard?” was his last writing. On May 4 of that year, he developed sepsis due to cirrhosis of the liver and meningitis and died at the young age of 47. The Aomori Museum of Art has in its collection a total of 33 items connected to Terayama, including twelve of his experimental films, as well as posters and tickets for performances by the Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe.

YOKOO Tadanori 《Recruiting members for Tenjosajiki》 1967 silkscreen on paper 103.4×73.1cm

OIKAWA Masamichi 《Throw away your books, Run into the streets!》 1969 silkscreen on paper 108.9×79.2cm

UNO Akira 《Le Petit Prince》 1968 silkscreen on paper 102.7×72.9cm

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Shuji Terayama, Emperor of the Underground

Poet, playwright, novelist, photographer, sports critic, filmmaker and cultural agent provocateur Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) was among the most broadly influential and innovative figures active in the post-WWII Japanese avant-garde. Throughout his all-too-brief but astonishingly prolific and multifaceted career, Terayama deliberately confused boundaries between high and low, between history and myth, while working inventively across different media. Terayama’s intermingling of theater, film and photography was an especially important inspiration for his visionary art practice. Beginning with his precocious and often controversial engagement with traditional tanka poetry as a mere teen, Terayama held tight to his belief that genuine artistic creativity was rooted in the act of shattering molds in order to cast them anew. Cinema was a source of fascination for Terayama ever since the childhood days and nights spent in his uncle’s cinema in remote Aomori Prefecture. Casablanca remained a talismanic favorite, cryptically cited throughout his poetry and multimedia practice, appropriated and reinvented in a similar manner as the work of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel. The early death of Terayama’s father would cast a long shadow across his films, art and writing, which are haunted by absent or ambiguous figures of authority. By extension, the questioning of masculine authority that informs so much of Terayama’s art found especially rich expression in his films and their frequently radical destabilization of meaning. Among Terayama’s best known film is Emperor Tomato Ketchup , a mesmerizing fever dream that follows the strange adventures of a child king wandering through his anarchic kingdom and encountering costumed women who worship and, most controversially, erotically frolic with their boy-ruler. Often compared to Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), Terayama’s film showcases the kind of transgressive performance central both to his cinema and his work as founder of the radical Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe, while also making clear the call for dissent and even revolution that resounds across all of Terayama’s films, perhaps most explicitly in his play, later adapted into a celebrated feature, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets .

Difficult to summarize, the many different facets and strands of Terayama’s remarkable career are best appreciated in the films that are today finally receiving the wider recognition they deserve, thanks in part to the preservation work of the National Film Center in Tokyo as well as a wave of important new scholarship exploring his cinema and career.  This retrospective gathers and presents, for the first time in the US, all of Terayama’s pioneering short films together with his feature films, while also inviting Terayama collaborator and expert Henrikku Morisaki to enact two of Terayama’s cinema performance pieces. – Haden Guest

Past screenings from this program November 2017

Friday 03 november, short films - program one.

Pastoral Hide and Seek

Saturday 04 November

Fruits of passion.

A Tale of Smallpox / Grass Labyrinth

Monday 06 November

Farewell to the ark.

Sunday 12 November

Monday 13 November

Throw away your books, rally in the streets.

Friday 17 November

Young person's guide to cinema.

Saturday 18 November

Short films - program two.

Monday 27 November

Video letter.

Current and upcoming film series

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Wings of a Serf

Le Dépays + Sans soleil

Carol for Another Christmas

Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy

The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama

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Shuji Terayama, Emperor of the Underground at the HFA

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During the Fall 2017 semester, the Harvard Film Archive presented a retrospective of the works of Shuji Terayama (b. 1935), a pioneer filmmaker of the postwar Japanese avant-garde. Also a poet, playwrite, and photographer, Terayama was known for his rich cinematic expression and innovative usage of different media.

This film series was organized in partnership with the Anthology Film Archives, National Film Archive of Japan, and George Eastman Museum with support from the Kinoshita Group, Tokyo Broadcasting System, and the Reischauer Institute.

3 November 2017

Pastoral Hide and Seek ( Denen ni shisu )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Kaoru Yachigusa, Keiko Niitaka, Masumi Harukawa. Japan, 1974, 35mm, color, 104 min. Japanese with English subtitles. Print source: The Japan Foundation.

preceded by Father ( Chichi )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. 1977, 16mm, color, 3 min.

4 November 2017

Fruits of Passion ( Les fruits de la passion )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Illiers, Arielle Dombasle. France/Japan, 1981, 35mm, color, 90 min. French, Japanese, English & Cantonese with English subtitles. Print source: The Japan Foundation.

A Tale of Smallpox ( Hosotan )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Keiko Niitaka, Yoko Ran, Takeshi Wakamatsu. Japan, 1975, 16mm, color, 34 min. Print source: National Film Center, Japan.

Grass Labyrinth ( Kusa-meikyu )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Takeshi Wakamatsu, Hiroshi Mikami, Juzo Itami. Japan/France, 1979, 16mm, color, 40 min. Japanese with English subtitles. Print source: The Japan Foundation.

6 November 2017

Farewell to the Ark ( Saraba hakobune )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Tsutomu Yamazaki, Mayumi Ogawa, Yoshio Harada. Japan, 1984, 35mm, color and b&w, 127 min. Japanese with English subtitles. Print source: The Japan Foundation.

12 November 2017

The Boxer ( Bokusa )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Bunta Sugawara, Kentaro Shimizu, Masumi Harukawa. Japan, 1977, 35mm, color, 94 min. Japanese with English subtitles. Print source: The Japan Foundation.

13 November 2017

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets ( Sho o suteyo machi e deyou )

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Hideaki Sasaki, Masahiro Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi. Japan, 1971, 35mm, color and b&w, 137 min. Japanese with English subtitles. Print source: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

17 November 2017

Young Person's Guide to Cinema Introduction by JULIAN ROSS, Curator and Scholar and CHIZURU USUI, National Film Center, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

This screening included the following four short films by Shuji Terayama: Young Person’s Guide to Cinema ( Seishonen no tameno eiganyumon ), 1974 The Reading Machine ( Shokenki ), 1977 Les chants de Maldoror ( Marudororu no uta ), 1977 An Attempt to Describe the Measure of Man ( Issunboshi o kijutsusuru kokoromi ), 1977

In addition to the feature films listed above, the following short films were screened in two programs:

3 November 2017 Short Films - Program One

Click HERE for details.

Butterfly Dress Pledge ( Chofukuki ), 1974 The Cage ( Ori ), 1964 The Labyrinth Tale ( Meikyutan ), 1975 Emperor Tomato Ketchup ( Tomato kechappu kotei ), 1971/1966

18 November 2017 Short Films - Program Two

The second program was followed by a conversation between JULIAN ROSS, curator and scholar; CHIZURU USUI, Assistant Curator, National Film Center, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; HENRIKKU MORISAKI, long-time Terayama collaborator and Tenjo Sajiki member; and ALEXANDER ZAHLTEN, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Shadow Film: The Woman with Two Heads ( Kage no eiga: nito onna ), 1977 The Eraser  ( Keshigomu ), 1977​​​​​​​ The War of Jan-Ken Pon ( Janken senso ), 1971​​​​​​​ Laura , 1974 The Trial ( Shinpan ), 1974