Shūji Terayama

The documentary to find the "true Shuji Terayama".

Open details →

This remarkable compilation follows an exchange of video letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama's death. It can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and inter-laid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.

Open details →

Open details →

Shuji Terayama starts a poem, and then ships his pencil to Herbie Yamaguchi in the UK. Herbie ships the pencil back to Terayama, who then finishes his poem.

Open details →

Shûji Terayama's commercial for the Japanese Racing Association.

Open details →

Easily bored, but still innocent and naive countryside girl discovers partying in Tokyo is a ton of fun. Yakuza-to-be is an acquaintance who tries to rape her, and the typically bland but very-good-here the first boyfriend.

Open details →

Amidst the 1960 Japanese-American mutual security treaty, alienated young nihilist Takuya struggles to find his footing between his do-nothing wealth and the outer Western extremism as major student protests take place.

Open details →

#47 functions as a quick analysis on the life of Shuji Terayama. This is the beginning, middle and restart on the life of a man who refused to die - "The past can always be rearranged."

Open details →

Open details →

Yukichi Matsumoto's 2013 stage adaptation of Shuji Terayama's "Lemmings". Two cooks share a room, one of which talks with his mother's head: it lives beneath their tatami mats. On the other side of their room's wall, lives a wife who desperately cares for her feverish husband. As more and more walls are tore down movie studios, hospitals and prisons are revealed, destroying the physical boundaries between their boarding house and the city.

Open details →

This four-volume boxset released by Image Forum compiles the breadth of Shuji Terayama's experimental short film work into an extensive DVD collection. Originally released by Image Forum on VHS in 1995, this upgraded DVD boxset stands as the definitive collection for Terayama's experimental work in the highest quality possible.

Open details →

A surreal, isolated village sees its inhabitants gradually leave behind their mutual traditions and superstitions as they leave for the city. Among them are two cousins who love each other and who get into a quarrel with other villagers.

Open details →

Lacking a coherent plot, We're All Riding on a Circus Elephant depicts the collapse of western civilization as a free-form collage advocating group anarchy and actor improvisation. The stage is a boxing ring. Those actors who are "onstage" get into the boxing ring and assault each other with words. Others heckle and cheer at the sidelines, or act as a rhythm-and-blues chorus while changing costumes or wigs. Taking as its coda Andy Warhol's dictum that everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame, actor transformations depict the Breakdown of Japanese values and selfhood due to an obsession with popular American culture.

Open details →

This second version of the play follows Wan and Tsu, two apprentice cooks who, as they eavesdrop on their neighbors one day, are shocked by the sudden disappearance of a wall separating them from the next flat. As they try to understand what happened and how to fix their wall, the line between reality and fiction begins to crumble, their endeavors continuously halted by weird and disrupting characters.

Open details →

"La Marie-Vison" tells the perversely fascinating tale of Marie, a transvestite prostitute who lives in elegant squalor with her dedicated servant. Every day, for eighteen years, Marie releases an exotic butterfly into the open fields of the living room. Every day for eighteen years the beautiful boy, imprisoned in her den, catches and kills it. The beautiful boy is tempted with visions of the outside world, free from the wiles of wicked Marie, but maybe the boy wasn't made for the outside world. Maybe none of us were.

Open details →

This remarkable compilation follows an exchange of video letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama's death. It can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and inter-laid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.

Open details →

This is Shuji Terayama memorial performance of The Hunchback of Aomori from 1983 (featuring Akihiro Miwa). Terayama gathered dwarfs, circus freaks, itinerant magicians, acrobats and untrained youth for his burgeoning troupe, Tenjo Sajiki. The troupe's premiere offering, written and directed by Terayama, was Aomori-ken no Semushi Otoko (The Hunchback of Aomori, 1967).

Open details →

A girl named O loves a rich, and much older man. She is subjected to a variety of humiliating experiences to prove her unconditional obedience to him in a Chinese brothel. A poor boy sees her and falls in love with her. To get the money needed to sleep with her, he takes part in rebellious acts.

Open details →

A pilot crash-lands in the African wilds, and loses his memory. He finds an old man living in the jungle with his grand-daughter. He falls in love with the young girl and settles down happily with them; their idyllic life broken only by a visit from his long forgotten fiancee.

Open details →

Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.

Open details →

Three stories. A solitary sailor falls from his boat and washes ashore on a tropical island. While seeking rescue, he's found by a nearly naked woman who is playful and compliant. He decides to erase his signs of distress and remain on the island. What awaits? In the second, an adolescent searches for the words of a nursery rime he remembers bits of. His journey takes him into dreams, sexual awakening, and Oedipal fantasy. Third, a man of wealth in late-nineteenth century Paris hires a prostitute for the night. She's also cabaret performer and takes him to her room. He fears he's about to be robbed. What's her secret?

Open details →

Third is an aimless young man who hangs around with a couple of girls who are amateur hookers. One day, while acting as their pimp, he gets into a conflict with a young gangster and winds up killing him.

Open details →

A “reading film” of delirious image and text, Les chants de Maldoror takes its title and inspiration from Comte de Lautréamont’s 1869 proto-Surrealist poetic novel which, for instance, describes beauty as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. In the novel’s six cantos, a young misanthrope indulges in depraved and destructive acts. Unexpected encounters abound, with turtles and birds joining Terayama’s regular cast of snails and dogs to wander over books and bare torsos. Feverish video processing posterizes, inverts and overlays images that are further colored by sound—pushing the limits of his literary adaptation. Terayama wrote that the only tombstone he wanted was his words, but, as Les chants de Maldoror demonstrates, words need not be confined to carved monuments or bound hardcopies.

Open details →

Using bluescreen video techniques, Terayama playfully—and with a silent film theatricality—posits a series of postmodern vignettes featuring realities-within-realities as his protagonist attempts some kind of relationship with a nude woman on the screen-within-the-screen. In his struggles to “free” her, he exposes the absurd flimsiness, deceptiveness and mutability of both the cinema experience and our human dimension.

Open details →

A man claiming to be the heir of an estate in northern japan finds himself at the doors of his mansion, only to find it overrun by servants and maids playing pretend as master or mistress, while the real master is nowhere to be found. As he makes his way down the many rooms of the mansion and witnesses the staff's strange antics, he gradually loses his own role and sense of identity. In this subversive play performed by Tenjo Sajiki, the spectator is asked to question their own role as hierarchical structures are reversed and walls between character and actor, actor and audience gradually break down.

Open details →

Shuji Terayama and J.A.Seazer's phantasmagoric folk-psych-symph-prog-rock opera. Historical Tenjo Sajiki performance from 1978.

Open details →

In this Borgesian satire on knowledge and technology, bibliophilic desire leads to the construction of a pedal-powered reading machine. Resembling a combination of gymnastic contraption, printing press and early cinematic apparatus, the machine’s purpose remains ambiguous. And like this machine, Terayama’s film connects his work in poetry, motion picture and graphic design by weaving together printed and projected, still and moving images.

Open details →

In the midst of a match, Hayato, a successful boxer, has had enough of the sport. He lets himself get knocked out, and quits boxing, leaving his wife and living alone with his mangy dog. One day a young mediocre boxer knocks at the door and wants to be Hayato's apprentice.

Open details →

As a family goes on with their day, the shadows on their walls lead a completely different life.

Open details →

Visions of characters by the seaside from one's memory are erased by the filmmaker's hand.

Open details →

The smallpox virus has created its own unique atmosphere in Terayama’s film where the skin of a bandaged adolescent and the surface of the filmic image are subjected to a bizarre ‘disturbance’ as snails cross the screen and nails are hammered into the skull of the ailing patient. Illness in this film is as much a psychic entity as a physical one and manifests itself in an array of theatrical tableaux from grotesque women rigorously brushing their teeth to a snooker game where the players in white face makeup behave like automata. A Tale of Smallpox uses a medical theme to chart the traumatic dream life of Terayama’s times, evincing deep-rooted concerns in the Japanese national psyche that hark back to the upheaval of Meiji modernisation and the devastation of World War Two.

Open details →

An experimental short featuring people and nails.

Open details →

A director faces creative block while working on his latest film – a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.

Open details →

A dreamlike portrayal of a hangover after a decadent party.

Open details →

Originally made for the 100 Feet Film Festival hosted by Image Forum. However, to test the limits, Terayama Shūji willfully made use of 3 projectors to project 300 feet of film at the same time.

Open details →

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.

Open details →

In a Japanese colony, children overthrow their parental guardians and attempt to form a new society. Their plan spirals out of control and they are soon lost in a web of sexual deviation and violence.

Open details →

Paper-Scissor-Rock wars draws an episode where the two generals portray the Second World War, mostly through the rock-scissors-bag, but also by some absurd torture techniques that bring to mind some sort of Japanese artificial 70s jack ass. To the sound of classical music, birds chirping and Nazi incendiary speeches travels generals, ever contestant in the seemingly meaningless game around at an abandoned industrial area.

Open details →

An outlaw pushes the residents of Edo's red light district to rebel against a growing number of stifling, moralistic laws.

Open details →

A teenage goldsmith with a dark past tragically falls in love with a young nude model.

Open details →

An experimental fantasy short dedicated to questioning whether or not man is a prisoner of time.

Open details →

A union-busting Yokohama dockworker learns that the loyalties that rule his life are based on shaky foundations. Believing that his manager was responsible for saving his life as a baby, he falls victim to a manipulative cycle of deceit and revenge.

Open details →

A young reporter falls for a beautiful waitress, but fate conspires against their burgeoning romance when the latter is involved in a car accident and loses her memory.

Open details →

A vengeful contractor hires a series of young killers to target a woman muckraker. Trouble brews when an amateur marksman shows up his eclectic competition.

Open details →