Yoko Ran

Stage performance by the Tenjo Sajiki troupe.

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).

Un jeune boxeur tue accidentellement le frère d'un ex-champion, qui va par la suite devenir son entraîneur.

Fasciné par sa mère disparue, Akira essaie de retrouver les paroles d'une comptine qui évoque pour lui le bonheur, la période heureuse et insouciante de l'enfance.

Racontant son enfance dans le film qu'il est en train de tourner, un cinéaste part à la recherche de son passé perdu et regrette de n'avoir pu tuer sa mère, trop présente dans sa vie. Il essaie à nouveau, mais ne peut accomplir le meurtre libérateur.

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.

An experimental short featuring people and nails.

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.

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

Three showgirls playfully mock the audience for attending a projection of an art film.

The film depicts the fatal, forbidden love between Nadeko, who is bought by a shop selling her mother, and her son-in-law, Jisumaru.

A dreamlike portrayal of a hangover after a decadent party.

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.

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