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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Finished shooting in 1962, the movie’s cast was almost the same as its crew. With a bunch of experimental symbols such as skinny human body, clock and goat flow from one scene to another, the film explores the question of whether a man is a prisoner of time.
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...
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.
He pulls out a pair of scissors that tends toward the sky. So begins his journey through time, space and memory. Seasons change, years pass. Wrapped in a mysterious box of sunset, the boy grows older, becomes adolescent, young man, adult, old, but - strangely - the memories are beginning to lead...
This sumptuous-yet-austere liberal re-working of Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez, arranged on a five-part stage surrounded by the audience, was historically the latest production of Tenjo Sajiki.
