Tenjo Sajiki Movies

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...

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,...

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 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...

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

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...

An experimental short featuring people and nails.

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...

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

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.

"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...